OBSTACLES TO THE SCRIPTURAL GURU

It has gotten harder to do this job (bringing dharma into prisons) thanks to the ever more complicated restrictions prison systems are putting on mail. Arkansas, for instance, now digitizes all incoming mail at a center in Florida and has apparently banned books and magazines entirely. Texas, probably due to a heavy religious presence in the state, doesn’t ban our material as long as it’s religious. We can send that in directly.

We can’t do that in Missouri without some difficulties to get permission. We’ve got an inmate who has spent a lot of time there in solitary. It took us 6 months to get one of our courses cleared for him, and him alone for that particular prison. Then he got transferred to another prison, and similarly, we’ve spent a long time simply getting dharma books to him, with many obstacles.

If you’re wondering why prisons are so uptight about mail and books, it’s because you can put synthetic marijuana, K2 (aka “spice”), on paper and inmates can access it. Synthetic marijuana isn’t real marijuana, and it’s a lot more dangerous and addictive. A lady at the Arkansas DOC told me that they had to ban Bibles from getting sent in because of it.

So at this point many state systems, for many millions of taxpayer dollars, send their mail out of state to be digitized such that the inmates don’t touch the paper it came in on, and even just getting a book can be a real chore or outright impossible.

While prisoner drug use produces an everyday spate of overdoses and deaths, you wonder if the authorities have ever asked prisoners where they get their drugs. I have. They tell me they mainly come in through the staff.

Ah. So what if those millions of dollars spent on re-copying all the inmate mail in America were spent on raising salaries and interdicting prison drug smuggling by staff, would drug OD’s go down?

Just wondering.

But that’s not my particular area of oversight. I’m trying to get a Pema Chödrön book in to some guy who’s struggling to be a better person in a 70 man dorm full of manipulators and sociopaths. Do we care about that guy?

Well, it falls on me to care about him. I often contemplate the uphill nature of learning dharma in situations like that. For all the attacks you might make on “organized religion,” it’s why there’s a space dedicated to its practice. It’s why scriptures and commentaries get written and preserved, and why there’s a curriculum regularly offered. It’s where other people might help you along and guide your faith, where you might meet and experienced accomplished spiritual teachers. There are religious celebrations, retreats, and community. Above all, I think, it’s where you might start to absorb something like the dharma through osmosis–through environment, atmosphere, tone. All these things matter in learning the dharma.

But that guy in the din of the 70 man dorm won’t get any of that probably. He likely won’t meet a lama or roshi or bhante. He’s lucky if an outside volunteer comes in once a month to meet him with other like-minded inmates. Often few to no dharma books sit on the library shelves.

In Tibetan Buddhism, they list various kinds of gurus you can work with, but the most likely one any inmate will meet is the “scriptural guru,” the one in writing. But if that’s your guru, it behooves you to study with him or her. A Louisiana inmate wrote me recently:

“I only have 2 ½ years left until my release, and I kind of feel like I’m running out of time. I spend at least a couple hours reading and studying Dharma every day–sometimes I spend most of the day with the Dharma. I know that I will not be able to dedicate so much time to study when I get out.”

Two and a half years seems short if you’ve been in there a while, and ironically, once you do connect to the dharma, a prison becomes a place that might allow for your study. It does narrow your choices, and if you’re not in the thrall of spice or fentanyl, you might find you have extra time for it that you wouldn’t on the streets. Your guru devotion could be to learning the dharma from a book, at least if we can get one to you.