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    Back to Basics: Why Do We Bow? Paid Member

    By Norman Fischer
    Many people have this question the minute they walk into the zendo and are told to make full prostrations to the Buddha image on the altar. They come with an idea that Zen is beyond words and letters, beyond religion, beyond rules, beyond piety, and so the idea of such a thorough-going and outrageous display of what seems like religious fervor seems quite disturbing to them. So why do we bow? I had this same question myself in the beginning of my practice. My teacher at the time took me up to the altar and let me look closely at the tiny Buddha there. He pointed out to me that the little Buddha was also bowing. So I was bowing to the Buddha and the Buddha was bowing to me. “If he can do it you can do it,” he said. I thought that was fair enough. More »
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    Agent of Change: An Interview with bell hooks Paid Member

    bell hooks is a seeker, a feminist, a social critic, and a prolific writer. Her books include "Ain't I a Woman?": Black Women and Feminism; Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black; Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West); and, most recently Black Looks all from Southend Press. She was born Gloria Watkins forty years ago in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and was educated at Stanford and Yale. Currently she teaches English and Women's Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio. This interview was conducted for Tricycle by editor Helen Tworkov. Tricycle: What was your first exposure to Buddhism? More »
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    A Very Easy Death Paid Member

    By Simone de Beauvoir
    Alberto Giacometti, The Artist's Mother Seated I (1965) Lithograph THE PNEUMATIC MATTRESS MASSAGED HER SKIN; there were pads between her knees, and they had a hoop over them to prevent the sheets from touching; another arrangement stopped her heels touching the draw-sheet: but for all that, bedsores were beginning to appear all over her body. With her hips paralyzed by arthritis, her right arm half powerless and left immovably fixed to the intravenous dripper, she could not make the first beginnings of a movement. "Pull me up," she said. More »
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    Through a Glass, Darkly Paid Member

    By Virginia MacLean
    LOOKING BACK I wince at the memory of reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead to my dying grandfather. The arrogance of imposing those terrifying descriptions of the final deterioration on the faltering impulses of an old Jewish man born in Odessa and dying in Brooklyn! My brother, having arrived from California expectedly, found me transmitting the eerie incantations through a plastic straw that went directly into his ear. Michael had grabbed the book, looked at the title, and thrown it across the room, screaming, "Are you crazy?" What I knew even then was that it violated the universe itself—call it God or grace or not—to disturb the dying with discord. Now, twenty years later I am nursing my mother and I want to get it right this time, this wondrous responsibility of bidding the dying farewell. Yet my brother has arrived again, and is so filled with enthusiasm for euthanasia that he argues in her hospital room as if the bed is empty.More »
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    The Riddle of Desire Paid Member

    Introduction  By Mark Matousek There comes a moment in everyone’s practice when our fixed ideas of what is spiritual, and what’s not, collapse in a paradoxical heap before our very eyes. We’re troubled, mystified, frequently angered by these intrusions of too-messy life into the glass house of our idealized self; we’re left to wonder, very often, where desire parts ways with wisdom. More »