ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how meta-awareness in composing is more efficacious with consideration of Buddhist mindful metacognition. Greater meta-awareness of present temporality yields a whole other set of rhetorical factors, ones often overlooked as we train students to essentially look over and above their immediate writing context, and these are the basis of a mindful metacognition and carry a shaping influence on the writer, the writing act, and the written outcome. This chapter explores the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutra or “The Foundations of Mindfulness,” a systematic development of awareness of actions, feelings, and thoughts with sufficient perspective. The common conceptual metaphors of writing-as-a-process and rhetorical situation are scrutinized as vehicles for mindlessness that can be ameliorated through greater present moment awareness. With Buddhist meta-awareness, writing happens without a past, without an illusionary future, but within a deeply inventive present moment characterized by calm, low-stakes exploration and privacy, even during later-stage composing phases. In this approach of mindful invention, every moment is a present moment, and therefore every moment can be a writing moment.
