The Heart of the Matter: Beginner's Mind

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Shunryu Suzuki

A few days ago, I purchased a hammered dulcimer, an instrument with 15 treble and 14 bass courses (a course is simply two strings strung together so they can be played together), which I have no idea how to play. I started out by setting up the stand and adjusting it to what I thought was a reasonable playing height. Then I set the dulcimer down, took out the two lightweight hammers, and started banging. It sounded pretty to my ear, but totally random and without pattern, atonal. Then I turned on a chromatic tuner and played the notes one by one to see if the instrument was tuned as it was supposed to be – I had a chart which listed the courses and their notes. It turned out that everything was a half-tone flat, so I took the T-wrench that came with the instrument and started tuning the dulcimer. This took nearly an hour. The next day I began to seek out simple major scales. I have found four of them so far. Today I am determined to master a simple melody, perhaps “Angeline the Baker.”

A musician friend of mine came over to see the instrument. He noticed that there were circles on the chart of notes. He began to make assumptions about what the circles meant in relation to the pitches of the courses, and he looked at how the notes were shaped by the string length. He looked at the instrument totally differently from how I had looked at it on the first day. Both of us had beginner’s mind. But we had different minds. We are different people. My life has been shaped by reading and writing, while his has been shaped by machining and carpentry. We share playing music. When we came to a new instrument, we each took a different path to the beginning of knowledge. This is what is wonderful about learning and about teaching. To recognize in each person the differentness of the beginner’s mind, to acknowledge the many possibilities that lead to learning.

For me, it is necessary to return to the beginner’s mind in some way as often as I can. I recall a classmate with whom I studied linguistics years ago. He had had no training in linguistics or language learning. He had earned his living working with his hands. At the beginning of the course of study, I had had some training in both linguistics and language learning. He became a linguist through using his beginner’s mind, and it led him to treat new subject matter the same. There was no sense that say, phonology was less difficult than grammar or that historical reconstruction was more iffy than parsing a language as currently used. On the other hand, I immediately attached values to the different courses because of my previous experience. I was unable to return to the state of the beginner. I left that program and opted to take a teaching post for a year in (the former) Yugoslavia. He went on to his doctorate.

As a learner, returning to beginner’s mind by forcing myself into a totally new learning situation is invaluable. There is nothing like beginning at the beginning. On the other hand, there is nothing quite as unsatisfying as being a false beginner. As a teacher, instructing total beginners is often a joy. Instructing false beginners is often fraught with anxiety, on my part and on the students’ part. So if this has been my experience, what does it tell me about teaching students who have already had over a decade of educating in schools?

First, I need to create as many situations as possible in which my students, and myself if possible, can return to beginner’s mind. To give one example, in a developmental reading class, I used The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. The book takes place in southern Spain, Andalucia, and northern Africa, Morocco and Egypt. I had the thought that it would be a good learning experience for myself and the students if we researched the contribution to European culture of the Moors who were present in Andalucia for about 800 years. I had an ulterior motive, which was to bring about an appreciation of the Arab contribution to Western culture at a time here in the United States when Americans are feeling animosity towards Arab countries and Arab peoples. To a certain extent, my motive came to fruition as more than one student was amazed by what he or she found out about the depth of cultural exchange and cultural influence between the Moors and Spaniards. I, in turn, didn’t know as much about the contribution as I found out through my students’ beginner minds.

Second, no methodology, except perhaps to an extent, The Silent Way, really makes use of beginner’s mind. By definition, a method is a set of assumptions about how something is to be done. All methods assume certain things to be true about language students and how they learn best. The student is immediately slotted into the learning track that follows from the method. This is true even in Silent Way, in which the assumption is that the economics of language learning, and spending those “Ogdens” on what must be remembered in the spirit of a particular language dictate the order of presentation of the language. Even so, I vividly recall my first exposure to Silent Way and the sense of exploring and discovering Spanish that I had as a learner. Surely, I was using beginner’s mind at that time. Perhaps in methods based upon a Vygotskian schema in which learners first learn socially and then internalize that learning, beginner’s mind may flourish. But again, there is an assumption of structure, of the scaffolding being built and extended to the beginner as having a direction and a more or less fixed content. This I would say is true of developmental methodologies as well, in which most studies have argued for an order of acquisition in language learning. It is true of universalist positions in which universal grammar is posited as the bedrock for learning. All methods make use of beginner’s mind, yet no method gives it a place of priority. To attend to the beginner’s mind in each student may be the best that we can do as instructors.

Finally, given the vast amount of information that exists in the world, what better way to sort among it all than to assume a position akin to beginner’s mind? It is true that we assimilate new information more rapidly as we are able to attach it to information already stored in mind. However, that situation may lead to unanalyzed or unappreciated gobbling of information. Or it may lead us to color that new information with the same palate we have used for what we already know related to it. Using beginner’s mind, we approach the new as new, and we open ourselves to possibilities. Shunryu Suzuki, the great Zen teacher, wrote:

For (Zen) students the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our “original mind” includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself.

In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, “I have attained something.” All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of attainment, no thought of self, we are true beginners.

This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki, 32nd printing 1994, Weatherhill, Inc. NY,NY

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