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BEARING WITNESS

NEWSLETTER FOR WESTERN SOCIALLY ENGAGED BUDDHISM - FEBRUARY 2010
BUDDHIST PRISON PROGRAMS ISSUE

read about symposium

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To submit profiles or information on activist-practitioners, trainings, employment or volunteer opportunities or projects in Socially Engaged Buddhism, send to: Editor


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Bearing Witness Blog: The Companion to the Newsletter for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism




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To view our Directory for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism, please click here.


MORE BUDDHIST PRISON PROGRAMS

DHARMA CENTER MINISTRIES
   Liberation Prison Project
   Shambhala Vancouver
   SF Zen Center
   Upaya Prison Project
   Wat Pah Santidhamma UK

CONTEMPLATIVE JUSTICE
Mind Body Awareness Project
   teaches meditation to at-risk and incarcerated youth......read more


The Center for Mindfulness & Justice
   teaches mindfulness to corrections officers......read more

MULTI-MEDIA

PODCASTS
Buddhas Behind Bars
   Interview with Al Albergate, Vice General Director of SGI-USA, who speaks about his son’s imprisonment and his own efforts as a volunteer Chaplin at Corcoran State Prison in California......listen

ONLINE NEWSLETTERS
    Forest Hermitage Newsletter
    Gateway Journal
   Mandala

VIDEOS

Fleet Maull YouTubes
   Fleet Maull and the PDN provide mindfulness-based, cognitive behavioral alternatives for rehabilitation and personal transformation for incarcerated youth and adults.

      Integral Transformative Justice: 1
      Integral Transformative Justice: 2
      Service as Path

Changing from Inside
   tells the story of the introduction of Vipassana meditation courses into the North Rehabilitation Facility (N.R.F.) of the King County jail in Seattle, Washington, USA. ....read more....view


Dhamma Brothers
   An overcrowded maximum-security prison, the end of the line in Alabama's prison system, is dramatically changed by the influence of an ancient meditation program......read more

Dhamma Brothers Trailer


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Join the Zen Peacemakers Resident Program in Socially Engaged Buddhism.


NOVEMBER 2010 AUSCHWITZ BEARING WITNESS RETREAT

First Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat Trailer

The Zen Peacemakers and Bernie Glassman return to Auschwitz for a Bearing Witness Retreat on Nov 1-5, 2010. To read descriptions and/or to register, please click here. This retreat includes Youth from Israel, Palestine, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, USA, and other countries.


Please! "Adopt a Monk." Join Alan Senauke, founder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and help the monks and nuns of Burma's Saffron Revolution.


NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES



chris_queen

Dear Friends,

In this issue of Bearing Witness we focus on Buddhist prison chaplaincy and ministry programs. As Alan Senauke reminds us, with only 5% of the world’s population, the United States has 23% of the world’s prisoners – more than 2,400,000 behind bars, and many millions more in the parole and probation systems. This staggering fact is a daily reality for you who experience America’s “corrections” system from the inside, as prisoners, family members, friends, employees and volunteers. For most of us, however, the violence and despair of life in a cage is inconceivable.

Here we can see the challenge and the promise of socially engaged Buddhism – a practice that goes on inside and outside of our lives. By discovering that our own suffering is a cage of hatred, greed and delusion from which we are desperate to escape, and by recognizing that spiritual practice – not only meditation, but ritual, prayer, reflection, bodywork, and many others – are keys to freedom that we can learn to use, we join the circle of all those who are incarcerated, those who minister to them, and those who awaken in the dharma.

The Newsletter serves as a clearinghouse for information about western socially engaged Buddhism. Announcements of upcoming events and resources may be found in the sidebar at the left. Our Directory of Western Socially Engaged Buddhism is quite possibly the most comprehensive anywhere: please follow the links there to visit many groups and projects. If your group or resources you know about are missing, please write to us with the reference. We will make sure it is added.

The theme for the next issue of Bearing Witness will be “Dharma and Mental Health.” If you are active in this area, please write to us so that we can profile or mention your work.

Please help promote the cause of Socially Engaged Buddhism by sharing this URL with friends, associates, sangha members and groups you think would be interested. Click on the line below, "Send mail using your own address book".

Send mail using your own address book.

Blessings,
Christopher Queen

Editor

Buddhist Prison Programs

(Link to More Programs in Left Panel)

National Buddhist Prison Sangha

The National Buddhist Prison Sangha (NBPS) is a nationwide network of Buddhist volunteers who correspond with inmates, visit prisons, and create and lead practice groups. Originally formed in response to the request of a NY State prison inmate, the Zen Mountain Monastery Prison Program began in 1984 after a court battle allowing the program to become the first Zen practice group in NY State Correctional Facilities.

NBPS is now part of a religious advisory group reporting to the commissioner of prisons of the NYS Correctional System. It has helped to establish Buddhist practice groups at several other state facilities. .....read more

Prison Dharma Network

Fleet Maull

Prison Dharma Network (PDN) was founded in 1989 by Fleet Maull, a federal prisoner then serving a 14-year sentence for drug trafficking. Since its founding, PDN's Books Behind Bars program has provided books on meditation and contemplative spirituality to over 25,000 prisoners in over 900 prisons around the world.

We have connected hundreds of prisoners with dharma mentors. Our network now includes over 75 member organizations and prison dharma groups of various faiths and over 2,500 individual members and supporters, many of whom are active prison dharma volunteers. .....read more

Theme of Justice
by Melody Ermachild Chavis

Melody Chavis

Our justice system isn't set up for transforming our karma. It's not about reconciliation between people, it's not about restoring the community to balance, bringing wholeness, after someone has offended. It's patriarchal, and hierarchical and it does not bring us together to talk directly. One of the things that's wrong, is that our system doesn't help either the victims or the offenders to reach any kind of wholeness.

As Buddhists, we know that the death penalty and prisons, and everything else we see will pass away some day. Things arise and things dissolve and karma is created and burned up again. But meanwhile, what do we do? I believe that in order to transform our own karma, what we do is, we work for a more just society. .....read more

Prison Practice
by Pat Coffey

I vividly remember my first night of teaching. I drove alone into the prison parking lot with trepidation and excitement. The drizzling damp November evening gave the lights of the facility an especially eerie glow and the shimmering concertina wire and block house architecture conjured images of death camps. Experiencing some fear and nervousness as the guards searched me for the first time, I wound my way through the labyrinth of buildings and six locked gates eventually settling into my assigned room to await my first class of 25 women. Thus began my most rewarding experience of my fourteen years of teaching meditation. .....read more

Buddhas Behind Razor Wire: Practicing with the Women of FCI-Dublin
by Hozan Alan Senauke

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 to relieve women of responsibility and the unfolding karma of their particular crimes…That is work each prisoner has to do herself, 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 this 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. .....read more.

No Freedom
by Dai-En Bennage

On the day of Al’s precepts ceremony, he was radiant; I had never seen him so self-possessed… The prison called me the next day asking me to resign. .....read more

A Lotus In A Swamp
by William (Red) Graham
Gowanda Correctional Facility

An inmate shares his story and expresses gratitude for receiving "Prison Chaplaincy Guidelines for Zen Buddhism" by Ven. Kobutsu Malone, which he was initially denied. .....read more

If it’s Thursday, this must be County Jail
by Gary Koan Janka

As a means of reducing the anxiety around our teaching meditation, we reached out to the director of the Los Angeles area chapter of the World Community for Christian Meditation, a wonderful woman in her early eighties who agreed to join us. In this way, the offering became one of shared spirituality, which also eases the concerns of Christian inmates who attend the group class. .....read more.

THE FIRST SYMPOSIUM FOR
WESTERN SOCIALLY ENGAGED BUDDHISM

August 9 to 14, 2010
at the Mother House of the Zen Peacemakers in Montague, MA

Attendance is Limited for this Historic Event.
Register Now!

$600 Fee Includes Tuition, Continental Breakfast and Lunch.

A Major Gathering of
Western Socially Engaged Buddhist Activists, Academics and Sponsors.

A Concluding Banquet to Honor Robert Aitken & the Pioneers Who Followed

To read more about the Symposium, link here

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PRESENTERS (partial)

PANELS (partial)

WORKSHOPS (partial)

Mirabai Bush
Richard Reoch
Honoring the Pioneers
Arts for Social Change
Melody Chavis
Matthieu Ricard
Social Entrepreneurship
Radical Chaplaincy
Stephanie Kaza
Peter Senge
Conflict Resolution
Funding
Fleet Maull
Robert Thurman
Compassionate Care
Being with Dying
Mayumi Oda
Anne Waldman
Environment
Diversity & Inclusion
Christopher Queen
Meg Wheatley
Prison Ministry
Zen Houses
Reggie Ray
Jan Willis
Street Ministry
Dharma Cool

The event is sponsored by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, the Lenz Foundation and the Zen Peacemakers. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review is the exclusive media partner.