When the author, radical feminist, and Black Buddhist Christian bell hooks died in late 2021, she was widely celebrated for just about everything in the mainstream press except for her spirituality. 

But hooks’s connection to religion is present throughout her entire breadth of work, which includes thirty books across a variety of genres as well as countless articles on feminism (and how it is for everyone), popular culture, education, recognizing the human rights of children, and more. This missing component of spiritual recognition was part of the motivation for bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle, a journalist and education reporter at The 19th, an independent news outlet that covers gender, politics, and policy. 

The book was published by Fortress Press in November 2023. Tricycle recently spoke with Nittle about the book, hooks’s legacy in spiritual circles and beyond, and as well as book recommendations for Buddhist readers interested in learning more about hooks’s life and work. 

You’re the author of several books, including Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature. Can you tell me how this book came to be? Sure. I had written a book about Toni Morrison for Fortress Press, which is a Lutheran publisher. My books are for people who are not necessarily religious, but interested in how a figure they might not associate with a spiritual tradition approached spirituality in their work or personal lives. They serve as an introduction to people who have never read these authors before; some people read them as a companion piece to read with their books. 

The publisher wanted me to write another book and had suggested some men. But I thought bell hooks would be a good figure because she was a Buddhist Christian, and many people didn’t necessarily know that, even though she discussed it. It didn’t come up in a lot of her obituaries. Spirituality was foundational to her work. And she died shortly after the Toni Morrison book came out. 

You write about bell hooks visiting your school in the 1990s, when you were a teenager. Can you tell us your impressions of hooks and what has stayed with you? I wish I remembered it better; this was such a long time ago. I had not read any of her books, though I knew she was an important person and an important figure. I remember being pretty intimidated.

I remember the speech she gave, saying that she didn’t think her father had loved her, how she had been saying it for years, and her mother finally agreed with her. She was challenging the idea that all that Black families, in particular low-income families, needed was a man in their home and all of their problems would go away. You heard a lot about welfare queen moms in the 1990s; you still hear about them today, but especially in the nineties. President Bill Clinton had passed welfare reform, and single mothers, especially Black single mothers, were vilified. So for hooks to come out and say, “No, we don’t just need men in the home, they have to be loving men who are not going to perpetuate patriarchy,” was pretty radical. And this is something she discusses in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, and other pieces.

She sat with us at lunch, and I sat close to her. She was discussing movies—this part got cut from the book. There was a movie called Sankofa, about a Black American model who gets more in touch with her African roots, and it also discusses issues around enslavement. I remember one of my classmates getting into an argument with her. My classmate loved the movie, and hooks thought it had problems—obviously, she was very critical of popular culture. But she wasn’t like, “Oh, you’re just a little teenager, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was respectfully arguing with him and treated him as someone capable of having an argument. 

Yes, and one other thing about her visit, which I write about in the book. I didn’t witness this, but bell hooks told one of my friends that she was beautiful, and should consider not straightening her hair and wearing it natural. And she stopped straightening her hair, and she told everyone that bell hooks told her that she was beautiful. I’m not in touch with this person anymore, but hooks really left a positive impact on her. 

I enjoyed learning more about hooks’s cultural criticism in your book. Unfortunately, I only came to hooks later in life, so she’s always been a Buddhist Christian radical feminist to me. And to learn about her interview with Lil’ Kim and her willingness to speak out against Hillary Clinton, even Beyoncé—especially Beyoncé. [In a 2014 panel discussion at the New School called Are You Still A Slave: Liberating the Black Female Body, hooks said Beyoncé was “antifeminist” and a “terrorist” to young Black girls.] To go up against these figures and take a lot of criticism makes her fearless to me. You refer in the book to hooks’s “Buddhist Christian ethic.” Can you expand on what that means? That’s in reference to what she took from both Buddhism and Christianity: the idea that you weren’t spiritual or religious for the sake of being spiritual or religious, you did so for the benefit of other people, to engage in social action. There was love at the root of it, the love of one’s self and the love of other people. She used the late author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love, which he said was one’s commitment to one’s own spiritual growth or someone else’s spiritual growth. 

You brought up Beyoncé, so when she was criticizing Beyoncé, or criticizing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, she believed that she was doing so in love, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh and other figures that she was influenced by, like Thomas Merton—people who had social action and liberation right at the heart of their spiritual tradition. 

In a 1992 interview with Tricycle’s founding editor, Helen Tworkov, hooks spoke about her hesitance in meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, whose social activism inspired her Buddhist practice. “As long as I keep a distance from that thread, I can keep him—and I can critique myself on this—as a kind of perfect teacher.” Did she ever meet Thich Nhat Hanh? Yes, she was afraid of meeting him because she didn’t want to be disappointed by him or have [him be] a big letdown. I write in the book about how when hooks first met Hanh, she was still so angry at a past partner who was abusive to her, and she blurted out the words “I’m so angry.” And Hanh told her to “compost” her anger, to turn it into something, for lack of a better term, positive, something that can be used for good instead of her just stewing in anger. And it seems that he handled her anger in a very wise way that she appreciated. 

What about hooks’s upbringing in the Christian church? It seems that she was drawn to social action and outreach from a young age. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Kentucky. She went to predominantly Black churches, where she found people who supported her speaking abilities by reading scriptures; she found people who encouraged her to use her “god voice.” That was in contrast to her home life, where she was more of a misfit and the family scapegoat. She had a difficult relationship with her father; it seemed they butted heads from an early age. She was considered strange or weird by her family members and told she was crazy, even for things like her reading habits. Her mother bought her books, and her family was supportive of her being a good student, but they were still worried if she was going to be a proper young woman who was attractive, found a mate, and was a homemaker—all of those things that she didn’t want to be. 

Her family life really contrasted with her church experience, which was a place of refuge for her. There was an elderly woman, a deacon in the church, who took an interest in hooks and supported her and was loving toward her; she’s the one who told her she had a “god voice.” And both of her maternal grandparents had unique experiences and ideas about spirituality. Her maternal grandmother was not a churchgoing person; she saw the church as being superficial and people caring more about what you wore and who you knew. She was spiritual, but more so when it came to nature—growing things, being self-sufficient, and living off the land. So that was a model for hooks. And her grandfather believed every object had a soul and that she needed to know the stories of all the things around her. He was considered by others to be a strange guy. He was also a pacifist—he never went to war, he refused to fight. hooks believed he was the one family member who truly loved her. 

And this was one of the reasons [why] she was opposed to the traditional, nuclear family, because she believed that it takes a village to raise a child. And if you did have a village, you were more likely to find people who rooted for you and nurtured you. hooks felt that her father was not loving; he was physically abusive to her, to her mother, and at times to her siblings. At one point, this started to affect hooks’s relationship with her mother, because her mother would sometimes act abusively toward her to get into her husband’s good graces. And I haven’t gotten into child liberation theology yet…

We did see a bit of that earlier when you recounted hooks telling your school friend that she was beautiful and to not straighten her hair and engaging in a respectful debate with your other classmate. And with her mother being abusive, that shows that it doesn’t have to be men acting patriarchal, it’s the system, right? Yes. I think the most radical part of bell hooks is her belief that women can enforce or perpetuate patriarchy. Often in popular culture, when we’re talking about the #MeToo movement, or sexism and misogyny in general, it’s framed as women not perpetuating any of these things. And she very much believed women are capable of perpetuating patriarchy and teaching their sons to be patriarchal. She also said women need to interrogate their ideas about women and gender. 

You write that one of the things that drew hooks to Buddhism was her confronting this image of a white Jesus at her Black church. Later in her life, she goes on a pilgrimage to Spain to see the Black Madonna at Montserrat as a way to reclaim the divine feminine for Black women. How did that trip impact her view on spirituality? As a child, hooks went to a church where they had a huge image of a white Jesus holding a globe, and at the bottom of the globe were all the people of color. She discussed how this image really had an impact on her brother who struggled to be a Christian, to be confronted with this image of a white Jesus, that he didn’t feel represented by, every Sunday. It doesn’t sound like she took that as hard as her brother did, but she longed for representations of divine feminine deities portrayed in all different colors, shapes, and sizes.

One of the reasons she became interested in Buddhism was [because] she saw Buddha portrayed in various colors, shapes, and sizes. One of her first encounters with Buddhism was through Buddhist nuns during the time she was a student at Stanford University. She met them, took an interest [in their message], and decided to pursue Buddhism. In terms of the divine feminine and Christianity, she was interested in the Virgin Mary and, specifically, the Black Madonna. She hadn’t grown up hearing about or seeing a Black Madonna, but eventually, she made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, Spain, to view this statue. 

It’s also important to mention that the Catholic Church has recently made an effort to start portraying Jesus, Mary, and other figures in different races and ethnicities, so that people feel represented. 

All About Love: New Visions, hooks’s book that was published in 2000, made a resurgence during the pandemic and even made the New York Times’ bestseller list for the first time, twenty years after its original publication. Why do you think it resonated so much with readers? In the US, we now have more single-headed households than partnered or married households. During the pandemic, especially during lockdown, people were isolated, and it made them think about their connections to other people, maybe in a way they hadn’t before. And people who were partnered or married had to deal with being around their partners for sustained periods, whereas before they were going out or going to work and didn’t have to see their partner or children as much. The pandemic forced some people to engage with their partners and children in ways they hadn’t prior to the pandemic. It makes sense people were interested in a book like All About Love during that time. Quotes from the book were being shared on TikTok and other forms of social media, so I think it was a perfect mix of social media, the pandemic, and younger generations being exposed to the book for the first time. And there are some influential people, like the filmmaker Sofia Coppola and the model Emily Ratajkowski, who began to cite the book as important in their lives and development. 

I also discussed that we can see from dating sites like Match.com that people are looking for more substantial relationships, not just a pretty or handsome face. All About Love is a go-to book for people interested in going beyond the butterflies and rush of feelings at the beginning of a courtship; this book is really about a deeper connection. And she was really clear that she didn’t want to just focus on romantic relationships. A lot of people who like All About Love cited the fact that she writes friendship should be equal to any other relationship, and that friendship will be different (than romantic love) but should not be devalued. And that was a lesson hooks wished she had learned before entering into an abusive relationship where she found herself isolated. 

There’s a quote attributed to the Buddha about friendship being the whole of the spiritual path. And the other thing is the epidemic of loneliness that we sometimes overlook. And she was discussing that more than twenty years ago. Now, there’s more attention to the fact that it’s not just elderly people who suffer from loneliness; there are a lot of young people who are lonely and looking for connection. And that may be a reason why [so many] young people [are now appreciating] the book. 

Toward the end of All About Love, hooks writes that the book is a guide about love, but also death. And if we treat each interaction with someone as if it were our last, that would change how we interact with others; it would allow us to live more consciously. To me, that’s a very Buddhist sentiment. Are there any Christian parallels between living consciously or staying connected to loved ones who have died? As a text, the Bible focuses on the importance of your ancestors. But in contemporary Christianity, in the US, I think that ancestors are not focused on in the same way. hooks was interested in how Black American and West African spirituality mixed with mainstream Christianity, and how during enslavement, Black people had to hide their African spiritual traditions but found a way to still have yard shrines and altars, even if it was just having rocks or things placed in a certain kind of way. Or the pictures in their house arranged in a way that transcended enslavement and white supremacy in an attempt to separate Black people from all that. 

And hooks believed in the power of naming ancestors too. That’s the whole reason she chose a pseudonym after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. I tried to honor hooks by naming her grandparents in the book.

Lineage is so important in Buddhism—who your teacher is and lineages that can be traced back to the time of the Buddha. It’s interesting to see the parallels with other religions. Can you recommend a few books for Buddhist readers who have never read hooks or who would like to revisit her more spiritual works? All About Love is one of the books where she most engages spirituality, be it Buddhism or Christianity. Her memoir, Bone Black, will allow you to see where she came from and why spirituality was important for her. [Bone Black also provides some framework for] the lessons and understanding [she received from] her Kentucky ancestors, who were not at all familiar with Buddhism [but who] paved her way to becoming a Buddhist; whether it was her grandfather being a pacifist and telling her that everything has a soul or her grandmother using quilting as a form of meditation, losing herself in the process and coming back to herself. And then, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. She’s urging Black women to not just have a patriarchal, fundamental approach to Christianity, but to expand our options, whether that’s through Buddhism, traditional African religion, Hinduism, or something else. 

I wanted to close with something hooks wrote in All About Love: “Sometimes, we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions.” Since you have spent so much time with hooks’s writing, what do you think she would make of the world right now, especially with multiple conflicts going on? Her grandfather, who was one of her teachers, was a pacifist. Hanh and King were pacifists. So I think she would be horrified. 

About ten years ago, she was one of many writers and scholars who signed a letter in support of Palestine. I imagine she would be heartbroken by what’s happening there. And she cautioned people to be wary of the media and the messages in the media. She talked about the importance of making sure you have access to a wide range of information and aren’t just turning on the TV and absorbing whatever messages [come your way, which often] perpetuate what she coined as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I think she would urge people to take in the news with caution and advocate for peace and liberation. 

⧫

This interview has been edited and adapted for length and clarity. 

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The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on Effective Altruism, Engaged Buddhism, and How to Build a Better World
by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 264 pp., $21.95, paper

The Buddhist and the Ethicist is the culmination of a five-year conversation between Peter Singer, a utilitarian ethicist and animal liberation advocate, and Shih Chao-Hwei, an engaged Buddhist nun, academic, and activist who champions gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Ethics is active—something to be done rather than a fixed opinion—and in this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics.

The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet
by Sarah Anderson
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 304 pp., $21.95, paper

Sarah Anderson, a painter and writer who opened the famed Travel Bookshop in London’s Notting Hill in 1979, provides a thorough meditation on silence: its essentialness and elusiveness, as well as the very human impulse to fill our worlds with “vacuous sound.” The book includes sections on religion and spirituality, the arts, and “darker” silence realms like war and prison. Woven through are histories and anecdotes from great thinkers, artists, contemplatives, and other silence enthusiasts who can inspire our own quest to find silence in the unlikeliest of places.

Buddhism and Loss: Navigating Grief, Adversity and Change
by Diane Esguerra
Mud Pie Books, 2023, 114 pp., $8.95, paper

The first noble truth reminds us that life contains suffering, and Diane Esguerra—a psychotherapist and Soka Gakkai practitioner—very skillfully writes about the many different ways loss comes into our lives, from the deaths of those closest to us, to our youth, to the funds in our bank account. Through Buddhist wisdom and contemporary case studies, Esguerra demonstrates how practice can help us through the losses we’ll inevitably experience, and how mindfully navigating loss can help us better appreciate all aspects of the human experience.

Scholar’s Corner

Buddhist Masculinities
edited by Mega Bryson and Kevin Buckelew
Columbia University Press, September 2023, 352 pp., $35.00, paper

Buddhist literature is full of idealized sacred and mundane physical perfections; often, those aesthetic ideals refer to men. Examining a wide range of Buddhist maleness—from narratives of morally superior monks and demon-taming tantric heroes to depictions of irresistible buddhas and bodhisattvas with sensuous bodies and jeweled smiles—Buddhist Masculinities expands on contemporary gender and intersectionality studies, merging a variety of methodological approaches. This much-needed transdisciplinary book pays critical attention to how ideas of masculinity have embodied, defined, and legitimized power and virtue in diverse Buddhist contexts. A must-read for practitioners and scholars alike.

WHAT WE’RE REREADING

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
by Tara Brach

Now approaching its twentieth anniversary, this modern classic by Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach continues to find new audiences. “Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” Brach writes, offering readers a path to freedom and fulfillment through the eponymous practice. Utilizing a mix of psychology and Buddhism, the book aims to guide readers out of the strictures we create for ourselves with guided meditations and a discussion of the Jungian shadow self, the repository of our negative emotions.

–Philip Ryan, executive editor

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The architect of the Indian constitution. The drafter of the Hindu Code Bill, which permitted Indians from different castes to marry and extended equal rights to men and women. The man who believed Buddhism was the only way to liberation, leading hundreds of thousands of Dalits (“untouchables”) to convert to Buddhism and escape the oppression of the caste system. What Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) achieved was in many ways unthinkable given the tremendous discrimination he faced as a young Dalit. But, had Ambedkar not met and married a young doctor named Sharada Kabir, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to accomplish nearly as much as he did during the last decade of his life.

Kabir, who became known as Dr. Savita Ambedkar after their marriage in 1948, published her memoir in the Marathi language in 1990. In 2022, nearly twenty years after her death, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar was published in English for the first time. Translated by Nadeem Khan, Babasaheb gives English speakers an insightful look into Savita’s complicated commitment to serving her husband—whom many consider a bodhisattva—as a companion, caretaker, and trustworthy confidante during watershed moments in modern Indian history. 

Savita was born in 1909 to what she described as a progressive Brahmin family. Graduating with a bachelor of medicine and surgery from Grant Medical College in 1937, Savita worked as a junior doctor for Dr. Madhavrao Malvankar in Mumbai before accepting a position as chief medical officer of a women’s government hospital in Gujarat. But facing some health issues, she returned to Mumbai and resumed her work with Malvankar. 

Enter B. R. Ambedkar. Savita writes that she wasn’t familiar with him before meeting him at a friend’s house. He was “deeply concerned about women’s progress” and congratulated the young doctor on her accomplishments, Savita Ambedkar writes; they also discussed Buddhism in their early meetings, leaving her “literally goggle-eyed with wonder.”

Though Ambedkar had the elegance of a German prince and the stamina of a high-ranking politician, he was suffering from a number of significant health issues (including diabetes, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and neuritis), which were put on the back burner while he worked on the constitution in 18- to 20-hour stretches. He sought the medical advice of Dr. Malvankar, whom Savita Ambedkar worked with as a junior doctor. 

The Ambedkars’ marriage started as more of a medical commitment than a romance: Savita had offered to live with him to oversee his treatment, diet, and rest; Ambedkar instead proposed, in part because “for the sake of millions of my people, I have to live on.”

“His personality, his work, his sacrifice, his scholarship, they were all mightier than the Himalayas. Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon. How was one to turn down a great person like Dr. Ambedkar?” Savita writes. “The doctor inside me was prodding me to go and serve him medically. The government had placed upon his shoulders the historic responsibility of drafting the Constitution of free India, and therefore it was utterly imperative that his health should be well looked after, and he should be given appropriate treatment.” 

She accepted, and they were married on April 15, 1948, less than three months after Gandhi was assassinated. “From then on till the last moment I stayed with him ceaselessly like his shadow,” she writes.

“Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon.”

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of conversations with a dharma friend about the faults of applying modern thinking to the lives of ancient Buddhist women. She is working on a book about the Buddha’s birth mother and views Mayadevi as the goddess she is; to compare her to an earthly woman makes no sense, because she was divinely chosen to be the Buddha’s mother. We can take inspiration from her qualities, but to try to think of her as a woman in our world is futile.

In that sense, it was more comfortable for me to think about Savita Ambedkar’s life as a dharma story rather than the biography of a modern woman. When I begin viewing her life through a feminist lens, I see only what she gave up to be the “shadow,” the constant companion and caretaker of one of the most important men of independent India. 

The few glimpses we get of Savita are inspiring and fierce: when Ambedkar was so ill that his constant stream of visitors would not help his condition improve, Savita cut meetings short, or refused to let them start in the first place, so that he could rest. Although they employed a cook, Savita would prepare his food with healing in mind; she taught him yoga asanas and made sure he had oil massages to help with circulation. Savita kept Ambedkar on a strict schedule, helped bathe and dress him; Savita made it possible for him to read and write into the night and work on legislation that affected millions of people at the time (and all the generations to come). Indeed, the ink was still drying on edits and corrections to The Buddha and His Dhamma when Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956. 

Yet following Ambedkar’s death, Savita was forced into obscurity. Some of Ambedkar’s followers even alleged that she had murdered him, and a significant amount of the memoir is spent establishing Ambedkar’s health history and how she likely prolonged his life. Though she was effectively blocked from politics, Savita found friends among the younger generation of social reformers in the seventies and eighties, garnering respect from the Dalit Panthers, radical anticaste thinkers who were inspired by Ambedkar, Karl Marx, Buddhism, and groups like the Black Panthers in the US. 

Early on in the book, Savita compares herself to Yashodhara, the Buddha’s wife. Like Yashodhara, about whom we know little from Buddhist literature, Savita’s innermost thoughts and dreams remain a mystery. We are instead left wondering what we might do if a bodhisattva came into our lives. Would we set aside everything to serve them too?

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Insight Meditation Society and the Canadian Prairie Sangha, two Insight communities in North America, are launching a new online series aimed at preserving and transmitting the important teachings that Western teachers have learned from their Asian teachers.

“Lineage Stories” is a free four-part video series that begins on October 12 with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, two of IMS’s four cofounders, telling stories about Munindra-ji (1915–2003), Dipa Ma (1911–1989), Mahasi Sayadaw (1904–1982), and other teachers that they either studied with or who greatly influenced their practice.

“When we can hear stories of our ancestors firsthand, this can motivate our practice. And when we hear the stories in community, this strengthens our sense of belonging and connection to each other and to the tradition, and cultivates an embodied relationship with our beloved Asian Elders,” said Jeanne Corrigal, the Guiding Teacher of the Saskatoon Insight Meditation Community, who also teaches through IMS. Corrigal is also a graduate of IMS’s 2017-2021 Teacher Training Program, by far IMS’s most diverse teacher cohort to date that the community said honors and better reflects dharma practice in the West. 

Buddhism began as an oral tradition, and the early texts were memorized and transmitted by monastics for the first 500 years. Corrigal, who is a member of the Métis Nation, one of three recognized Indigenous communities in Canada, says that storytelling is also an important aspect of their culture. 

The project started with the idea that five of the Canadian Prairie Sanghas could give their sanghas a “stronger sense of lineage and ancestors” through a storytelling series. They wanted to invite the wider community as well, according to Corrigal, which led to the involvement of IMS. 

Alexandra Gekas, director of IMS Online, told Tricycle that the project “felt like an instant fit with our goals and intentions.” 

“Honoring our lineage is important on so many levels—there is the spiritual practice of connecting our line of transmission to the Buddha, the historical importance of keeping an accurate record, and the justice issue of making sure that our Asian ancestors, heritage, and roots are not erased.” 

Gekas added that Prairie Sangha did the majority of work creating the program, and that IMS provided the wider platform. In addition to the talks, a visual lineage map will be created as the series progresses. IMS Online has previously offered programs on lineage, including through their 2022 Dipa Ma series.  

Lineage Stories is expected to continue for at least the next three years. All of the talks are free to attend virtually, and those interested can enroll on IMS’s website. Talks and materials will also be available on the Prairie Sangha website. As of publication, registration for the first program is nearing capacity but the presentation will be available on demand within 48 hours of the live event.

IMS and the Canadian Prairie Sangha are Theravada Buddhist communities in the Burmese and Thai Forest lineages of Mahasi Sayadaw and Ajahn Mun (1870–1949). Mahasai Sayadaw is credited with creating the mindfulness technique that launched the Vipassana movement; Ajahn Mun was a meditation master who founded the Thai Forest tradition.  

Joseph Goldstein first encountered meditation as a Peace Corps member in Thailand in the mid-sixties. After his volunteer service, he returned to India in the late sixties and met his first teacher, Anagarika Munindra (Munindra-ji), in Bodhgaya, the Buddha’s birthplace. Munindra had recently returned from nearly a decade in Burma and had started teaching Vipassana. Goldstein writes in Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (2013) that “when I first arrived, he said something so simple and direct that I knew I had come to my spiritual home: ‘if you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.’”

Sharon Salzberg first went to India at age 18 for her junior year in college abroad, determined to learn how to meditate. As Salzberg recounts in Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience (2003), she attended a 10-day meditation retreat in Bodhgaya given by S.N. Goenka. (This is also where she first met Goldstein, Ram Dass, and other future big names in Western Buddhism and spirituality circles). Salzberg also was taught by Munindra-ji and his student, Dipa Ma. “I saw her as the epitome of spiritual development. Dipa Ma was a little bundle of a woman wrapped in a white sari, but her psychic space was huge, radiating light and peace, filling whatever room she was in,” Salzberg writes in Faith. 

Three additional Lineage Stories are planned for:

• January 11, 2024: Rebecca Bradshaw, devon hase, and Jessica Morey on Sayadaw U Pandita (1921–2016) and the intersections of Theravada and Tibetan practice
• April 11, 2024: Roxanne Dault, Tara Mulay, and Carol Wilson on the Mahasi Method and its different transmissions through Sayadaw U Pandita and Sayadaw U Tejaniya
• October 10, 2024: Guy Armstrong on the Insight lineage 

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Wes Nisker, a Buddhist teacher, award-winning broadcaster, comedian, counterculture figure, founding coeditor of Inquiring Mind, and author has died. He was 80 years old. 

Nisker was born in 1942 in Nebraska to Jewish immigrant parents. He attended the University of Minnesota and has said he first became interested in Buddhism after seeing Alan Watts speak there in 1965. He arrived in San Francisco in the 1960s, as he said in an interview with SF Gate in 2003, “too late” to join the beatniks—he was particularly inspired by Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder—so he was “assigned to the hippies instead.” “To this day, I consider myself a kind of mongrel bohemian, with a beatnik head and a hippie heart,” Nisker said in that interview. 

In the late 1960s and in the 70s, Nisker was heard on the San Francisco radio stations KSAN and later KFOG. It was on the former station that he coined a phrase that he is often remembered for: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” His broadcasts combined news, commentary, music, and remixed audio; Nisker once said his news show was the only one you could dance to. Nisker was also known for his vox pop, or person on the street, interviews in the years leading up to television’s media takeover.

Nisker earned the moniker “Scoop” from activist Abbie Hoffman when Nisker was covering the Chicago Seven trial, when  a group of men were charged by the US government with conspiracy to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968. 

Nisker studied with Asian and Western Buddhist teachers for years, and eventually started teaching too; he was a teacher at Spirit Rock, among other places. In 1971, Nisker attended S.N. Goenka’s first 10-day Vipassana retreat in Bodhgaya, India. Also in attendance were Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Ram Dass. In 1984, following the encouragement of Insight Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, Nisker cofounded and coedited Inquiring Mind with Barbara Gates. The semiannual journal, “dedicated to the creative transmission of Buddhadharma to the West,” continued publishing articles, essays, poetry, and more until 2015. The full digital archive, with a regular column by Nisker, has been completed and is housed by the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies online. The journal remains available online, and in the days following Nisker’s death, the homepage included his poem, “Why I Meditate (After Allen Ginsberg).”

Gates, recalling her longtime friend and collaborator, said: “Wes was a wonderful interviewer. He liked to do interviews as a team with me and other dharma friends. His favorite interviewees included Gary Snyder, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Joanna Macy and Ram Dass, to name a few. He also loved poetry. He delighted in selecting poems for each issue of the Mind for a section we called “Poems and Not Poems.” April Fools Day was his favorite holiday. He was a playful punster.” 

In the early 2000s, Nisker performed as what he believed was the “world’s first Buddhist stand-up comedian.” A 2005 interview between Nisker and Andrew Cooper, Tricycle’s features editor, on the topic of being Buddhist and Jewish contains a number of zingers:

Which Jewish writer would you rather have as a dharma student, Marcel Proust or Franz Kafka? Oh, without hesitation I’ll take Kafka. You certainly wouldn’t have to explain the First Noble Truth to him, and furthermore, he already knows that he is part cockroach, something most Buddhists don’t understand until after many years of practice.

Following Nisker’s death, Cooper shared a memory of Nisker via email: “I remember once years ago walking around SF with him as we tried to have a conversation but every few steps someone who was obviously a good friend from somewhere would stop us to catch up a little. It was a little like walking with someone famous, but not really because there was in each stop something meaningful exchanged. I was at first frustrated by what I viewed as interruptions but eventually it clicked that I was watching something really cool in itself, one little bit of beauty after another.”

Nisker authored numerous books, including Buddha’s Nature: A Practical Guide to Enlightenment; The Essential Crazy Wisdom; If You Don’t Like the News … Go Out and Make Some of Your Own; The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom; Being Nature: A Down-to-Earth Guide to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and more.   

In 2016, Nisker was inducted into the 11th Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame.

Last winter, Spirit Rock celebrated Nisker’s 80th birthday, according to a remembrance disseminated by Jack Kornfield. “When one of your best friends and spiritual brothers dies, it’s hard to put into words all that it means. Sad and tender, hard to fathom and also a loving relief for his release from a deteriorating body,” Kornfield wrote. “He loved to invite awe of the cosmos, he opened windows into the ecological mysteries, he smiled at the absurdity of human society, and carried a playful endless enormous creativity and deep Dharma vision. And here’s one of the best things…..Wes was alway kind. What a beautiful thing to say of someone’s life!”

Tricycle published an excerpt from his last book, entitled “Making Friends with Death: A meditation for new beginnings” in the spring 2023 magazine. 

In an undated post on his website, called “The Practice of Geezing,” Nisker humorously and sincerely reflected on his body and mind growing older.

Wandering the hills of Northern California, I carry the realization that I will someday be leaving this place I love, forever. Never again will I see the great pines waving through the in-flowing fog, or the gnarled sculpture of the oaks standing firm; or smell the vibrant decay of the woods punctuated with the tang of fennel and eucalyptus—all of it will vanish, along with my senses themselves.

Nisker, who had been living with Lewy body dementia, was surrounded by friends when he died. Condolences continue to roll in on his Facebook page. Details on a service to follow.

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The greater Mumbai area, home to more than 22 million people, is a world away from remote and serene Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas. But Buddhism is alive in India’s most densely populated city and financial and film capital. Mumbai has the largest urban Buddhist population in India and makes up nearly 80 percent of the country’s total Buddhist population.

Most of the city’s Buddhists are followers of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), who led a movement that converted hundreds of thousands of Dalit (“untouchable”) Hindus to Buddhism to escape the horrors and discrimination of the caste system. Today, Ambedkar continues to be revered, and his image can be found just about everywhere you turn, including in smaller temples, which include statues of his likeness in addition to the Buddha’s. 

1| Fabindia 

Traditional clothing isn’t a prerequisite for visiting Indian houses of worship, but modesty is. For sixty years, Fabindia has worked with rural artisans to sell clothes, jewelry, furniture, and more. Kurtas, long-sleeve shirts, and loose pants provide good sun coverage and a cooler option than jeans or leggings, and you can find every color and pattern imaginable. Shorts are not temple-appropriate; women might consider adding a scarf, called a dupatta, or
stole, depending on the length,
for covering arms or the head if required. Fabindia has hundreds of stores in India, with several in Mumbai; we recommend the Fort location, close to the famous Gateway of India and Crawford Market.  

Jeroo Building, B Bharucha Road, Kala Ghoda, Fort
fabindia.com

2| Kanheri Caves

If you have only one full day for Buddhist sightseeing in Mumbai, spend it at this ancient complex. The 109 Buddhist caves carved into a basalt rock hill were constructed as early as the 3rd century BCE, and were in use as a center for Buddhist study and worship up to the 11th century. The massive Buddhas in themselves are magnificent; Kanheri is known for a unique eleven-headed Avalokiteshvara. The caves are situated within Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which offers additional sites and attractions, including hiking, a safari, Jain temple, waterfall, and lakes. The caves are about seven kilometers inside the park, and uphill; cars can be hired once inside the main park’s entrance. You can also hike up; just be aware of the wildlife threats, including leopards. Guard your snacks from resident monkeys, they are quick. 

Sanjay Gandhi National Park

3| B.R. Ambedkar Chaityabhoomi

Chaityabhoomi was the site of Ambedkar’s cremation in 1956, and his death anniversary, or Mahaparinirvan Din, brings millions of pilgrims every December 6. The main hall includes a statue of the Buddha; sitting below him is an Ambedkar bust adorned with flower garlands and illuminated by candles, and a monk nearby to offer blessings. The main entrance gate and pillar are replicas of the Sanchi Gate and Ashoka Pillar, and stalls leading to the temple sell Ambedkar literature, flowers for offerings, and a wide variety of Buddha and Ambedkar tchotchkes. Chaityabhoomi is on the waterfront, steps away from Dadar Chowpatty (beach) and Shivaji Park. 

2RGM+2HJ, D Mandir Road, Dadar West, Dadar

4| Global Vipassana Pagoda

The Global Vipassana Pagoda, on Mumbai’s northern outskirts, was a project S. N. Goenka (1924–2013) worked to complete toward the end of his life that honored his teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, as well as educating visitors about the Vipassana tradition. The gold-painted pagoda stands at 325 feet tall and contains Buddha relics. The complex includes a pillar-less dome that can accommodate 8,000 people (but only those who have completed a Goenka ten-day course can meditate there). A ten-minute anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing) course is offered continuously from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and all visitors aged 10 and up can participate. Getting there is a trek that includes a ferry ride and magnificent views; take advantage of the vegetarian food options onsite.

Global Vipassana Pagoda Road, Gorai Village, West Borivali
globalpagoda.org

5| Nipponzan Myohoji

This Nichiren Buddhist temple has the distinction of being Mumbai’s oldest—and possibly only—Japanese Buddhist place of worship. The temple’s founder, Nichidatsu Fujii (1885–1985), traveled to India in the ’30s to fulfill Nichiren’s prophecy to bring the Lotus Sutra to India. Today, visitors can chant the daimoku in the temple, which includes a large marble Buddha and vibrant paintings depicting scenes from the Buddha’s life. Resident monk Bhikshu T. Morita continues the vision of the order’s founder by working to construct a new peace pagoda and running a nonsectarian school for local children. 

2R28+79P, Dr. Annie Besant Road, opp. Poddar Hospital, B Wing, Worli
nipponzanmyohojimumbai.com

6| Rajgruha (Ambedkar Museum)

Ambedkar’s former mansion is an opportunity to pay homage and to learn more about his life. Ambedkar is said to have constructed the residence to house his personal library, which, at 50,000 books, was one of the largest in the world at the time (a portion of his collection now lives at Mumbai’s Siddharth College Library). Rajgruha is an important site to many Ambedkarite Buddhists, and the ground-floor museum contains other significant personal items from his life. 

Dadar East, 129, Khare Ghat Marg, Hindu Colony

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Illumination: A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No-Method
by Rebecca Li
Shambhala Publications, October 2023, 280 pp., $21.95, paper

There’s method in the no-method approach, or the Buddhist practice of “silent illumination” as taught by Chan Master Sheng Yen (1931–2009). Rebecca Li, a Chan Buddhist teacher, writes that this method completely changed her understanding of silence. Silence does not mean to “push away or avoid all noise,” but instead to “refrain from succumbing to our habitual reactivity that gets in the way of fully experiencing the present moment as it is.” After introducing readers to the essential components of silent illumination, chapters on the “modes of operation,” including craving and trance, help us halt reactivity and see contentment as our natural state of being.  

Three Minutes a Day: A Fourteen-Week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life
by Richard Dixey
New World Library, August 2023, 144 pp., $18.95, paper

No matter how busy we are, we can probably find three free minutes per day. This guide by Richard Dixey, a senior faculty member at Berkeley’s Dharma College, makes the bold claim that just a few minutes of daily meditation can “generate a real insight into personal experience that no amount of reading can replicate.” Exercises include watching a candle to develop concentration and listening to the sound of a fading gong to develop flexible concentration. This guide is suitable for both beginners and experienced meditators looking for a shift in perspective. A free mobile app is also available to keep you on track.

Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard, and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption
edited by Trine Brox & Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg
Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, 194 pp., $35.95, paper

Buddhism is green. At least more than other religions, right? Although many like to valorize Buddhism as inherently antimaterialist and mindful of its worldly interconnectedness, the lived reality is quite different. From the garbage, sewage, and excrement produced daily by both monastics and lay Buddhists to the desacralized ritual objects and decaying mummified bodies left behind by the dead, this timely and poignant text examines the Buddhist contribution to the seemingly endless wave of “zombie rubbish” that sits poised to overwhelm and consume our very existence. 

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Scholar’s Corner

Living Treasure: Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in Honor of Janet Gyatso
edited by Holly Gayley and Andrew Quintman
Wisdom Publications, June 2023, 544 pp., $59.95, hardcover

Janet Gyatso, the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard University, is “one of the most creative and influential thinkers of her generation,” as the editors of this anthology by her peers write. Living Treasure celebrates two areas of her greatest expertise—terma (hidden texts) and Tibetan autobiographical writing—and features essays from many of her former students. Gyatso’s multidisciplinary approach and “interrogation of what it means to be human” are found in her pieces on supine demonesses, a third gender, and Tibetan nuns’ advocacy for full ordination. What results is a scholarly work that need not be limited to an academic audience.

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WHAT WE’RE REREADING

Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
by Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Cultural misunderstandings often fuel the divisive debates across our fractious and fractured online forums. In this overheated milieu, examining the roots of our ideas about Buddhism is crucial. Donald Lopez’s groundbreaking challenge to Western cultural assumptions about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, Prisoners of Shangri-La (published in 1998 and revised in 2018), still resonates. Lopez’s detailed catalog of countless tropes that still shape popular discourse adds needed context to the endless stream of misinformed posts and drive-by comments. Cutting through complexity with meticulous yet down-to-earth prose and a bodhisattva’s compassion, Lopez delivers a trenchant critique of Western fantasies about Tibet.

–Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins

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Jane Hirshfield, among America’s most celebrated and decorated poets and a longtime Zen student and Tricycle contributing editor, welcomes her tenth book of poetry this fall. The Asking: New and Selected Poems invites us to zoom out, to take a second look, and to explore expansiveness, pushing back against our culture that is often preoccupied with telling.

She recently spoke with us about the book, which is available from Knopf on September 12, 2023.

Your new poems in The Asking share sentiments of not-knowing, renewal, and awe of the natural world. Can you speak about what inspired the collection? These past years have brought us all a set of increasing, quickening crises, each requiring response. Failures of our sense of shared fate, of a basic social compact of mutual well-being. Failures of justice and of compassion, of care for the animals, insects, microbes, plants with whom we share this planet. COVID-19’s unspeakably politicized unfolding. I’ve had also some personal invitations to major transition. I write to meet what comes—to stay upright, to speak into shock and grief. Yet somehow, the beauty of the fragile world also steepens, grows brighter. The new poems hold, too, my gratitude for being alive for this open eye-blink of a lifetime.

What have you been asking lately?  “How now go on?” is a question more and more in awareness. It has several faces. One is, “How can I keep opening my eyes to each morning’s fresh news?” One is, “What can I do to be helpful in turning the world’s tiller in a different direction?” One is, “How to counter despair and my simple, profound disappointment in the course of our culture over my lifetime?” How to answer despair is a question I see being asked by many—the young; my own generation also. We came of age into the first Earth Day. I thought we’d respond to that moment’s shifted knowledge in ways united and urgent. The fracturing of trust and increase of malice that came instead continually stun me. What happened? Why?

Despair is a useful emotion, but only if we feel that it must be answered. Its antidote is, I hope, reflected in the new poems in two ways—one, the felt imperative to recognize the beauty still all around us. The other, taking some action. So long as you preserve possibility and agency, hope exists. Even to bring a few words together in a new way is an action, one always available. You can create a widened world, offer it forward. Despair freezes in place. Questions, hypotheses, imaginings, thaw.

Questions have for me felt always central to practice. Zen is continual asking, not a set of answers. With each breath, “What is this?” I arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1974, in summer, in a red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains. One of the first teachings I heard was the suggestion that we find some question to practice with. Soto Zen doesn’t engage the formal curriculum of koans; we were encouraged to find our own questions.

For a long time, mine was “What is the emotional life of a Buddha?” But these days, most often, it is the simple: “How go on?” How stay undefended, unbarricaded, permeable, in the face of so much pain, loss, and delusion. Art’s work is to let us take everything in, however difficult. Also, to help us recognize the Buddhist parable of the mustard seed: whatever we experience is shared. Isolation, division, small self, compound suffering. The sense of shared fate loosens clench, loosens grip. A fist can only act on the world in a single way, by banging. An open hand can do infinite things. So perhaps another way to phrase my current question might be: “How can I open further into what is—and, once I have, what is given me then to do?” Writing poems is part of that, though I also take more concrete actions.

This collection contains both new poems and selections from past books. Can you talk about the criteria and process of including the previous works?  You write poems because you have no choice. You keep them, you publish them, because they might prove of use in the future. A “good” poem, for me, is a poem I may have need or desire to think of again. I tried to choose earlier poems that I felt—or had been told—serve most strongly. Ones that cast needed light.

One of the new poems, “Today, When I Could Do Nothing,” is a reflection on the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the collection includes a poem you wrote after 9/11. What is your process when writing about such massive events? Both poems arrived quickly into their respective moments. I need poems most—either my own or someone else’s—when the earth tilts in crisis. Poems re-knit the heart-mind’s fracture. These two speak to different kinds of distress. Terrorism and war—which I saw coming at once, and so wished any words could prevent—is a different order of crisis than a virus. But both were world-altering, and altered worlds need new words through which to walk into them. “Today, When I Could Do Nothing” was asked for by a newspaper hours after it was written. It went instantly viral, not least because it may have been the earliest such poem broadly published. But I didn’t write it for others; I wrote it to take in for myself the new state of being: the profoundly unnerving silence of that first day and what it meant.

What do you hope readers, writers, and the world might take away? How can we ask more?  This question holds beautifully its own answer. The shift from fixity, assertion, and shouting into a spirit of asking and dialogue is itself the key. Asking turns the heart-gate from closed to open. What a gift, a life’s bi-directional Q&A with the immeasurable What-Is. My advice to young writers is often: “Open the window a little wider than you feel comfortable.” My advice in practice is to ask each thing, event, person you meet, “What is your teaching?”

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Today, When I Could Do Nothing

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