During my death penalty trial, Melody, a private investigator working on my case, sent me books on how to meditate, how to deal with pain and suffering, how to keep my mind at rest. She had broken her ankle and was trying to keep still. She and I were both trying this meditation gig, and like me, she was confronting a lot of things in her past. She was also writing and encouraged me to do so as well.

I began to get up early to try to calm my mind so I wouldn't panic. It was as if my whole life was being displayed on a screen during the death penalty case. Things I had never realized about myself and my life were introduced to me and the jury at the same time. Questions I'd never asked my mother—like how long she'd been abused, on the street, an addict—were being asked now. Through meditation I learned to slow down and take a few deep breaths, to take everything in, not to run from the pain, but to sit with it, confront it, give it the companion it had never had. I became committed to my meditation practice.

While I was in the holding booth during the jury's deliberation on whether I should get life without parole or the death penalty, I started leafing through a Buddhist journal Melody had left there. In it was an article called "Life in Relation to Death" by a Tibetan Buddhist Iama, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. I thought, "Wow! This is right up my alley!"

I sent a letter to the address in the journal and got a reply from a woman named Lisa, one of Rinpoche's close students, with a copy of his booklet, Life in Relation to Death. At the time, I'd gotten into some kind of trouble and was in isolated confinement, stripped down to a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, with only two blankets. In her letter, Lisa asked if I needed help. I always needed help, I still need help, and because of the help she offered, we began corresponding. Then she began to visit me and eventually brought Rinpoche to San Quentin.

When I first saw Rinpoche through the glass in the small visiting room booth, I thought, "Oh, shit, I'm in trouble now. I'm messing around with a real lama. He's from Tibet. Check him out. I bet everything he's got on is blessed."

I figured there were two ways I could introduce myself. I could greet him in an ordinary way, or I could bow. I bowed. Then he bowed. Why'd I think he wouldn't? He's been bowing all his life.

I thought, "I've been reading about lamas for the last three years and now I have a real one in front of me." I knew that all I could do was tell him exactly what I think. If I lied or shied away from him, he'd know it.

I fell in love with him for the same reasons everybody else does. His life history was my key. He had been a rebellious kid. He wasn't born with a silver spoon. He was a feisty guy who would discipline me when I needed it. He knew what he was talking about, and would say it in a way that I'd get it. He had a certain shrewdness. Compassionate ferociousness. He was a lama who ate beef jerky, got upset, and had jewels of compassion in him. The only thing he didn't do was say all this to me. I just felt it. I thought, "Here's a guy who can take me out of prison even as I remain here. He won't dress me in Buddhist garb, but accept me as I am." I knew he was a tough character.

It was past midnight. The prison night watchman was making his routine body count down the tier when I awakened from a late evening snooze with plans to get up and spend the rest of the night doing my meditation practice.

I paced the length of my cell for a while, all eight feet of it, preparing myself with repetitions of the Tara prayer. Suddenly I was struck by an idea for a way to make my own mala, my own prayer beads, which I could use to keep track of the repetitions. I spun around my cell, looking for what I would need.

Since the very first day of learning this prayer, I'd wanted a mala to help me with my practice. My teacher, Rinpoche, and other practitioners who came to San Quentin to visit me had often offered to bring me one, but prison authorities had denied them permission to do so.

I gathered a pair of prison-issue jeans, a Sports Illustrated, and a bottle of Tylenol, and sat down at the front of my cell. I picked and pulled at the seams of the jeans until I got hold of a good piece of thread. I unraveled more than I meant to, "Uh-oh!" A gaping hole widened down the leg. "I'll get another pair somehow," I resolved, and put the thread aside.

I opened the Sports Illustrated to the middle and took out one of the staples. I straightened it out and sharpened it on the rough concrete floor beside me. I had to be very quiet. If the night watchman heard these strange scratching sounds, the whole cell block might be searched in a panic. Scraping usually meant a weapon was being sharpened.

For almost an hour I ground the staple on the floor, until it was as sharp as a sewing needle.

Now I opened the bottle of Tylenol and began the slow process of poking a tiny hole in the center of each tablet. There were a hundred of them. I had to be as careful as a surgeon. First I poked at the surface of the Tylenol and then with a screwing motion I made a hole all the way through. Taking the thread from my jeans, I passed it through each "bead."

All through the night I sat cross-legged, poking holes in Tylenols and threading them together. It was extremely tedious. My eyes blurred with exhaustion. My fingers began to get sore. I felt foolish. "What in the world am I doing?" I asked myself. But I kept going, determined to finish.

Five and a half hours later I held my first mala, made from trouser thread and Tylenols. I was elated. But when I got up to stretch, my head throbbed, I had an awful headache. I stood silently at the bars of my cell, taking comfort in looking out a window in the opposite wall. A beautiful morning light was peeking in. "I wouldn't mind a Tylenol or two," I thought "to stop this pounding in my head." I looked down at my hands. "Damn! I don't have any. They're all on this mala."

For a split second I thought the unthinkable, my head was hurting that much. Then I smiled. I realized that after spending all this time making my Tylenol mala, all I needed to do was to sit my butt back down with it and take a few moments—no Tylenols—to do my spiritual practice.

I was walking out on the exercise yard last week, along the fence, staring up at the beautiful clear sky. It was a gorgeous day. Then something frightening happened: someone got stabbed on the adjacent yard. In the gunmen's tower prison guards were racking rounds into their rifles. They were shouting at two guys scuffing and fighting and trying to kill each other. I knew immediately that someone was going to die. Either the guards or one of these two prisoners would be responsible for taking a human being's life.

The tower gunmen ordered everyone to lie face down on the round as they swung their fully loaded rifles around the three adjacent yards. I didn't know what to think. Since I didn't hear any gunshots, I figured the two guys must have stopped fighting. At least the gunmen had been saved from taking someone's life. But what about the prisoner who had been stabbed? Was he dead? What had I been thinking about before all this happened? Why am I lying here like this? Is this all real? Shit! How long can I go on trying to be a Buddhist in this prison culture that has me lying face down? Who am I kidding?

Just as I thought my head would explode from so many flashing thoughts, I locked on to a single idea: how some people in this world have only a tragic five seconds to put their entire lives in order before they die—in a car crash or in some other sudden way. I realized that what really matters isn't where we are or what's going on around us, but what's in our hearts while its happening.

I used to feel I could hide inside my practice, that I could simply sit and contemplate the raging anger of a place like this, seeking inner peace through prayers of compassion. But now I believe love and compassion are things to extend to others. It's a dangerous adventure to share them in a place like S.Q. Yet I see now that we become better people if we can touch a hardened soul, bring joy into someone's life, or just be an example for others, instead of hiding behind our silence.

The key is in using what we know. This calls for lots of practice. There is this vast space in life to do just that, both as a practitioner and as someone who walks around the same prison yard as everyone else in this place. I've learned how to accept responsibility for the harm I've caused others by never letting myself forget the things I did and by using those experiences to help others understand where they lead.




Copyright © 1997 by Jarvis Jay Masters

From Searching for Your Soul: Writers of Many Faiths Share Their Personal Stories of Spiritual Discovery. Edited by Katherine Kurs. Used by permission of Padma Pubishing,Junction City, CA.