Lama Rod Owens

In this revolutionary book, Lama Rod Owens — Buddhist teacher, activist, and one of the few Black Buddhist lamas in the Kagyu lineage — offers a path toward liberation from the trauma of anger. Drawing on his own experience navigating systemic racism, homophobia, and loss, Owens integrates Vajrayana Buddhist practice with the insights of Black liberation and contemplative social justice to show how anger, when met with awareness and compassion, can become a source of clarity, protection, and transformative power rather than a force that consumes us. Structured around guided reflections and practices, Love and Rage gives readers a way to honor their rage, release its destructive grip, and move toward a more awake and liberated way of being in the world.

In The New Saints, Lama Rod Owens articulates a vision of spiritual warriorship for our fractured age — ordinary people who refuse to look away from suffering, who keep their hearts open under the weight of systemic injustice, and who commit to the work of healing themselves and their communities. Drawing on his training as a Kagyu Buddhist lama, the legacies of Black liberation, queer wisdom, and the lives of ancestors who loved fiercely, Owens maps the qualities and practices of those willing to carry the burden and the blessing of awakening in public. Part memoir, part teaching, and part call to action, the book invites readers to enter the lineage of the new saints — not canonized by any institution, but made by their willingness to stay present to what is broken and to love anyway.

Igniting a long-overdue dialogue about how the legacy of racial injustice and white supremacy plays out in society at large and Buddhist communities in particular, this urgent call to action outlines a new dharma that takes into account the ways that racism and privilege prevent our collective awakening. The authors traveled around the country to spark an open conversation that brings together the Black prophetic tradition and the wisdom of the Dharma. Bridging the world of spirit and activism, they urge a compassionate response to the systemic, state-sanctioned violence and oppression that has persisted against black people since the slave era. With national attention focused on the recent killings of unarmed black citizens and the response of the Black-centered liberation groups such as Black Lives Matter, Radical Dharma demonstrates how social transformation and personal, spiritual liberation must be articulated and inextricably linked. Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah represent a new voice in American Buddhism. Offering their own histories and experiences as illustrations of the types of challenges facing dharma practitioners and teachers who are different from those of the past five decades, they ask how teachings that transcend color, class, and caste are hindered by discrimination and the dynamics of power, shame, and ignorance. Their illuminating argument goes beyond a demand for the equality and inclusion of diverse populations to advancing a new dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies systems of suffering and prepares us to weigh the shortcomings not only of our own minds but also of our communities. They forge a path toward reconciliation and self-liberation that rests on radical honesty, a common ground where we can drop our need for perfection and propriety and speak as souls. In a society where profit rules, people's value is determined by the color of their skin, and many voices—including queer voices—are silenced, Radical Dharma recasts the concepts of engaged spirituality, social transformation, inclusiveness, and healing.