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.

But that is just it.  Prisons are angry places.  I don’t know how much time Khenpo Tsultrim has spent in prisons (we brought him into FCI Englewood, located west of Denver, to teach once, and all he really saw of it was the chapel) but he got immediately what the root klesha (“emotional affliction”) of prison certainly is: hot, seething, teeth-grinding, gut-churning, unending anger.  You can wake up with it, live your day out that way, and go to sleep wrapped up in it.  Shantideva (Stephen Batchelor translation):

My mind will not experience peace
If it fosters painful thoughts of hatred.
I shall find no joy or happiness;
Unable to sleep, I shall feel unsettled.

In prison, they put you into a uniform and underwear that doesn’t fit, and they tell where you can go, when you can go there, and what you can do while you’re there.  If you transgress the rules, you could face disciplinary action, like a “write up,” which could adversely affect a parole bid, all the way up to putting you in solitary and throwing away the key for years and years.  They don’t even have to tell you why you’re there.

But as inmates will quickly observe, the authorities can punish you for violating the rules, but they themselves don’t necessarily follow them when it’s not convenient.

And then there’s the truly egregious kinds of acts.  I got a letter recently from someone in Texas who described a guy on his unit getting out of the cell block shower when a c.o. ordered him back to his cell.  He wouldn’t go instantly because he wanted to put on his clothing first, and the c.o. responded by tear gassing the block.  Since it’s a closed space, there was nowhere anyone could go to breathe clear air, and it resulted in a number of men getting severely sick and being removed for medical treatment.

At least they got treatment.

So isn’t this a basis for rage?

Nevertheless, it’s often this very thing that brought them to prison in the first place.  The inner violence and resentment that motivates you to arm yourself and rob a convenience store.  The hatred that leads to beating up your wife or raping someone.  The fury that leads to gunning down an enemy…or a friend.  There are many, many such stories.

Prison becomes the conclusion of these stories, and it houses such people together, who only become more angry at the daily injustices, petty insults, impoverished resources, and eat-or-be-eaten ethos going on all around.

In brief, there is nobody
Who lives happily with anger.

Enter Shantideva.

Actually, as it turned out, when we started to put together our course—“The Power of Patience: Healing Anger”—there existed an entire book-length commentary in English on chapter six by the Dalai Lama.   He’s the world’s most famous Buddhist.  If you were going to listen to a Buddhist, wouldn’t you listen to him?

But inmates who get all the way to this course (it’s the third one) have already worn themselves out some over the anger dilemma.  Where does it start and where does it end?  If you had a gun and the freedom to use it, how many people would you kill until you felt that there was no need to kill anymore?  Quite possibly down at the bottom of all that rage is a self-hatred that continues to poison you, your relations with your family, your interactions with the people you live with—there’s a root of self-disgust in it all.  You have to start to wonder where and how it ends.

At least some inmates start to wonder that, and they’re the kind who write us.

Given that samsara (birth and death in delusion) itself is without beginning or end, pursuing samsaric redress, i.e., taking your anger out on someone or something, automatically furthers samsara, not any ultimate relief.  That would be the big view Shantideva takes.  Play the samsaric game, you get samsaric results.

Patience, in effect, means resistance to playing that particularly vicious game.  If you view the problem as purely external, caused by the bad behavior of others—and doesn’t a prison surround you and keep you cooped up with a lot of people there because they don’t know how to act?—therefore anger becomes your only choice.

Shantideva offers a bunch of logics for not getting angry in provoking situations, not the least of which consists of recognizing just how blind, confused, and conditioned people often are.  Literally, have compassion for beings who get so lost—just as you have—in their projections that they often don’t have much sense of what they’re doing, and therefore…don’t take it personally.

The Dalai Lama says that the point of patience isn’t some helpless passivity, but that it gives you possibility of choosing your response with discernment: “Shantideva is not advising us to remain totally submissive and passive and not do anything.  Rather, we should generate patience and tolerance, and use that as a strength for then changing the situation.”

Interestingly, he does differ with Shantideva in that he finds some value in anger at injustice and how it might fuel the desire to protect people and instigate social change.

Well, the American prison system could use some of that “social change,” but meanwhile, if you’re living there, you have to deal with your emotions, with anger chief among them.  This inmate taking our course has started to reverse the ingrained, knee-jerk logic:

“Life-long habits and prison culture demanded that I respond to insult with anger and violence. The response was so conditioned as to become automatic. It took me a long time to realize that disrespect usually is a symptom of the speaker’s inner pain and suffering. A part of my realization was that any anger that may arise in response to an insult passes fairly quickly, but if I escalate the situation and respond – either verbally or physically – anger, hatred, and other negative emotions become stronger and last longer, as do the practical negative consequences of my words and actions.”

Anger has an infectious quality, something both staff and inmates suffer from.  It produces a cyclic hell realm, one thing feeding into another.  Simply learning some methods of restraint and starting to apply them shifts the whole footing, breaking entrapment in the cycle, as another inmate describes:

“I have more patience than I used to … When I do experience anger, I feel tight in my stomach and mind as if I cannot breathe easily. When that happens, if I am practicing, I take a breath and let it out slowly, then I try to find the source of the emotion and analyze it. This doesn’t always happen, but it does happen more often and more effectively than it used to. Practicing patience makes me feel like I have a better outlook, like I’ve accomplished something in life, and like I have more to offer people and situations.”

And isn’t that the outcome incarceration is looking for?