Tracks of the flying birds
by Robert Reese
Freely I watch the tracks of the flying birds.
Above the Monterey County correctional facility sea birds make lazy circular patterns in the thin sunshine that makes the winter lettuce grow. The jail buildings are low, modern and windowless, surmounted by razor wire laid in rolling, sinuous coils along the gray-brown roofline. To the west, the Santa Lucia mountains of California’s costal range fall towards the sea in angular ridges.
It is Friday night in the extremely full jail lobby and I am reading the Fukazagengi, a brief tract on meditation by Dogen Kigen, using the few minutes before the receptionist either forgets I’m here or provides me with an escort to the jail “chapel” and meditation with inmates from A-Dorm. A-Dorm is a holding facility, housing inmates prior to sentencing. Under the aegis of the Monterey County Jail (MJC) Chaplaincy Program, the weekly meditation group is intended to provide “prayer, fellowship and religious study by religious clergy from the local faith community.”
Other than occasional visits with individual inmates, I’m revisiting MCJ for a few visits after an extended sabbatical from the facilities. For five years I hosted weekly meditations in the jail, but the drive became too onerous to continue every week.
I just sit in one of the plastic chairs that don’t encourage lingering and breath things in for a minute. Tonight is somewhat busy for MCJ. Young women with sad little teardrop tattoos on their ankles and thin penciled-in eyebrows wait fretfully along the wall looking at eggplant-colored fingernails and talk with bail bonds men. Children skitter about and implore their mothers for something from the candy machine. You can tell the bail bondsmen because they all carry worn brief cases and talk in hushed, reassuring tones.
The lobby is florescent lit with industrial green walls with notices in Spanish and English indicating booking procedures and visiting information. While studying my notes but cannot help but over-hear the too-loud conversations of the bail bondsmen and the Latina women who often arrive in pairs for support or convenience. I surrender my driver’s license and receive in turn a visitor i.d. and directions to the chapel.
Typically, I do not have to wait and just walk to the chapel. But tonight, there is some confusion as to where we are conducting tonight’s meditation. I do not mind the wait because it affords me a few minutes to get my bearings and become reacclimated to the jail. The wait also allows me more time to study the Fukazagengi.
It is a curiously dislocating experience to read Dogen’s layered text in the jail lobby. The collision of classical Zen practice with the downside of contemporary American life is often jarring--but not discordant. I can have the thought that there is something like an ordered universe, but then find myself in place like Monterey County jail reading Dogen Zenji, become swamped by incongruity and paradox, and have to start all over again.
In jail there’s often a sense of “yes, and, this too,”, as if nothing is really off the table, depending upon causes and conditions. From that perspective, the seeming incongruity of studying a 13th century Japanese religious text seems on par with everything else.
With its rich themes extolling the virtues zazen, the Fukanazengi is the appropriate companion to a jail facility in that it conveys the universality of meditation. In fact, some translators have rendered the title in English as “The Universal Promotion of the Principals of Zazen,” phrasing that suggests the egalitarian nature of Dogen’s Zen. For Dogen, the real activity and realization of meditation is available to everyone, despite their circumstances. This leaves the door open to school teachers and lawyers, students and farmers and the inmates of Monterey County Jail.
Written in 1227, immediately following his return to Japan after a pilgrimage to Sung China, the Fukanzazengi is generally held to represent Dogen‘s first Zen teaching to his countrymen and was evidently intended to modify and improve the early principals of meditation expounded by the Chinese masters. With its emphasis on the appreciation, rationale and practice of meditation, the Fukanzazengi is generally regarded as marking the historical origin of the Soto Zen School and is Dogen’s mission statement with regard to practice.
The hour-long meditation and discussion are held in the jail chapel. The chapel is a narrow room with plastic chairs and smells faintly--as the rest of the jail--like scorched laundry and human sweat. The walls are faded yellow-beige, more-or-less the color of an arrowroot biscuits. There is florescent panel in the ceiling emitting a sputtering, watery glare. To reach the chapel, one must pass through six sets of heavy metal doors that are opened by pressing a metal buzzer and which close with a theatrical finality that I‘ve come to associate with dozens of prison movies. The chapel has a TV, DVD player and lectern. There is a phone that exclusively calls jail administration office and a red button which is pressed for emergencies.
Ushered in by deputies, the inmates array themselves against the walls in plastic chairs. Dressed in formless orange overalls and rubber flip-flop sandals they file-in and look for reading material in small library tucked into the wall. They wear short-sleeve pajama-style uniforms, with v-neck tops, made of coarse cotton twill and beach flip-flops. After introductions and simple meditation instructions, we sit mediation together for fifteen or twenty minutes. It is unexpectedly quiet in this area of the jail. Except for the sound of a distant ventilator, there are few sounds other than the distant bolt of a closing door.
Typically, 12 to 20 inmates attend these meetings. Tonight, there are just a few inmates: a tall black youth with short hair freshly cut, a set of initials shaved into his head suffering the first egregious symptoms of heroin withdrawals. Mostly he fidgets or slumps dejected and suffering in a chair, occasionally pantomiming shooting heroin for his friends with a small paperback bible. The others are also young and mostly Latin: gang members with de riguier shaved heads, skulking adolescents and addicts going through withdrawals. Many, it seems, are simply confused and have chosen an unfortunate strategy to achieve an end. There is a small, grave Latino man, who last week seemed bright with the prospect of his sentencing. Tonight, as the arduousness of his jail term has become clear, his stare conveys the flat helplessness of fear. After mediation, when asked of his experience, he says, “I’m thinking of somewhere else than here.”
Because the a majority of the inmates in A-Dorm are all awaiting sentencing or transfer, I am assigned here in the hopes of lessening their anxiety. I provide the group with rudimentary meditation instruction based, primarily, on the Fukanzazengi. However, instead of sitting in half or full lotus on the floor facing the wall, we sit upright in orange plastic chairs for fifteen minutes followed by another ten minutes of walking meditation. After the endless clamor of the dorm, which starts early and can sometimes continue until 2 a.m., many inmates appreciate the silence mediation affords.
Sometimes the conversation following meditation focuses on internal and external prisons. The personal prisons we create can arise from one basic decision about life, though that decision (and its results) can show up in many different form. As if each of these basic strategies, then, answered questions about how to spend time and who our friends would be. These prisons can be seductive in a singular and powerful way—and it may not be a room we gladly leave. There sometimes is a dazzle to its walls, an intoxication to its structure.
The more subtle prisons we erect may not look like this. The more success we have been in the outer world, the harder it can be to see the jails we inhabit. The walls of some prisons sometimes only become apparent when cracks begin to appear.
The Fukanzazengi asks us to become familiar with our interior jails, the color of its walls, paying close attention to its various rooms and to realize, first off, that we are in a prison of our own making, brought there by our own strategies and uncontested assumptions about life.
It is often challenging to know what part of the mediation and talk resonates with inmates. Dogen can be lofty, profound and difficult even for Zen students versed in his themes, practice and ideas. Accordingly, discussions of the Fukanzazengi in Monterey County Jail, tend to focus on the middle section with its concrete description of method and posture, avoiding the beginning and end sections, which are more philosophical and enigmatic.
However, tonight, one of the text’s metaphors resounds with the inmates: “Take the backward step to turn the light inward and illuminate the self.” With the suggestions of refraining and introspection, the phrase elicits thoughtful discussion from the group. To someone who has circled their life around some great desire or a burning devotion to self, the admonition to “illuminate the self” could be startling. Taking the backward step, then, for these men, is a challenge to the trance of self-will and the enactment of personal delusions.
The Japanese word “tenken” is translated as “accounting “or “inspect,” “examine,” “overhaul” and is akin to the illumination of self in meditation. “Tenken,” or “shining the light inward,” is formless meditation, a exploration that explores the farthest reaches of causes and conditions.
Sometimes peace does not show up in a particular way in MCJ. For three weeks we had been viewing a series of videos focusing on spiritual and ethical action. The videos were high-minded, thoughtful and powerful evocations of living, and being lived, by a spiritual life. For each session, the inmates were attentive, respectful and found compelling teachings in the instruction. But something missing. Their response seemed muted, as if they were being given medicine. At the third meeting, I greeted the inmates, pulled out my bag, which had perhaps five DVDs, slipped the Buddhist DVD into the player and was completely dumbfounded when then credits began to roll on the Disney film, Escape to Witch Mountain. I quickly reached for the intended DVD, began to turn the Children’s film off, but was stopped by a voice……”No, man, let’s watch it……it’s ‘Escape from Witch Mountain!’” We then sat there for the next 90 minutes gleefully and serenely moved to a kind of joy by a children’s film.
This is what you sometimes discover being in jail: that when you sever links to normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the everyday that truly shocks. Nothing is so tremendously unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself through the prism of incarceration. It’s a foreign land with its own language and laws. To walk into a place of incarceration is to voluntarily unbalance oneself. To be in jail is to step into a field upon which no ground is solid, no field in reliable. Between one step and the next we become off-balanced. Balance is regained—step by step-- as we touch the ground.
After the meditation, outside, the stars of Orion are sparking, vivid and incomprehensible in the clear night sky.
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