The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place

by David Sheff

prostrations.

But the goal isn’t dangling above the messiness of life, it’s sitting in it; you don’t want to transcend the past but be there fully.

Yes!

“Their karma is the situation they’re left with; it’s their reality.

“I thought this Buddhist shit was supposed to

!

She saw that Jarvis still looked uncertain. “Let’s say you get to the top of the mountain. You still have your alcoholic brother and schizophrenic mother down at the bottom of the mountain. What about them? There are still people begging on the street for food. What about them? Do you just leave them behind? Is that enlightenment? No,” she continued, “the path is going down and down and down into their suffering and the suffering of all the people. You embrace them. You join them. Compassion isn’t about looking down on someone who’s in worse shape than you and helping the poor person. It’s about a relationship between equals. You understand their suffering. You’re completely in their shoes. It comes from softening our hearts, opening up to our own and others’ pain. To me, that’s enlightenment.”

!!!

It may seem like you’ve made no progress and are starting over, but you aren’t. Every repetition is different; the lessons are different because you are.

You help people in hell. Do you know who else does that? The Buddha.”

When he was first put on death row, there were a few dozen; now there were more than seven hundred. Knowing that few if any would ever have a phone call like the one he’d just had, his heart broke for them, and he recalled again how lucky he was.