PARABOLA: Why Buddhism?
DAMIEN ECHOLS: I started to feel angry all the time. Everything I had been through was really starting to turn me bitter and I knew that I had to do something about that or it was going to eat me alive.
P: Who taught you about Buddhism?
DE: The very first day I came into death row, there was another guy here who sent me a package of stuff. It was filled with shaving cream, razors, a bar of soap, uh, I think there was a grape soda in it, a couple of stamped envelopes, ink and pens, basic necessities. It had a note in it from the guy, who said he tried to do this with everybody who comes in, to help them get their feet under them. And this guy was a Zen Buddhist [Jusan Frankie Parker]. For about two years, I went to the yard with him and talked to him on a regular basis.
A couple years later, [Parker] was given an execution date. His spiritual advisor was this Zen priest who only did prison work, Kobutsu. I met him when he came for the execution in 1996. We started corresponding and eventually, I really delved into Zen and really committed myself to this practice.
I also eventually started corresponding with a Vietnamese Zen temple in Los Angeles. I first took refuge probably a year after I started practicing Zen. Kobutsu performed the ceremony. I was given the name Koson. It means “move toward the light” or “loves the light,” something in that vein.
P: I read that you were also given the name Jyoti Priya Karuna, Lover of the Light Compassion.
DE: That was when I took the next set of vows from the Vietnamese Zen temple. About two years after that, I received Jukai ordination from Shodo Harada Roshi. He’s a really popular Zen master in Japan. Kobutsu asked him if he would come over here to do this ceremony. He couldn’t speak English either. He had to bring one of the female priests with him to act as a translator.
P: Can you describe Jukai for Parabola readers?
DE: Jukai ordination is whenever you really begin to take the first step on the road to serious vows and it’s sort of like a renaming ceremony also. There aren’t too many things to compare it to in Western religion. For example, the first thing we did, taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, which could be comparable to, say, baptism in Christianity. The closest thing [to taking the rest of the precepts against all forms of doing harm] would be maybe becoming a deacon.
P: Did you feel a connection with Shodo Harada Roshi?
DE: You feel this tremendous sense of discipline that almost comes off of him in waves. The only word I know how to use to even come close to articulating it would be beauty. There’s some sort of beauty in that discipline that makes you feel awe. Whenever I was around him, it was almost like being speechless. The reason I don’t say “connection” is because it implies almost an equality in status, and I didn’t really feel that with him. He was shorter than me physically but you still have that feeling that you’re almost looking up at someone.
P: He opened a door.
DE: Even now, coming up on nine years later, whenever I think of it, it really inspires me and makes me want to dig in my heels and try even harder.
P: How does your practice help you?
DE: It prevents you from becoming lost. It enables you to take a step back. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a gradual thing. If someone asks me, “What are you now?” it’s almost an offensive question to me. I think spirituality is the second most intimate thing a person has in their life, second only to their marriage. The reason I find it so offensive is because it is so hard to describe. For example, I’m still a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I go to Mass every week. I never miss it. It’s one of my favorite things in life, yet I don’t identify myself as a Roman Catholic. I have taken these vows in Buddhism but I don’t really identify myself as Buddhist.
P: It’s about getting in touch with who you really are, or what’s nameless?
DE: The way I approach it is to try it and see if it works. See for yourself. Get firsthand experience. That’s what I love about Zen. It didn’t require me to surrender my ability to think. It gave me techniques I could use that actually benefited me in my daily life.
P: I read that you start every day reciting the Heart Sutra [the shortest and most popular sutra in Buddhism, expressing the insight of nonattachment and the doctrine of emptiness].
DE: For about five years, I did start every day reading the Heart Sutra. Then I would do a hundred and eight prostrations. Then I would sit for an hour, and again at night. I had a little shrine set up in my cell. I had a little fold-out cardboard Buddha statue and I would sit a bowl of water on the table like an offering. Saturdays and Sundays, I would dedicate entirely to sitting. I would get up early in the morning and do sitting and walking meditation pretty much all day long. Eventually, we went from just sitting to practicing koan.
P: Rinzai Zen is known for koan study.
DE: I almost lost my mind when we first started the koan practice. The very first one I was given was “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” I would think “What am I supposed to do with this?” But then something did happen. It’s like being flooded with an epiphany or a realization. There’s no way to even describe the feeling of it but the weirdest part was after I did finally get that first one, no other one has ever presented a problem again. Eventually, it was let’s go on to something else.
P: A lot of people think of the interdependent nature of life only in a positive way, but life can be terrible. You can suffer injustice. But allowing yourself to be consumed by negative emotions is just participating in your own destruction.
DE: It would also stunt growth and if you don’t grow, you automatically start to stagnate. To me that was the nightmare, that was worse than the execution—that horrible stagnation that I see all around me.
P: Do you relate to your situation like a koan, confounding but something you have to handle somehow?
DE: It was almost like it did show me how to handle each day and each situation that would come along. It’s almost impossible to articulate to someone how sitting for five hours a day and holding the question “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” in your head helps you deal with prison life. But it does.
P: What is your practice now?
DE: I still do tons of meditation, and I want to keep moving forward. The closer I get to the experience of divinity the closer I want to be to it. So, I am trying to expand my own practices into Western traditions of meditation to do that. One of the things I spend an hour doing every morning now is what’s called the Middle Pillar exercise. It does the same thing that Zen does only it goes about it differently.
When I started practicing Zen, the very first thing that the focus is put on is mindfulness. In the Western traditions, they’ll say you have to develop a background awareness. It’s almost like separating a part of your psyche and standing as an observer at all times and observing what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.
P: I can see why you have to keep making it new. At the same time, the Jukai ordination you received and the Zen ritual you were engaged in must have thrown you a rope, connecting you with a lineage and also with the timeless, the divine as you call it.
DE: Not only that but everything that people put faith or belief or practice into, it creates a current of energy in the universe. Whenever you’re ordained or whenever you receive initiation into a spiritual tradition, it forges a link between you and that energy current in the universe.
P: Has your practice helped you transform your suffering into compassion for others?
DE: In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. I’ve really had a chance over the past fifteen years to study what causes people to be in this situation. You see these people who grew up in poverty with no education whatsoever and they go rob a store and shoot somebody. When you realize the hardship that they came from, that can inspire compassion. But you also see how they are once they are here—making no effort to change or to grow.
I don’t believe that anything excuses not taking personal responsibility. You know, I grew up so poor that we didn’t have heat in the winter; we had to go to gas stations just to get water to bring home to drink; the whole family would have to take a bath in one tub of water that had been heated up over a fire. I know that doesn’t make me a moronic zombie who has no choice but to give
in to some criminal impulse. So stories like that inspire, not the opposite of compassion, but I guess people would call it tough love, where you want to grab somebody and you want to say, “You can try to blame it on society or anyone else you want to blame it on but you make the choices to do what you are doing on a daily basis.”
P: The Buddha talks about how mysterious karma is. And yours certainly ranks way up there.
DE: I’ve heard that before, from a woman who had a Tibetan Buddhist practice who would teach these meditation classes.
P: Can you sum up your beliefs?
DE: In plain English, we shape our own realities. We don’t always realize the extent to which we do. I think the main thing is that we have to take responsibility for changing our own lives. That’s the thing that Lorri and I focus on all the time. We don’t want to settle. I call it living ferociously. If I’m not living ferociously, if I’m not trying to transform my life, then I’m wasting my life.
P: But different branches of science say there is no such thing as free will, that it’s just a perception, an illusion. When you make an action, the action begins before you have the perception of willing it. Everything just happens.
DE: Will is what in the Eastern tradition is called Enlightenment. Will doesn’t mean gritting your teeth and using white knuckle force. It’s more like in Tai Chi when you move without effort.
P: Will is awakening to the big picture?
DE: I wrote about this in my autobiography [Almost Home]. When I was in kindergarten, I was going out to play at night in front of our apartment and my mother tells me, “Do not leave the front of these apartments.” And I say, “O.K.” Then I take off. I’m a little kid. I’m going to go where I want to go. So, I went behind the apartments and played in this huge pile of dirt for awhile and I start to walk back around home. It’s already dark outside and I know I’m going to be in trouble. When I’m walking past an apartment that was empty, I see a man standing in front. He’s wearing a pair of black pants. He has on no shirt. He has shoulder length black hair and he’s standing there with his arms across his chest. And when I’m walking past, he says, “Your Momma’s looking for you.” I just stopped and looked at him. He said, “You know she’s going to whup your ass.” I didn’t think anything about that. I walked on. My Mom found me and eventually she did whip my ass. Right before I was arrested, I had my shirt off. I walked into the bathroom and looked into the bathroom mirror. And I realized that I was the guy I saw that night.
P: Wow. You believe that everything that happens to us is predetermined somehow?
DE: I think reality operates like a computer. I think there are parts of our psyche that we never or almost never touch that have a hand in programming our reality or what we perceive as reality.
P: We make ourselves out to be smaller than we are.
DE: That’s a very good way of putting it. It’s tremendously important to practice and dedicate ourselves to so that we don’t make the same mistakes over and over again through ignorance or through losing awareness.
I think we are given the abilities to do a lot of things, say lucid dreaming,
for a reason. It’s not just for cheap entertainment. The conclusion that I’ve come to is that these are tools to help us prepare for death.
In my situation, that has really been driven home because in the time I’ve been here somewhere between twenty and twenty-five people have been executed. Whenever I have one of those days where I think I’d rather lay here and watch T.V., I think, is that really what you want to do or do you want to continue to get ready?
P: So you practice every day and try to make it new.
DE: Of course. There was one time after an execution when I could sense the energy patterns of the person who was executed. It was like he never knew he had been a person. It had no idea who it was, where it was, anything else. It was like leaves caught in a high wind, disintegrating, being blown in every direction.
P: Because he never laid claim to his life.
DE: Exactly. Experiencing that was horrifying.
P: You still have a connection with Roman Catholicism.
DE: I believe there are a lot of good things in it. One time when the priest put the Communion chalice in my hand, I realized as the wine touched my lips that not only was I tasting it, but it was tasting me. I realized that there was a sentient thing in my hand, that there was an intelligence in the wine. That’s why I go to Mass, for communion with that intelligence.
P: Can you say more?
DE: I just know that it was this huge, vast thing that made me feel tiny. It was like having an elephant open its eye and look directly at an ant.
P: Was it like meeting that Zen master?
DE: It was greater than that just because it wasn’t in human form. I was dealing with divinity face to face not in a human body but actual face to face contact.
P: Is there anything that you would like to add?
DE: Just that this is what I enjoy in life. This is what motivates me. Just even having conversations like this and exchanging ideas about these kinds of things. This is what I live for.
http://parabola.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=152
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