The Engaged Zen Foundation is an independent organization originally founded to foster zazen (seated contemplative meditation) practice in prison. Meditative training alters the functioning of the mind of the practitioner and these changes manifest with the development of positive perspectives on life.
The Foundation's goal is to help foster an environment to enable prisoners to use the time available during imprisonment to practice zazen. By encouraging prisoners to sit in dynamic, lucid awareness, serving prisoners will gained an insight into an aspect of life, which on release will enable them - through their own efforts - to reenter society with a disciplined, patient, nonviolent and compassionate frame of mind.
"Our activities are geared to assisting individuals on a case-by-case basis and much of our effort is unseen and unacknowledged.
EZF was initially founded with the intention of it being a means for fostering zen practice in prisons as a mechanism for bringing about change in the prison systems. This, after well over a decade of experience, has proved to be an impractical and short sighted perspective.
I have seen, experienced and learned, a lot over the past years about the nature and magnitude of the shortcomings of the criminal justice system and the underlying paradigms that drive it. The ramifications are deeper than just the matter of prisoners engaging in meditation practice while incarcerated.
It matters little if one or two prisoners are practicing in a facility if hundreds of others in the same facility are subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment on a daily basis. A prison full of enlightened prisoners - is still a prison."
- Rev. Kobutsu Malone
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To further the efforts of Venerable Kobutsu Malone and his organization, the Engaged Zen Foundation has been included as one of the recipient of the Bodhi Mandala grant.
What happens when a deeply committed, religious person, a priest, comes into direct contact with a cynical cabal of cops? I was standing there for less than a minute on the edge of the crowd when suddenly, without any announcement or warning, a policeman rushed at me from my left side holding a nightstick diagonally in front of him. I clearly saw his black gloved right hand and part of the wooden shaft of the nightstick as it came at me and hit me across the chest pushing me backwards. I fell backwards onto the pavement and remember seeing stars and hearing a rushing sound as my head hit the pavement. I lost consciousness. When he came to, the 50-something priest would find himself struggling to breathe, his face mashed into the wet concrete, a cop's meaty knee boring into his back, while his arms were being wrenched behind him, only to be lashed together tightly by plastic bonds. Rev. Kobutsu Malone, who suffers from heart trouble, would be violently rushed to a van, hoisted into it, and when he found the breath to tell a cop that he was a priest, and could his bonds be loosened, one cop sneered at his request, while another announced Malone should be ashamed of himself, if he really was a priest. I was not informed of my Miranda rights, nor told of any consequences of answering any questions. [The detective] asked me why I was there and I told him about my heart condition. He then rephrased the question asking me why I was arrested. I was taken aback with this question and asked if I was indeed under arrest and what I was charged with. He responded that they didn't know what I was arrested for, did not know what I was charged with and did not even know who placed me under arrest. Hours later, when the charges were finally dropped, he took his bruised and battered body and pysche and, along with family and friends, put distance between himself and Philadelphia. He learned firsthand, what Philadelphia freedom was about.
The Priest and the Police
Copyright '02 Mumia Abu-Jamal
This question is far from rhetorical.
A middle-aged man named Kobutsu Malone knows it's not rhetorical, for he is an American-born Zen Buddhist priest, and he came in direct contact with some cops recently.
It wasn't pretty.
As leader of the Engaged Zen Foundation (based in N.J.) Rev. Malone has put his Zen humanistic faith into practice in the darkest corners of the real world, by going into American prisons, some as notorious as the infamous Sing Sing prison in upstate New York, to promote and sustain Zen practice and meditation.
In 1996, he served as Spiritual Advisor to a prisoner on Death Row in Arkansas, named Jusan Frankie Parker. Indeed, he waged a 6-month campaign on Parker's behalf, begging two successive Arkansan governors to commute his death sentence to life in prison. Rev. Kobutsu Malone's efforts did not succeed, and he shared the last day of Parker as the state committed a legalized lynching on August 8th, 1996, in Varner, Arkansas.
The experience left him deeply committed to the abolition of the death penalty, and led him to the frigid, rain-swept streets of Philadelphia, on December 8th, 2001, on behalf of this writer. As a religious person and as an American citizen, he felt safe to come to a city that takes its name from the Bible, meaning "City of Brotherly Love," and the place where the Constitution was written several centuries ago. It was at 13th and Walnut Street, that he would learn about today's Philadelphia, and that the Constitution, nor his faith, meant nothing, at least to the armed men who claim their sworn duty is to serve and protect people.
After he heard some commotion behind him, at the rear of a march, he turned back when he heard people hollering about arrests, and then it happened:
Meanwhile, Rev. Kobutsu, his arms numb from the tightened tourniquet which stopped circulation to his hands, tossed to and fro by the moving van, fell again into unconsciousness.
When he came to this time, cops were tugging at his vestments, and pulling him out of the van onto a stretcher.
The Rev. Kobutsu Malone was on his way to a nearby hospital where he was given some rudimentary heart medication.
He saw several cops during his time in the hospital, and whenever he spoke to them they informed him that he was indeed under arrest, but when he inquired as to the charges, he was told repeatedly, that they didn't know what charges:
He must have wondered to himself, in the early morning hours, if this can happen to me, a priest, an American, a white guy (who happens to believe in Zen Buddhism) what of other people, who are younger, darker, or poorer? And surely, a shudder must have moved through him.
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Ven. Rev. Kobutsu may be reached at www.engaged-zen.org