St. Nadie in Winter. Terrance Keenan

with the problems contained in daily living.... The question is: What is the real face of our commonplace experience of Daily life?” He goes further, “True reality is encountered while staying in the midst of every day and returning ever more deeply into its depth and inner recesses. Even the great problem of life-and-death is clarified thereby and what is called ‘faith’ in Buddhism implies a kind of experiencing. Daily life is the basic problem and the last key to all problems. That is the standpoint of Zen and, more generally, the core of the Buddhist standpoint.” This is the force, the drive behind the Zen Center of Syracuse as a lay practice—what lay practice means, to have naikan or thoroughgoing intuition about ordinary things. The answer is not only in a remote temple but on your kitchen table.

      On August 8, 1996, fifty-one years and two days after Hiroshima, a Buddhist monk was killed by the State of Arkansas. That is one way to tell the story. Another is that Frankie Parker had been on Death Row twelve years and his appeals had finally run out that August day. Both versions are true. In this case the “dead man walking” was one of our desaparecidos twice over. He was one of society’s throwaways, an invisible number in our brutal penal system. He was condemned to die. He was also a realized monk, ordained and trained while in prison in a remarkable transformation that was free of self-pity or pride, who could face death with equanimity. Frankie Parker was a confessed murderer, at one time one of the lost who saw violence as a real alternative, who could say: “How do you spread the Dharma if the person you meet is blind and dumb? The answer is a hug! Kindness, a hug is a smile, a smile that can be felt. Buddhism is not a religion or philosophy, it is not a psychology or a science. It is example. It is a method of liberation. I feel liberated and soon may be liberated from this world. I change as all things change. . . . I trust that I have not let you down in any way, I trust that this world will be helped in some way by my death. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha gave me refuge. Thank you my friends. Y’all take care . . . live by example!”

      For twenty-seven years Veronza Bowers has lived in maximum security prisons. He is a former Black Panther who claims he was framed by the Feds for murder back in the early seventies. He considers himself a political prisoner. It is possible. That is a period needing scrutiny. I do not know the truth of that part of his story, and all my wanting to do so cannot change what I cannot know. But I came to know him through my study of the shakuhachi, the bamboo flute, which is the only melodic instrument used in the Zen tradition. Monty Levenson, who made my flute, also made Veronza’s. It was through Monty that I heard about this prisoner who has been denied parole more times than he can count. In prison Veronza turned from someone committed to a violent solution to the racial question into a healer. A man, invisible to us for a quarter of a century, has used meditation and music to transform himself. He has studied shiatsu massage, acupressure, and is an honorary elder of the Lompoc, California Tribe of Five Feathers, a Native American spiritual and cultural group. In his words in 1996:

      I have lived the past twenty-four years of my life as a federal prisoner with the Bureau of Prisons number 35316-136 appended to my name. For those of you who have never been inside a maximum security penitentiary, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine it as a place where the plaintive sounds of shakuhachi can be heard. Ah! But it is true . . . . In the recreation yard of Terre-Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana, I first saw Punchy—he being pushed in his wheelchair around the quarter mile track (he had been paralyzed with a gunshot wound); me sitting under the shade of a lone tree blowing my shakuhachi . . . . The song in my heart reflected what I had just seen and my shakuhachi began to cry . . . .

      Veronza arranged to work with Punchy to help his healing. “After a solid month (six days a week, two and a half hours a day) of breathing exercises, acupressure treatments, stretching, etc., we were basically where we were when we started. Punchy was locked up inside himself where I could not touch.” He arranged a meditation session in which he played the flute. During this he achieved a breakthrough of sorts. Punchy is recorded to have said, “It appears that I have allowed the flutist . . . to take me beyond the realms of my control. I can sense serenity, but the pain . . . oh! The pain! And why do I feel as if I’m not alone? . . . My body began to respond, my eyes opened. . . .”

      Veronza goes on:

      Ah! The breakthrough! On so many levels a small piece of bamboo, 1.8 feet long, had opened doorways which had previously been shut. Shakuhachi had done in one and a half hours what no human being had done in three years . . . . From then on we began each working session with shakuhachi. A healthy diet of vitamins . . . meditation and . . . weight lifting . . . stretching and more stretching . . . all combined so that by the end of the summer (ten months after our first meditation healing session) Punchy could do one hundred full squats non-stop, walk five steps on his own [and] walk behind his wheelchair with me sitting in it. . . .