Welcoming Beginner's Mind

This nuanced commentary on the famous Zen ox herding pictures explores the paradox of welcoming your true nature anew at each stage of spiritual development.

Many Buddhist schools teach that we each already have and express our true nature at every moment. Yet these same schools paradoxically also lay out stages on the path of spiritual development. How can a person always already have their true nature and continually be evolving into it? In the ox herding pictures from the Zen tradition, for instance, the images illustrate stages such as seeking, glimpsing, touching, and riding the ox—the representation of true nature—and also of forgetting the ox and even forgetting oneself.

In Welcoming Beginner’s Mind, Buddhist teacher Gaylon Ferguson reflects on the ox herding images to show that the path into this contradiction can be walked with the practice of welcoming—the simple, challenging, and always new possibility of opening to exactly what’s occurring in your experience. This practice, which he distinguishes from meditation, opens a middle path between spiritual bypassing (using meditation or other spiritual practices to repress or avoid parts of ourselves) and spiritual materialism (practicing with a sense of ego involvement and gain).  

Rich with teachings from the great Zen master and author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Ferguson’s own teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and numerous others who have commented on the ox herding pictures, this book invites you into a process of spiritual maturation that never occurs elsewhere than here or other than now.