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Buddhas behind the Razor Wire Hozan Alan Senauke Abstract: The author, who has been among the leaders in Buddhist social action and social services in the United States, recounts his work with Buddhist practitioners who are inmates in a women’s prison

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ocially engaged Buddhism, as I see it, is really not different from the Buddha Śākyamūni’s core teaching. He said, “I teach about suffering and the end of suffering.” But in this age of globalization and interdependence, socially engaged Buddhism widens the view of suffering and liberation beyond the focus on an individual or a small sangha (or practice community) to social systems and structures. These systems—cities, nations, races, genders, ecological regions, and so on—are of course made up of individuals. But an “individual,” in Buddhist terms, is itself an impermanent collection of causes and conditions. In Western countries we tend to think that the individual, the “I and mine,” exists within one particular bag of skin. The wider and deeper view is that we actually co-construct reality and identity. Taking a leap, I might say that the individual is created by the systems and interactions of all the infinite selves that constitute a system.

The practice of engaged Buddhism entails insight and action exactly where self and social structures come together, as one moves freely between them as appropriate. This effort—manifesting in areas of social change and protest, social service, environmental activism, hospice work, justice and democracy, civil rights, and more—is beyond charity or wellintentioned service. It has the potential to transform self and others alike.

What follows is my experience and understanding in just one of these realms of engagement.

At least once a month for the past eleven years, I’ve been driving out to FCI-Dublin, a federal women’s prison and prison camp twenty miles from my home in Berkeley. Having found a spot in the parking lot, I always take a few minutes to collect myself, reflecting that anything can happen ISSUE

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when I walk through the gates. I’m not thinking about outright violence by inmates or personal danger, although these are remote possibilities.

Rather I’m wondering whether I’ll find that the facility has been locked down and that I will have to turn around and go home, or whether there will be anyone in the chaplain’s office to escort me, or whether someone has misplaced my paperwork, or whether a gate officer will be rude, officious, or difficult. All these things happen from time to time. So I sit in the car and remember I am there for the women and for the Dharma. I find a smile and walk to the gatehouse.

The meditation group at FCI-Dublin was established by Maylie Scott in affiliation with Buddhist Peace Fellowship when she was visiting imprisoned antinuclear activists in the 1990s. I took a regular visitor’s slot in 1998 and soon after became the program’s coordinator. I gathered a team of teachers with backgrounds in several different Buddhist traditions. All these years we have been fortunate to have the support and friendship of our supervisor, Protestant chaplain Hans Hoch.

The program began as “meditation and stress reduction,” which at first was seen as belonging to the prison’s medical and psychological resources. But in time it evolved more properly as a religious service.

By the time I joined, the weekly teachers were all Buddhists. We do not specifically teach Zen or vipassana or any particular brand or school of Buddhism. We simply offer meditation and associated activities as tools for an awakened life. I am open about my Zen Buddhist background as the source of teachings I have to share, but since the group is diverse and self-selected—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, as well as Buddhists —we are more accurately presenting Buddhism with a small b, without proselytizing. I see it as a kind of interfaith ministry.

FCI Dublin is one of the few federal centers for immigration violations, so many of the prisoners are Hispanic. (We usually count on the women to translate for each other.) Among the inmates are a few women with previous experience in meditation, and several have a strong yoga practice. Many practice daily in their cells. Each teacher has his or her own approach. My emphasis has always been on zazen; another teacher is a skilled qigong instructor, and he regularly shares this practice with the inmates. Another, a professional writer, does an in-the-moment writing practice. Although each of us works from his or her tradition, we have agreed not to present only one methodology or practice. From time to time we meet to check in about how things are going and to renew our consensus concerning our general direction of study and inquiry.

Bowing and chanting are optional, since not all the women are comfortable with elements of Buddhist liturgy. But most are curious

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about Buddhism and like having some ritual. Some see meditation as prayer. Over the years, when there has been illness or death affecting someone in the group, we have done simple well-being and memorial ceremonies. On my days at the prison, we offer incense and do three full bows toward the altar, then three bows to each other, facing into the circle. I demonstrate how to bow and explain that we are bowing to the Buddha not as an external deity but as a way of honoring the reality of our own true nature. We chant Maylie Scott’s “Metta Prayer” simultaneously in English and Spanish.

May I be well, loving, and peaceful. May all beings be well, loving, and peaceful.

May I be at ease in my body, feeling the ground beneath my seat and feet, letting my back be long and straight straight, enjoying breath as it rises and falls and rises.

May I know and be intimate with body mind, whatever its feeling or mood, calm or agitated, tired or energetic, irritated or friendly.

Breathing in and out, in and out, aware, moment by moment, of the risings and passings.

May I be attentive and gentle towards my own discomfort and suffering.

May I be attentive and grateful for my own joy and well-being.

May I move towards others freely and with openness.

May I receive others with sympathy and understanding.

May I move towards the suffering of others with peaceful and attentive confidence.

May I recall the Bodhisattva of compassion; her thousand hands, her instant readiness for action. Each hand with an eye in it, the instinctive knowing what to do.

May I continually cultivate the ground of peace for myself and others and persist, mindful and dedicated to this work, independent of results.

May I know that my peace and the world’s peace are not separate; that our peace in the world is a result of our work for justice.

May all beings be well, happy, and peaceful.

We meditate for about half an hour, starting with five or ten minutes of basic instruction on sitting and mindfulness. In the prison atmosphere of social control, I tend to be loose about the form of meditation, not emphasizing formal posture as I might at home in Berkeley Zen Center.

There is enough formality in these women’s lives. The important thing here is for prisoners to feel safe, to have a chance to sit quietly and meet themselves. This in itself is a rare and precious thing in prison. (As natural as it is, this kind of gathering, sangha, is rare in the wider world as well.) After meditation I take time for questions and check-in, or for a brief teaching. Over time, we have studied the Four Noble Truths, the ISSUE 9, OCTOBER 2009

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precepts, the five hindrances, and other points of basic Buddhism. But our discussions always proceed from the women’s experience and from the wisdom of their root cultures and religions.

We don’t need a special place to practice. It is wonderful to be able to come to a dedicated meditation hall, but I find that one can meditate anywhere—in a temple, a railway station, a prison. Silence is deep in the chapel. Meanwhile, people walk by, talking in the hall. A work crew sets up near our windows. Birds sing freely in the trees, and then gunfire chatters in the nearby pistol range. All of this is part of one’s moment-by-moment awareness. Again, prison is all about social control; there’s a surveillance camera in the chapel. Authorities can and do invoke rules at will. The federal system seems to be constantly cutting down prisoners’ opportunities and rights. Women live together in large dormitories or “pods” with four people to a room. There is ethnic and racial tension. There is unexpected harmony, too. One can feel it; it’s like a cool breeze.

Working in prisons, I encounter a particular challenge, one which often confronts engaged Buddhists. Some people feel that meditation is sufficient. The Buddha taught three great principles: śīla, samādhi, and prajñā (ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom). As Dharma, these three are inseparable and interdependent. In our modern world, though, meditation can become merely a kind of technique which is no longer connected to ethics and wisdom. But when I hear about mindfulness being used in corporations and even taught to soldiers going into combat, I worry about the larger ethical context. Mindfulness, relaxation, even communication skills can create a process that may appear to be or may even be ethical within an environment whose purpose is essentially unethical. Historically, Japanese samurai warriors cultivated Zen, and one can see where that led in the complicity of Buddhist sects with Japan’s aggressive and imperialist war-making in the middle of the twentieth century. So when we go to the prisons, are we teaching in a way that encourages a prisoner to examine his or her life and mind in the context of the prison system and society itself? Or are we imparting a technique that offers a kind of spiritual pacification, making it easier for guards and prison authorities to maintain social control? I worry about that.

When I visit FCI Dublin we come together for meditation. We also study and talk about our lives. There is a lot of trust in the room. A sense of sangha comes from meeting weekly year after year. Along with that trust (and because of it), I feel an obligation to tell the women that I see the U.S. prison system, based on principles of retribution and punishment, as an expression of structural violence and structural suffering unlikely to lead to spiritual and psychological rehabilitation of individual prisoners

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or to restoration to their victims and society as a whole. My vision of engaged Buddhism is that social service and advocacy necessarily go hand in hand. Offering meditation is the service component; studying the societal basis of our prison system and possible alternative responses to poverty, racism, and crime is what I think of as advocacy.

My objective is not at all to relieve women of responsibility or to free them from the unfolding karma of their particular crimes. We rarely know anything about a prisoner’s conviction or even the length of her sentence, unless such details come out in our discussions. Rehabilitation is work each prisoner has to do herself by looking closely at her life and considering how she will choose to live in the future. We have all spent many intimate hours at FCI Dublin talking about recovery and rehabilitation in moving and sometimes disturbing ways. But we also need to investigate broader causes and conditions that lead to the U.S. having the largest single prison population and the highest rate of incarceration in the world, according to the government’s own National Institute of Corrections. We have five percent of the world’s population but twentythree percent of the world’s prisoners, with more than 2.4 million people incarcerated and millions more in the parole and probation systems.

It would take volumes to explain why this is so. In Dharma terms, people and systems are driven by greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed motivates America’s vast hidden prison industries, which employ hundreds of thousands of imprisoned men and women, and greed also lies behind the privatization of state prisons, which, as corporations, are even more distant from accountability than their government counterparts.

Anger, hatred, and fear generate draconian measure like “three-strikes” and the barbaric death penalty, and they are the basis for a racist criminal justice system that locks up poor black and brown men and women far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Delusion is the only word I can find that accounts for a social logic which argues that the way to reduce violence in society is to do violence to those one fears.

When has this ever worked?

Inside the prison, I am measured in my words and views. What I have expressed in the sentiments above is certainly not the perspective of the United States Bureau of Prisons, nor is it what we are taught in the annual retraining sessions. But if the Dharma of freedom is about relationship—to oneself, to others, to the world—then I feel obligated to help these women cultivate a wider view. Without such a view, bitterness and despair are likely to arise.

Inside the prison there are rules—and more rules. These rules are carefully explained to all prison staff and volunteers. No touching, no ISSUE 9, OCTOBER 2009

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favors, no exchange of personal information, no use of first names, and so on. Prison authorities worry about security. This is the shadow dimension of social control. The more tightly the prisoners are controlled, the more resistance and pushback arises. Prison authorities are also concerned about the natural sympathy volunteers might have for prisoners, and we are warned about how prisoners can take advantage of that. (As the saying goes: “They don’t call them ‘cons’ for nothing.”) If one ignores these rules, sooner or later one’s ability to work inside will become compromised.

The Dharma itself offers rules for life, and some of these seem to me to conflict with the rigidity of institutional thinking. Treating all life as part of oneself implies a manner that is familiar and yet respectful. So within the confines of our meditation group, we are on a first-name basis.

It would not be appropriate for me to touch the women, so I can’t adjust their meditation posture as I might in the zendo. According to regulations, hugs are out of bounds, but from time to time one-armed hugs happen spontaneously. A natural and respectful intimacy is essential.

Despite rules, we have a steady and growing group of twenty to twenty-five women sitting together. Several have been with us from the beginning, one of them a political prisoner who is serving an eightyyear sentence. Over time I have seen many women change, settle into their lives, put aside reactivity, and acknowledge their difficulties, shortcomings, and past harmful actions. This is a wonderful thing to witness; it is testimony to the ever-present possibility of change. It encourages us to keep our practice going.

At FCI-Dublin, I witness how deep people’s faith can go. I see women who have committed crimes and made serious mistakes, who are far from home and family, yet have a clear sense that there’s something larger than themselves, beyond the prison walls. They may be justly or unjustly convicted, but they come to see that they can make use of their months and years in prison. Old Zen master Joshu told his disciple, “You are used by the twenty-four hours; I use the twenty-four hours.” Even behind bars one can learn to use the twenty-four hours.

My sense is that many of these women should not be in prison. They are there because they got tangled up in someone’s bad drug deal or because they were implicated in a boyfriend’s illegal activity. But once inside, one can either make imprisonment an opportunity, or one can nurture bitterness. I’m lucky to spend time with the women who want to work, whose resolve to seek the Way leads them to meditation and study. So each time that we sit down together, behind the fences and walls, with guards and countless rules, bad food, and long days—even with all that—liberation is rising. 

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