A Field of Future Buddahs Waiting to Bloom

by John Daimõku Kingham

The monk asked Layman Vimalakirti, “Where is this place of awakening?” (The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra)

It began in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. I was feeding lunch inside the Hardee Correctional Institution Close Management (CM) cellblock where I had been assigned to live for an indefinite term for possession of weapons, along with 224 others deemed too violent or mentally unstable for Open Population. The June heat raised the level of
frustration while the humidity ensured long sweaty days inside the 7’x10’ concrete boxes.

As the only white “runaround” I heard every imaginable racial slur and obscenity hurled my way by those still stranded “behind the door.” That day I was roaring back, hot and furious, when I found myself looking down at the whole drama, my face purple red and contorted, shouting at the faces pressed to cell doors as they joined the vile chorus, and I had an epiphany: I was a 35 year old and had not one good thing to show for it. I couldn’t control myself, much less help anyone else.

Over the next few weeks, I returned to this late at night as I mopped the sleeping quads. I had no spiritual inclinations by then, having jettisoned Christianity after my parents’ messy divorce, but I knew my heart was twisted and dry. I’d read the “dope dharma” of Kerouac and Ginsburg as a teen, along with Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, so I thought that I might be able to do Zen meditation unsupervised. Maybe it would help me when I returned to Open Population. I’d had enough of CM. 

I met David Wood a few months later and discovered that he also hoped to practice Zen, but was leery of our gruff Baptist prison chaplain. We met with him in July 1997 and learned that we would need a sponsor before our group would be allowed to meet, so I wrote every Buddhist group I could find in Florida. Four of them told me, “Great idea—good luck!” But Mitch Doshin, Cantor of Southern Palm Zen Group, gave me my first lesson with his simple response: “How can I help?”

For the next 10 years he drove up every three weeks from Boca Raton—an eight hour round trip—to lead services and teach. We gained weekly services and held daylong meditation retreats on our holy days. Our community, the Blue Lotus Sangha, drew its name from the hundreds of men walking the yard—a field of future buddhas waiting to bloom. David and I took our layman’s vows in December 1998, and while our group rarely exceeded 20 men, transfers spread them all over Florida’s 60-prison network, where many of them stayed with their practice. Today, Southern Palm sends volunteers into nine prisons and a monthly newsletter reaches hundreds more.

I set out to create a space for authentic practice for myself, but truly sacred space does not respect walls and barriers. We welcome all who seek peace in a place that tests that intention constantly. One of the gifts of practicing community is to be able to extend refuge to those who have left traditional religions, wounded by judgement they could not bear, but still in need of spiritual fulfillment.

I, too, came full circle after five years of practice. Our local Catholics had recruited me to provide organ accompaniment for their Mass. I agreed, as long as they understood that I didn’t believe in any of it. However, my curiosity and my desire to learn how to make the Mass more beautiful pulled me in, and exposure to the Catholic Worker movement kept me there. I found that all of my adolescent anti-Catholic prejudices had no basis in fact; moreover, this church had convincing answers for the big questions which had troubled me. I came to see a way to practice that would respect both traditions, and some four months after I took my monk’s vows in 2002, I was received into the Catholic church, becoming the first Catholic in my family in more than 50 years. “They” became “us.” 

When my Evangelical friends ask why I’m still meditating, I just smile and say, “Zen keeps me sane and the church gives me hope for the future.” The simple intention to create that space, for the sake of all beings, led me to a place I could never have imagined when I began.

This article was published in the Summer 2017 issue of Living Peace.