The following articles have been written about and by members of the Sangha:

• "Prison Ministry" by Rev. Kshanti, in Dharma Breeze   (see below)
  
  
• "Teaching Zen Meditation in Prison" by Vy Tran, in Nguoi Viet Daily News (Vietnamese Press)
  
  
• "Being Buddhist in Prison" by Vajra Kshanti, in Dharma Breeze
  
  
• Meditation and Dharma Study" by Satya Kshanti, in Dharma Breeze
  
  
• Sangha Poetry by anonymous.

"Prison Ministry"

Rev. Kshanti  [From Dharma Breeze, Journal of the Desert and Mountain Sangha. 1999.]


This is the first time in my few short years of practice that someone has asked me to write about prison ministry. Unpredictably (or perhaps predictably) my mind went blank. It's not that I haven't ever mentioned my prison practice. I've been known to talk about it incessantly on occasion, even at the risk of endangering a few friendships. But I have never done so formally, upon request. So when I felt this sudden--vacuum--and it simply would not yieId, I was forced to ask myself what brought it on. My mental tablarasa yielded only one reason for itself: I couldn't think of anything to say about prison ministry because I didn't feel that I had one.

Neverthless, the paradoxical fact remains that, for a while now, I have been going to a prison to practice. So what, then, am I doing there, with all those other people? The answer to that question came first as a feeling. A few seconds later, words came that almost perfectly described the feeling. They were F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, his definition of a family: "a willingness of the heart."

That phrase describes the prison practice better than anything else I can think of-except, of course, the word Sangha, which amounts to the same thing. A Sangha is a family -a Buddhist family-and experiencing this mutual Buddhist “willingness of the heart” in prison has been immensely valuable for my practice.

It becomes nearly impossible to fall into the easy trap of preaching one thing and practicing another. You, yourself, have to be able to bow with a knife between your shoulder blades (metaphorically speaking, of course) before you can expect someone else to even consider doing it. Because if you can’t - if you don’t - everyone will see it, everybody will know it, and nothing you say will have any value at all. There is no room for faking or pontificating in prison practice.

Facing your fears, your age, your outrage, dealing with your worst mistakes, your most extreme and deeply rooted aversions, not giving in to violence, swimming upstream from the social current, fighting enforced prejudices, dealing with personal physical and mental discomfort - these are not abstract concepts in prison, they are the order of the day. “Easy outs” do not abound.

It becomes a joy to see how well the Dharma works. For us on the outside, the experience provides a healthier perspective and more balance-it gets harder to waste time on petty trivial issues. On the street, “soul-searching” is often a casual intellectual pastime if not an outright game. In contrast, the spiritual explorations that I have seen during my very limited prison experience have been powerfully motivated-sincere, compelling, inspiring right effort, It’s a privilege for me to be a part of that willingness of the heart, ad my practice has been immeasurably enriched because of it.