Buddha in Jail
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Buddhism has ventured into the prison system in the United States and around the world. Shugen Sensei is the director of the National Buddhist Prison Sangha (NBPS) that started teaching inmates meditation in 1984 with John Daido Lori.
Prison can also provide the opportunity for awakening as portrayed in the compelling memoir Razor Wire Dharma by Calvin Malone. Here is an excerpt where he describes the mundane experience of eating an apple, an apple that stood out from the usual horrible prison food he was subjected to.
Breathing in I smelled apple, breathing out the universe. Everything there is or ever was was contained in this apple. I could see it with the wild exactness of shattered glass. The answer and the question were there in the apple. I was feeling an inexplicable joy, keenly aware. I never before felt better in my life. I realized this moment was as good as it gets.
The Buddha's teachings offer this form of radical freedom. The happiest moment of your life could occur during a prison sentence. That true happiness could arise from the simple beauty of an apple, a living thing connected to everything else in the entire universe.
The pioneering work bringing Buddha into prison was conducted by S.N. Goenka at the Tihar jail in New Delhi, India. This prison was considered the most dangerous prison on earth. Before his work there, torture and murder were commonplace. A visionary warden, Kiran Bedi, embraced Goen-ka's aspirations to teach the inmates vipassana meditation. The Vipassana Prison Trust (VPT) teaches vipassana courses to Tihar inmates, a thousand at a time, and also teaches in prisons in Israel, New Zealand, Mongolia, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
