A FEW REFLECTIONS ON PRISON AGGRESSION AND THE MEDITATIVE PATH
The Buddhist tradition gets regarded as pacifistic. It definitely emphasizes not creating harm–not resorting to aggression in speech or physical violence. But anyone who’s spent real time on the meditation seat knows that aggression often shadows thoughts in some form or another. Over the decades you can see what a refined game it is. Even pretty subtle thoughts can arise purely for the sake of dodging your direct experience and any raw feeling that goes with it. There’s a fundamental aggression in discursive thought habituated to rejecting your own naked experience, and that tendency goes deep.
But then, when I consider what inmates routinely go through, unraveling your own subtle aggression seems like a boutique activity in the face of the very real possibility that someone will try to beat your face in because they don’t like your tone. Or maybe they’re threatening to kick your ass if you don’t hand over your chocolate bars. Whatever it is. It can get a lot uglier from there. [Read more…]
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
I remember as a teenager plucking a book off the rack–-something you saw everywhere back in the 70s, almost as ubiquitous as fat James Michener novels. It was called The Prophet. I opened it randomly and felt struck in the face by what it said:
The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,
And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,
And the white–handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.
Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,
And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for
the guiltless and unblamed.
Astounded, I’d never heard such an idea expressed before: it tied the criminal and victim together in a way that did not exalt the innocent and separate them from the crime and the criminal committing it. Instead it pointed to how the two were bound together such that even the innocent became culpable for the violation, and therefore…who really was innocent and who guilty? Where did one end and the other begin? [Read more…]
PRISON AS THE PATH OF PATIENCE
Probably 20 years ago now, MPP had an audience with Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. Back in our early days, we had one study course, The Myth of Freedom, based on Trungpa Rinpoche’s book and the resonant title. What else should we be teaching inmates? we wondered. I remember he looked up for a moment into the distance, and then said without hesitation: “The sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara.”
All right. What’s in the sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara—“The Way of the Bodhisattva”? It describes in considerable detail how patience is an antidote to anger. In fact, it has quite a bit to say about anger and all the many reasons we use to justify it. Shantideva, the Indian Buddhist master who wrote this epic poem as a commentary on the bodhisattva path, doesn’t seem to think that there’s really any basis or validity for getting angry about anything at any time for any reason.
Try and tell that to the average convict. [Read more…]
Some Thoughts on Prison as Spiritual Path
SOME THOUGHTS ON PRISON AS SPIRITUAL PATH
by Gary Allen
I first entered a prison in 1990. Back then I was an M.F.A. student in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University. That semester the department offered a one credit course designed to get students teaching creative writing outside the academy grounds, and our teacher arranged for us to lead a two day creative writing program at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, the oldest prison in Colorado.
I remember coming up to the control room for the first time where you passed through the metal detector. The control room window was peppered with holes (as a matter of fact, I think it still is, some 34 years later), clearly from getting blasted with a shot gun. I didn’t know what to expect from such a place, and I probably would never have tried to go into it without having my hand held, so to speak. [Read more…]