Dharma in Hell
The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull
by Fleet Maull
Forward by Bo Lozoff
Kate Crisp, Editor
Prison Dharma Network
Boulder
2005
11 S. Angell St. #303
Providence, RI 02906
www.PrisonMindfulness.org
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2005 Prison Dharma Network
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts from Turning Wheel and Shambhala Sun magazines used by permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 0-9718143-1-7
First Published November 2005
Distributed by Prison Dharma Network.
Cover Design by Mary Sweet
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my root teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and to all the prisoners and staff who daily face the challenge of surviving in the hell realms of our prisons and jails, where the spirit—to say nothing of the mind and body—suffers the continual assault of dehumanization and violence.
It is especially dedicated to those prisoners and staff who courageously practice kindness and compassion in the face of this relentless assault on the human spirit.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the tireless efforts and unflagging inspiration of my editor, Kate Crisp. Kate conceived of this project and skillfully shepherded it from beginning to end with her keen sense of what is most important and relevant to the spiritual quest and struggles of prisoners, a sensibility honed through her many years of dedicated service to prisoners as director of Prison Dharma Network. The book would also not have been possible without the kindness of a number of editors and publishers who gave me the opportunity to write for their publications while in prison: Melvin McLeod and Molly DeShong of the Shambhala Sun, Susan Moon of Turning Wheel, and Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine. I was particularly inspired in my writing by my friend and mentor, Bo Lozoff, who has kindly written the foreword for Dharma in Hell, and whose book, We’re All Doing Time, was a faithful companion and continual inspiration during my time behind the walls. I am deeply indebted to my two very dear friends, Karen Lavin and Dan Barrett, for the continual and unwavering kindness and support they provided throughout my prison journey, always encouraging me in my writing and projects. I am particularly grateful to Dan Barrett for serving as the volunteer coordinator for Prison Dharma Network from 1991 to 1999.
My prison writings were inspired by my spiritual practice, my service work, and the rock meets bone realities of long-term incarceration. I am deeply indebted to my spiritual teachers and friends who so kindly supported my journey. The late Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin, visited me in prison in 1987, giving me the necessary empowerments to continue and complete my ngondro (preliminary) practices on the Tibetan Buddhist vajrayana path. Practicing like my hair was on fire, I completed those practices in 1988, driven by the devastation and longing I experienced following the death of my guru, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. All that I was able to accomplish in prison and since, is nothing more than my very limited and imperfect expression of the profound teachings, example, and blessings of my teacher. Then, in 1989 the Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche kindly visited the prison to perform the Vajrayogini Abhisheka (empowerment) for me, so that I could begin deity yoga sadhana practice, the next stage on the vajrayana path. This practice, more than anything else, shifted my prison experience into a profound path of transformation. I can’t begin to express my gratitude to Thrangu Rinpoche for his great kindness.
Inspired by his unique integration of spirituality and social action, I contacted Roshi Bernie Glassman, co-founder along with his late wife Roshi Sandra Jishu Holmes of the Zen Peacemaker Order, asking him to join this new order. I wasn’t looking for another spiritual path, as I was certainly in no need of more practices or further inspiration beyond the depth and richness of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition I had so fortunately encountered. I was simply taken with the possibility of a fully ordained path of service in the streets. With the permission of my Tibetan Buddhist teachers, I began studying with Roshi Glassman and Sensei Holmes in 1994. They visited me in prison several times per year and corresponded with me regularly, guiding my Zen training, practice and study, and affirming my dedication to service and peacemaking while in prison. I received the Jukai vows in 1995 and was ordained a Zen Peacemaker Priest in 1997 in a ceremony presided over by Roshi Glassman and Sensei Jishu in the prison chapel. I am deeply grateful to Jishu who showed me so much kindness, and I continue to study with Roshi Glassman, or Bernie as he prefers to be called.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the many spiritual friends and fellow practitioners who visited me in prison and/or corresponded with me while I was there, offering their support and friendship, including, to name but a few: Pema Chodron, Stephen & Ondrea Levine, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Bill Bothwell, Purna Steinitz, Peter Volz, Sister Dipa, James & Carolyn Gimian, Mitchell Levy, Liz Craig, Nancy Craig, Pamela Krasney, John & Lisa Bayless, Michael O’Keefe, Dave Gold, David Rome, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Marianna Kaplan.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge my family who stuck with me through it all, and especially my son, Robert Maull, who despite the obvious challenge of growing up with his father in prison, has become an amazing young man, a good son and a continual inspiration to a grateful father.
Fleet Maull
Boulder, Colorado August 2005
Table of Contents
Introduction by Michael O’Keefe
Chapter One: Dharma in Hell
Chapter Two: Prison Monasticism
Chapter Three: Money & Livelihood Behind Bars
Chapter Four: Death without Dogma
Chapter Five: Letting Go of Depression
Chapter Six: Rumblings from the Inside
Chapter Seven: A Taste of Freedom
Chapter Eight: Transforming Obstacles into Path
Chapter Nine: The Path of Service
ForwardBy Bo Lozoff
The Greek legend of Sisyphus has always intrigued me. For various reasons the Gods sentence Sisyphus to an eternity of rolling a huge boulder up a mountain with his bare shoulders, reaching the top, and watching the boulder roll all the way down again. Sisyphus then dutifully trudges back down to do it again. And again. And again….
Those of us who live or work in prisons, or who are committed to helping those who do, may often feel like a modern-day Sisyphus. For all our devotion, for all our efforts to change and humanize the system, the prison system doesn’t get better, it just rolls back down to the bottom and, in fact, gets worse. And just when you think it can’t get much worse, along comes a Sheriff Joe Arpaio who dresses inmates up in pink and humiliates them in every way he can; or along come the business moguls who dreamed up the monstrous idea of the private prison industry. It seems the bottom keeps getting lower and the top keeps extending farther out of sight. But we continue to roll that boulder none the less.
In 1973, when I began working in prisons, there were about 185,000 prison inmates in adult institutions across the United States. Now, California has nearly that many. Texas has nearly that many. The U.S. grand total tops two million people who are locked behind bars. College students frequently ask me the reason for this disgraceful state of affairs, and my answer is usually, “Because we’re just really stupid. Unbelievably stupid.” Prisons harm people and long sentences incapacitate people. And so we build more and more prisons and sentence inmates to longer and longer terms. And then we release over 90% of those damaged, incapacitated people with little more than a few dollars in “gate money” and the clothes on their backs. If that’s not stupid, what is?
But back to Sisyphus. No one has forced me or my wife to work in such a stupid milieu for over thirty years. We could easily have done our bit for five or ten years and gone on to a more positive field of endeavor, one where we might actually be able to improve something—literacy, vocational training, working with kids—who knows? So, why have we continued to roll this boulder up such a depressing mountain for all these years?
The answer is simple: Because for some mysterious reason of human nature, the very horror of such a bleak and maddening prison system seems to inspire and fuel a level of spiritual growth, sometimes even total transformation, that is unparalleled in any other context. An opening remark to the many thousands of prisoners in my workshops has been “Here’s the deal: Life is very deep, and you haven’t been acting like it. Let’s talk about that.”
And we do. We talk like oldest and best friends. We have magical conversations of the sort that are always taking place somewhere in the world, usually in a hidden cave or a remote ashram or under an ancient tree or on top of a mountain or in a quiet little sanctuary. Without a doubt, the most wonderful, sincere, honest conversations of my life have been inside terrible prisons, with human beings who have never before taken the time to consider any philosophical view or spiritual dimension whatsoever. Interestingly enough, the worse the prison, the more magical the conversations. People in Hell have no energy to waste on pleasantries or beating around the bush. They desperately need to know whether anything truly good, genuinely comforting, exists. They need to rip off all the wrapping and see whether there is indeed a gift inside the box.
Fortunately, the gift is real and it is there, and it is more powerful than anything they had ever expected. I have heard comments, or received letters, from tens of thousands of prisoners, each assuming it was the first time anyone had ever said this: “I know it sounds crazy, but I am happier and feel more free right here in lockup than I have ever felt in my life.” Imagine that. Many of those people do get out eventually, and many do not. The ones who do often seek work in the helping professions, especially in recovery or working with at-risk youth. The ones who will never get out of prison become genuine elders in their prison communities, peacekeepers and counselors to the legions of confused and frightened people who surround them.
This is the magic of spiritual work in prison, or as Fleet Maull puts it, Dharma in Hell, that keeps all of us Sisyphus wanna-be’s rolling those boulders up the mountain. We and our prison friends find the Holy together. We touch the Sacred. We share the profound goodwill that makes Jesus beam from ear to ear. We unlock insights and levels of perception that have the Buddha smiling down on us.
Anywhere that such experiences happen is not Hell, but Heaven. It may be Hell again a moment later, and it may be designed and constructed from the beginning to be Hell, but we can turn it into Heaven in an instant. And some of the prison elders I am privileged to know, have found the strength and clarity to keep it as Heaven day after day after day as they make peace with their prison existence—and their opportunity for service there—as what the Hindus call one’s “Karma Bhoomi,” or “destined field of action.”
Fleet Maull saw the opportunity to turn Hell into Heaven for himself and many dying prisoners, and he went for it. And so the prison hospice movement was born. A friend of mine, whom Fleet has probably never met or heard of, spent over thirty years in Oregon’s state prisons, and it was hospice work that finally brought dignity and great meaning to his existence there. It is a certainty that Fleet’s hospice work in the federal system helped bring about that opportunity. Similarly, I constantly hear from or meet people who tell me some profound transformation in their lives that came about as a result of the Prison-Ashram Project, and I’d never have had any way of knowing about it if I hadn’t run into them quite by chance. Heaven works like that. Good works spin and spin in intersecting circles forever, even when it sometimes may appear that we’re pushing one single boulder up an ungrateful mountain where it falls back down again.
Bo Lozoff is the director of the Prison-Ashram Project and the Human Kindness Foundation. He is the author of We’re All Doing Time. See www.HumanKindness.org for more information
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