No Expectations

According to Zen Master Dogen, zazen (sitting meditation) is the best practice for realizing suchness, for seeing things as they are. In Shobogenzo Bendowa (A Talk About Pursuing the Truth), Dogen wrote, “According to the unmistakenly handed down tradition, this buddha-dharma which has been singularly and directly transmitted is supreme beyond comparison. From the time you begin to practice under a teacher, incense burning, bowing, nenbutsu, as well as the practices of repentance or of reading the sutras, are unnecessary. Simply practice zazen, dropping off body and mind.”

“The true practice in accordance with the Way is nothing but shikantaza,” Dogen says in the opening chapter.  of Zuimonki.  Shikantaza is a form of zazen literally meaning “just sitting.” Anything added to “just sitting,” such as “just sitting to see things as they are” or even “just sitting to drop off body and mind” is not true shikantaza; something extra has been added.  While such things may, in fact, occur, shikantaza is zazen which is practiced without expectation of any reward, even enlightenment. 

It is just being yourself, right here, right now.

A Forest

Shikantaza was the very essence of life in Dogen’s monastery. The word he used for “monastery,” sorin, literally means a forest in which various kinds of trees are living together. In a monastery, all practitioners with their different characters, capabilities, and backgrounds live together with unified bodhi-mind; thus Zen monasteries are sometimes called sorin. 

In Shobogenzo Ryugin, Dogen speaks of withered trees, and of mountain trees, ocean trees, and sky trees. ”Withered tree” is a common Buddhist metaphor for a monk who has, in meditation, attained a deep state of non-emotion, whose passions have all but disappeared. This meditative state is not to be confused with a quietistic or blissful condition, which is simply a passing phase that may arise in spiritual practice. 

“Mountain trees” are those who are sitting as still as a mountain, while “ocean trees” are those who are exploring the great depths, and “sky trees” are those who are exploring the unbounded. All of these “trees” come together in a monastery, and the Zazen Hall where the mediation happens is sometimes called a koboku-dō, or “withered tree hall.”

Focus

The more we separate our spiritual practice from our daily lives, the more both suffer - our daily lives become less spiritual and our spiritual life becomes less and less relevant to who we really are and what we really do.

This is not a knock against Christianity, but the problem with the way many people practice the faith is they go to church on Sunday and become quite pious and charitable, but then go back to practicing greed, anger, and intolerance for the rest of the week.

We Buddhists are often quite the same.  We practice mindfulness in meditation, either together with the sangha or alone in our home practice.  But as soon as the bell rings, we go back to praising the self at the expense of others, taking that which is not freely given, and practicing greed, anger, and intolerance (sometimes we don't even wait for the bell to ring and engage in these activities in our thoughts while still on the cushion).

I suppose the precepts were developed to help guide us in our daily lives, but following a predetermined set of rules is quite different from being guided by our own internal instincts and doing good only for the sake of others.  

If we integrate our practice with our life and dissolve those artificial boundaries between the spiritual and the ordinary, between the sublime and the mundane, and the sacred and the profane, we open our lives to receive the wisdom of our practice.  After all, those boundaries were first created by our own discriminating minds, anyway.

"Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn"

Periods of great uncertainty can become a teacher to us.  In uncertainty, we abandon our conceptual models and learn to see things as they truly are, not as our friends, our family, and even our own prior experience lead us to believe they are. 

On the other hand, we need to be careful that paranoia doesn't lead us to accept a narrative that doesn't exist outside of a runaway imagination. 

A middle way exists between blind faith and cynical doubt.

All things in the universe have different names and forms, but they are all made from the same substance.   Substance, on the other hand, has no name and no form.  Energy, mind, god, and matter are names and forms.  Having name and form is having opposites. Formless substance is the Absolute.  

In thinking, all things are separated into opposites: good and bad, beautiful and ugly, mine and yours.  I like this; I don't like that.  I try to get happiness and avoid suffering.  People desire money, fame, sex, food, and rest.  All this desire is based on thinking.  Thinking is desire, and desire is suffering.  Suffering  means no world peace.  Not thinking is not suffering.  Not suffering means world peace.  World peace is the Absolute. The Absolute is I.

Not understanding yourself is not understanding the truth.  That is why there is fighting among ourselves.  If all the people in the world understood themselves, they would attain the Absolute.  Then the world would be at peace.

- Based on the teachings of Seung Sahn

Not Knowing

One day, a student asked Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, “What is Zen?” 

Seung Sahn held his Zen stick above his head and said, “Do you understand?” 

The student said, “I don’t know.” 

Seung Sahn said, “This don’t-know mind is you. Zen is understanding yourself.” 

Seung Sahn taught that in a cookie factory, different cookies are baked in the shape of animals, cars, people, and airplanes. They all have different names and forms, but they are all made from the same dough, and they taste the same. 

In the same way, all things in the universe – the sun, the moon, the stars, mountains, rivers, people, and so forth – have different names and forms, but they are all made from the same substance. The universe is organized into pairs of opposites: light and darkness, man and woman, sound and silence, good and bad. But all these opposites are mutual, because they are made from the same substance. Their names and their form are different, but their substance is the same. 

Names and form are made by your thinking. If you are not thinking and have no attachment to name and form, then all substance is one. The don’t-know mind cuts off all thinking. This is your substance. The substance of Seung Sahn’s Zen stick and your own substance are the same. You are the stick and the stick is you. 

In this sense, not-knowing is a place where we haven’t yet created name and form. What we don’t know is formless – we haven’t put a name on it and therefore it doesn’t assume a form. When we practice true intimacy with not knowing, when we don’t know our own self, then we are formless and part of Seung Sahn’s cookie dough, the formless substance of the universe. 

Dogen said that to study the way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self (not-knowing). To forget the self is mind and body dropping away (formlessness), and experiencing mind and body dropping away is to enter realization. 

Seung Sahn said Zen is understanding yourself, and that you are don’t-know mind. Same thing.

Suzuki

“Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.” ― R.D. Laing

R.D. Laing, who comforted me so much in my psychedelic teens and early 20s, reassures me once again by suggesting the possibility that even those of us who are still asleep can nonetheless recognize that what is taken to be real is actually like a dream.

On Precepts

Sorry the following is so long, but once I got stared, I couldn’t decide where to stop.

The Buddhist Precepts are simply a bunch of rules that the early sangha came up with to govern how to live together, and those precepts that seem to enhance our following of The Eight-Fold Path have stuck with us and have been handed down over the years.  Today, there are many, many different versions and translations of the precepts, almost one set of precepts for every Buddhist school, if not teacher.  

Monastics have many more precepts that they’re asked to observe beyond the basic Ten Grave Precepts, and in some monasteries there are literally hundreds of precepts. Apparently, as monastic life proceeded over the centuries, more and more precepts were required to deal with situations that arose, and Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal says we can only imagine what must have led up to one monastic precept he’s heard that states that no monk shall ever insert his penis into any orifice smaller than that of a chicken’s. 

Some schools of Buddhism go to great, even comical (in my opinion) lengths to try and comply with all of the many monastic precepts.  For example, I have heard of Tibetan monks not being allowed to even so much as touch money, and having to request others to take their cash out of their wallets for them and hand it to a ticket agent so they can board a train. And of course, many monks have practiced celibacy in order to comply with the Third Grave Precept on sexuality (except, apparently, with chickens). 

I recently heard the Fifth Grave Precept expressed as an admonition against “intoxicants that engender heedlessness.”  In the tradition in which I practice, The Silent Thunder Order, we just say “Do not cloud the mind with intoxicants.”  The late John Daido Loori’s Mountains and Rivers Order states “Proceed clearly. Do not cloud the mind,” and does not even mention intoxicants at all. I don’t know if the addition of “that engender heedlessness” helps point out the problem with intoxicants or merely creates the perception of a loophole in the precept (such as, “what about intoxicants that are so debilitating that one can’t possibly behave heedlessly?”) 

The precepts are often confused with absolute rules, and in Judeo-Christian, Western society, they are often thought of as similar to The Ten Commandments.  But in Buddhism, there is no divinity passing down a set of absolute, if inscrutable, laws. In Zen, we “observe” the precepts more than “obey” them. 

On close examination, we violate the precepts all the time. While I’ve managed to avoid the temptation of murdering anyone today, and I might even have avoided proxy killing by not eating meat that someone else slaughtered for me, my tax dollars still go to war efforts, drone strikes, police actions, and so on in other forms of proxy killing. I might not knowingly step on bugs and try to avoid killing insects and pests indiscriminately, but I may still kill small organisms unconsciously when I scratch what I thought was an itch. Even my blood with its hemoglobin and antibodies and such is designed to kill microbes, parasites, and other foreign organisms, so my very body is engaged in killing all of the time. And aren’t plants living things, so don’t vegetarians kill as well? And so on. We can’t not kill - to live is to kill. This certainly doesn’t excuse us to go out and commit murder, but by observing when and how we violate the First Grave Precept (“Do not kill”) and the karmic effects that it has, we move in the direction of not more, but less, killing. 

When I first started Zen practice with Sensei, I heard him say “We observe the precepts by breaking them.” At first, this struck me as a massive cop-out, a way to avoid moral behavior, especially with regard to the Fifth Grave Precept against intoxication. It didn’t help that I was dating a recovering alcoholic at the time, and had chosen to practice total sobriety with her.  But Sensei enjoys his Saki, and has some amusing stories about getting shitfaced with his teacher.  I figured he just didn’t have the moral fortitude to refrain from drinking (if he wasn’t an outright alcoholic himself), and had found himself some wiggle room to continue to drink. It took me several years to understand the Fifth Grave Precept. 

Intoxicants go beyond alcohol and drugs. Music can be an intoxicant, as can other forms of entertainment. Daido Loori even goes so far as to say that sunglasses can be an intoxicant.  Let me explain. 

In yet another version, all of The One-Minded Precepts of Bodhidharma start with the phrase “Self-nature is inconceivably wondrous.” The fifth of the precepts states “Self-nature is inconceivably wondrous; in the intrinsically pure Dharma, not arousing ignorance is called ‘not being intoxicated.’”  As Daido Loori explains, we violate the precepts with the “if only. . . “ assumption that the world would somehow be better if only something were a little different. We violate the First Grave Precept when we decide the world would be a better place “if only” a certain person or persons or animal(s) were not in it with us. We violate the Second Grave Precept against stealing when we decide that the world would be a better place “if only” we possessed what someone else owns. And so on. 

As for intoxication, we violate the precept when we decide that the world would be a better place “if only” we had a slight buzz, or a major buzz, or were totally anesthetized against the nature of the reality around us. That’s why Loori equates any manipulation of reality to intoxication, including music to rid the universe of its unbearable quiet or just to change the mood, or earplugs to get rid of the unbearable noise, or even sunglasses to change the way er perceive light. 

Does this mean that we shouldn’t listen to music or wear sunglasses (or do both at the same time to be really cool)?  Not at all. We should just observe that we’ve chosen to impose our own egocentric version of how reality should be over that of our “inconceivably wondrous Self-nature” (which is to say the entire universe, since to a Buddha Self-nature and the universe are one and the same). As for alcohol and drugs, it is up to each of us to observe our own behavior, observe how we violate the precept and why, and the effects that those violations have on us and others around us. As we observe, our behavior will naturally change on its own accord in relation to those observations. 

Personally, I’ve almost entirely lost any appetite for inebriation and intoxication as I’ve come to appreciate that inconceivably wondrous nature of the reality of this very moment.   But that doesn’t mean I can't and don’t enjoy an ice-cold beer on a summer day, or a good glass of wine with dinner. Or listen to new music to excite my interests and curiosity. 

It is no different when it comes to sexuality. Our order states the Third Grave Precept as “Do not misuse sexuality.” That’s a far cry from practicing celibacy, and many Zen priests are married and have children. In fact, considering that sexuality is one of the joys of being alive, I could argue that suppressing our sexual nature in a celibate existence is itself an abuse of our natural sexuality. Committing rape is clearly and obviously a violent misuse of sexuality, but other actions that do not honor the body also go against the precept, such as commodifying and selling the body in prostitution. There’s a lot of grey area here, and the violations are probably as much in the intent and the attitude as in the actual acts performed, and I’m not going to be the one who tries to say what is or isn’t in violation of the precepts. Bodhidharma doesn’t even mention sexuality in his One-Minded Precepts, but instead implores against greed in the third of his precepts. 

Zen Master Ikkyu is an interesting case. First of all, we have to assume that he was a fully awakened and self-realized Zen Master, and all indications are that he was. But to those who asked, he would say that his true self was very sexual by nature and best expressed in the bedroom and the bordello. Therefore, he was able to commit actions, such as consorting with prostitutes and frequenting whore houses, without violating the precept, as he was celebrating, not denying, the wondrous nature of his true self. But as he was fully awakened and self-realized, he had an understanding that far surpassed mine, so I’m not able to say “Me, too” and run down to the local strip club. Or to say my true nature really likes to party and partake of drugs, as I’m not Ikkyu and self realization is still outside of my own direct experience. 

It’s similar to the famous story of the two monks who encounter a young lady on the street. One can pick her up and carry her over the mud puddle (a violation of his very strict, monastic precept against touching a member of the opposite sex) because he was able to immediately move past the action, while the other dwelled on it (“I put her back down, but you’re still carrying her,” the first monk said when the second admonished him later). 

I think the point of the Ikkyu case is not that it’s okay to behave in any way that we think that we want from our own small, egocentric viewpoint, but that the precepts themselves are but points to observe on the road to realization (the Eight-Fold Path). To put it another way, the precepts aren’t absolute rules which must be obeyed at all times in order to appease a vengeful deity nor are they absolute requirements for achieving nirvana, but instead are a common sense set of things to observe as we try to follow the Eight-Fold Path. Violations of all of the precepts are us putting our own egocentric interests over those of our true nature, which leads us further away from our true nature. 

Finally, I have to point out that in zazen, we are fully in accord with all of the precepts. We’re not killing, we’re not stealing, we’re not abusing sexuality, and we’re not engaged in other one-sided acts of egocentric gratification or denial of the inconceivably wondrous nature of the universe.

Martin

Merry Martin Luther King Day, y'all.  I think it's fitting that today was the day that New York State chose to enact the toughest gun law in the country.  According to The Huffington Post, "Owners of an estimated 1 million previously legal semiautomatic rifles, such as the Bushmaster model used to kill 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Conn., a month ago, will be allowed to keep their weapons but will have a year to register them with police. The sale of any more such weapons is prohibited."

The United States incarcerates far too many of it's citizens, the majority of them minorities, but I still think it makes more sense, if you have to incarcerate people, to lock up those with illegal guns rather than those with illegal cigarettes.

A New Year

Happy New Year, y'all.

2012 is now over and complete, the Earth having completed yet one more revolution around the Sun. I somehow survived.

2012 was the first full year I spent working on my own, finding my own clients, executing projects by myself, and doing my own invoicing and collections. Total DIY.

Dogen said that everyone has an allotted share of food and life, and though you might seek after more than your share, you will never be able to obtain it. He also said, "To think of accumulating even a little bit of wealth is a great obstacle. Without thinking of how to gain or store up things you will naturally receive as much as you need to stay alive for a while. Each person has his allotted share; heaven and earth bestow it on us. Even though you don’t run around seeking it, you will receive it without fail."

I certainly did not accumulate more than my share of wealth last year, but I did learn to rely on heaven and earth to provide me what I needed. And the provisions came, often in ways and forms I did not expect. Granted, I had to work for everything I received - there were no free rides - but the work itself was a form of blessing.

I learned to do things I never thought I was capable of learning, and met challenges that seemed at times to be overwhelming. And yet I survived, and find myself looking forward to another year of taking life one day at a time.

My Christmas Hexagram

We always knew the world would sink in snow each year.

One winter, we suffered as before,
But no one would measure our ordeal,
Until a stargazer staked a pole, setting stones day by day,
Year by year, each time the shadows moved.

His unbound hair whitened like the ice on his robes,
But he could soon predict when the sun
Would pierce night on the shortest of days.

And once that day had come,
He knew the ice would melt
And the shadows tremble in the plum blossom breeze.
(Hexagam 19 of the I Ching, translated by Deng Ming-Dao)

Nirvana

The word nirvana actually connotes death, as I understand that it can be translated as “extinguishing,” as in the blowing out of a candle.  Some modern people find reassurance in the concept of reincarnation, taking it to mean that we don’t really “die” at all, but merely come back as some other person or life form. However, back at the time of the Buddha, people dreaded the concept of constantly returning to existence over and over again, only to be once again subject to suffering and disease, old age, and death. People sought an escape from the cycle of samsara and during the Buddha’s lifetime, many spiritual teachers were proposing various practices and methods to escape or avoid this endless cycle. Nirvana to them was the ultimate death, the true death, the state of no more becoming.  

This is the context in which the Buddha’s teachings were first presented. The passing away of a Buddha is called the parinirvana, as the Buddha then leaves the cycle of samsara and does not return again. The flame is extinguished. 

It’s also interesting to note as an aside that this concept of the extinguishing of a flame also had a subversive double meaning. The Brahmans at the time taught that the responsibility of each householder was to constantly keep three flames burning in the home at all times (don’t ask me why - I’ve forgotten), and by advocating the “blowing out of the flame,” the Buddha was also symbolically rejecting the teachings of the Brahmans. He even went so far as calling the “three poisons” – greed, hate, and delusion - the “three flames” that must be extinguished first before the ultimate extinguishment (nirvana), which was an even more explicit and confrontational rejection of the Brahmans. All of this is just an aside, but I find it interesting to note how the Buddha was willing to explicitly reject the teachings of others. 

Anyway, nirvana is escape from the cycle of samsara, and parinirvana is the final death with no more becoming. This is why early Buddhists texts and some Theravedan teachings still talk about classes of Buddhist practioners, including, stream-enterers (those just starting in this lifetime), thrice-returners (those who’ve entered the stream in a previous life, but still have three more lifetimes to go to further purify themselves before entering nirvana), and arhats or saint-like persons who are free from greed, hate, and delusion due to the actions of their previous lives and current practices, and who will enter into nirvana upon their passing. 

After about 500 years or 14 generations of teacher-to-student transmission, this school of thought was overturned by the Patriarch Najaruna, who changed the emphasis from the arhat seeking his own nirvana to that of the bodhisattva who seeks instead to free all other sentient beings from samsara. This was the first great division of Buddhism into the so-called Mahayana, or “Greater Vehicle” and the traditional Theravedan schools, and to support the Mahayana views, sutras such as The Diamond Sutra were emphasized (or possibly even made up at the time). 

It was the Mahayana teachings that were transmitted to China and encountered Daoism, and then this Daoist-influenced Mahayana Buddhism became Japanese Zen. The teachings were being transmitted from Japan to the West by teachers like Sunryo Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center and Soyu Matsuoka, my teacher’s late teacher. As I understand it, these teachings do not emphasize future lives so much as this very life here and now, and nirvana, or the death of the ego-self, usually referred to as satori by the Japanese teachers, can be experienced right now, in this very life time. Even more specifically, the Soto Zen way is that we can experience body-and-mind falling away and lose the ego-self through the practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting” – zazen that seeks no ultimate goal but is just the natural way of abiding. 

Sitting in zazen and experiencing the falling away of body-and-mind (I insist of hyphenating it to remind myself that it is not two separate things, but one, that falls away) is essentially the same experience as the extinguishing of the flame of existence. It is the at least temporary death of the self, and a step outside of the cycle of samsara. It is no small thing. This is why Dogen said that practice (shikantaza) and enlightenment are one – losing one’s self during zazen is to directly experience the self as the temporary aggregation of the five skandhas, the effect that comes from the coming together of bodily form, sensation, thought, samskara, and consciousness. When thinking stops, or is at least sufficiently ignored, there is nothing holding the aggregation together, and the “self” disappears (body-and-mind falls away). This is what I understand to be “dying on the cushion.” 

In my own experience, and in my studies of Zen, the constructed ego-self does not want to die, even if temporarily. We obsessively cling to the illusion of “being,” and the mind creates all kinds of obstacles and distractions to keep us engaged in the process of thinking and thereby keeping the illusion going. This is what the Buddha experienced as the manifestations of Mara trying to keep him from continuing his mediation by first distracting him with pleasurable fantasies and then with terrifying images and doubting thoughts. The mind is very clever - in fact sometimes I joke that it is exactly as clever as you are (since it is you) - and it can manifest all sorts of thoughts, sensations, ideas, doubts, cravings, fantasies, and so on to keep us engaged in thinking and not letting go of our thoughts. 

This is where a teacher can come in. Ultimately, there is nothing to teach, but a teacher can encourage us to keep practicing zazen and help us dispel the concepts that the mind creates as barriers to letting go of thinking. A teacher encourages us to practice shikantaza (just sitting) and experience for ourselves the dropping away of body-and-mind. 

On Giving

"I do as many random acts of kindness partly because it makes me feel good and also because it makes others feel good," a friend of mine recently posted on Facebook. "I don't expect anything in return except maybe some good karma? Where was my good karma when I got ticketed for a moving violation?"

The comment is a good example of common misunderstandings about both compassion and about karma.  Random acts of kindness performed partly to make us feel good about ourselves are not truly acts of kindness.  When Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma how much merit he had accrued by building temples across China, Bodhidharma replied, "No merit."

When we practice generosity, it’s easy to turn our actions into something special—thereby elevating ourselves, however subtly, above those we mean to help.  But according to John Daido Roshi, the late abbot of Zen Mountain monastery, doing good is not the same as true compassion.  In true compassion, Daido teaches, giver and receiver merge; in responding to the cries of the world, the Bodhisattva of Compassion always takes a form that is indistinguishable from the person being helped.

Expecting something in return for your kindness and generosity taints those very actions with egocentric thoughts.  Give and expect nothing in return; practice kindness, but do not become the kind practioner.  

Rohatsu

Day 4 of the Rohatsu retreat and I didn't even make it in at all today.  I worked once again during the day, and Wednesday evenings are newcomers night, so there didn't seem to be any point in going to the Center just to receive instruction but not actually practice zazen.  However, my home practice still continues through this week.

In my Monday Night Zazen quote of Zen Master Dogen, he says, "It is good to understand such things without misinterpretation when you enter the mountains or seclude yourselves in a city."  This is the first and only reference I've seen to Dogen acknowledging such a thing as an urban monk. I self-style myself as something of an urban monk - living alone in relative seclusion while in the midst of the bustle of the City, trying to be a bodhisattva at the very place where there are so many sentient beings to assist.  

If anyone knows of any other Zen references to the path of the urban monk or better yet, guidance for living the urban monk life, I would be so appreciative.

Rohatsu

Day Two of Rohatsu has been completed.  Really, Day One, as Saturday was only 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm.   Although there was earlier sitting for those in residency, today's schedule was from 9 am to 9 pm.

I have work and a business meeting Monday that will keep me from participating during the day, but I will be returning for Monday Night Zazen, if nothing else.

Rohatsu

This evening marks the beginning of the annual rohatsu meditation retreat, a seven-day event in commemoration of the Buddha's enlightenment.  "Monks around the world shudder in anticipation of rohatsu," it is said, as the retreat is generally considered to be the most intensive and arduous on the Buddhist calendar.  

For several reasons, it appears to be time for me to immerse myself back in the butsudo (buddha-way) of practice-enlightenment once again.  It's been too long.  However, as usual, I will also have to attend to more mundane matters such as my job and livelihood during the week, especially considering that I'm now self-employed and no longer have the luxury of taking vacation time and still draw a salary while engaged in meditation practice (ah, those were the days).  I have meetings, reports to write, deadlines to meet, and clients to maintain.

I will do my best, however, to attend rohatsu at times where there is not something else that I need to be doing.  Let's use this public forum to help keep me honest to that vow and have the readers, such as they are, help encourage me on this path.

"When I was young, I went to war as a Kamikaze pilot. I had firmly made up my mind to give my life because I wanted to protect my parents, my brothers and sisters and my friends. Other pilots went before me, giving their lives in that final flight. I waited my turn. My turn did not come. The war ended just when I was about to fly. I was devastated, because I could not carry out my commitment to help. I wasn’t able to serve. I felt useless. All my comrades had given their lives and here I was, still alive, to what purpose? After that, again and again, just on the brink of death, my life was miraculously spared. You too are perfectly protected. It just isn’t obvious to you. You are receiving all the care, protection and guidance and love of all the universe. You just haven’t been able to see it yet, but you will." - Harada Tangen Roshi, Abbot of Bukokuji, Dharma Heir of Daiun Sogaku Harada (1871 - 1961)

Prison Population

Can this really be true?

I don't believe everything I read on the internet, not by a long shot, so I figured this should be checked out.  According to The Sentencing Project, the State of Georgia currently has 92,599 people in prison, 479 per 100,000 persons.  Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia, the prison population of England and Wales in October 2011 was 87,673.  So, if anything, the map is an understatement.

The Sentencing Project lists 231,186 prisoners in the State of Texas, and BBC News claims there are 214,450 prisoners in Mexico.  That's close, I guess. Similarly, Louisiana has 71,311 prisoners and Japan has  79,052.  That's a random check of three random states using three different data sources.  The equivalents aren't exact, but the numbers seem legit.

The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails, a 500% increase over the past thirty years. These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and state governments being overwhelmed by the burden of funding a rapidly expanding penal system, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not the most effective means of achieving public safety.  Changes in sentencing law and policy, not increases in crime rates, explain most of the increase in the national prison population. These changes have significantly impacted racial disparities in sentencing, as well as increased the use of “one size fits all" mandatory minimum sentences that allow little consideration for individual characteristics.  Sentencing policies brought about by the "war on drugs" resulted in a dramatic growth in incarceration for drug offenses. At the Federal level, prisoners incarcerated on a drug charge comprise half of the prison population, while the number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased thirteen-fold since 1980. Most of these people are not high-level actors in the drug trade, and most have no prior criminal record for a violent offense.

It's time to stop the madness.