It may seem like an unattainable ideal, but you can start right now as a bodhisattva-in-training. All you need is the aspiration to put others first and some inspiration from helpful guides like the Buddhist teachers found here. ("How to Be a Bodhisattva" is also the cover theme of the Fall 2016 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly. We hope you'll check that out [...]
About bell hooks
Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh
bell hooks meets with Thich Nhat Hanh to ask: how do we build a community of love? Thich Nhat Hanh has been a presence in my life, as a teacher and guide, for more than twenty years. In the last few years I began to doubt the heart connection I felt with him because we had never met or spoken to one another, yet his work was ever-present in my work. I began to feel the [...]
Pema Chödrön & bell hooks on cultivating openness when life falls apart
In this conversation from 1997, bell hooks talks to Pema Chödrön about how to open your heart to life's most difficult challenges. Initially when I enter the classroom, I share with my students that we are there to think critically — to engage the world of ideas that we live in fully, deeply, and with our whole heart. Pema Chödrön's work gives me this gift. Consistently she [...]
bell hooks shares her “Big Screen Buddhism” pick
In our May 2016 magazine, 10 figures familiar to movie buffs and Buddhist alike — including Krista Tippett, Jeff Bridges, Peter Coyote, Naima Mora, and more — nominated their favorite Buddhist-themed films, from Groundhog Day to Kung Fu Panda. Here, renowned feminist theorist, author, and cultural critic bell hooks writes about her pick. A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Directed by [...]
Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love
The practice of love, says bell hooks, is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. She traces her thirty-year meditation on love, power, and Buddhism, and concludes it is only love that transforms our personal relationships and heals the wounds of oppression. At a conference on women and Buddhism that took place in spring last year, I was upset because most of [...]
Penis Passion
bell hooks argues that our erotic lives are enhanced when men and women can celebrate the penis in ways that don't uphold macho stereotypes. Working on a poem inspired by the joys of having sex in the world’s smallest study seated on an old-fashioned straight back chair painted red where I spend much of my time writing, I seek for words to describe the sensation of sitting in [...]
Ain’t She Still a Woman?
Increasingly, patriarchy is offered as the solution to the crisis black people face. Black women face a culture where practically everyone wants us to stay in our place. Progressive non-black folks, many of them white, often do not challenge black male support of patriarchy even though they would oppose sexism in other groups of men. In diverse black communities, and [...]
Rebel’s Dilemma
From childhood on I have had to struggle to break from the impositions of images that don’t represent me accurately or well. Even though this is a drag, it too is part of the struggle, part of the process of decolonization. The lights are low in my place and I am listening to Brandy sing: "I’d like to get to know if I could be the kinda girl you could be down for." Tonight, I [...]
When Men Were Men
The message is, says bell hooks, that it's fine for women to stray from sexist roles and play around with life on the other side, as long as we come back to our senses and stay happily-ever-after in our place. Books on the bestseller list always intrigue me. I like the idea of picking up a book that lots of people are choosing—I wish I could say reading but I know better. [...]
Design: A Happening Life
"When life is happening, design has meaning, and every design we encounter strengthens our recognition of the value of being alive, of being able to experience joy and peace." All my life I have been obsessed by the pleasure of design. There is no human being in the world who is not born into a happening life—who is not born with the will to endlessly design. My girlhood [...]