Foreword
As one of the defense investigators who prepared Jarvis’s trial, I looked into the details of his life and learned how far he has traveled spiritually in one short lifetime. Jarvis was born in 1962, the same year my oldest child was born. I met Jarvis’s mother, Cynthia, while working on his case, but she died of heart failure just before his trial. She had not seen him for many years. All of Cynthia’s children were raised in foster care because she was addicted to drugs. Jarvis’s father had left the family and later he too became an addict. In a series of foster care placements, Jarvis was separated from his siblings. For several years, he stayed in his favorite home, with an elderly couple he loved, but when they became too old to care for him, he was moved again, at the age of nine. After that, Jarvis ran away from several foster homes, and went back to the elderly people’s house. He was then sent to the county’s large locked facility for dependent children, and later to some more group homes. Once, he stayed with an aunt for a while, but he got in trouble. At twelve, he became a ward of the court because of delinquency, and was in and out of institutions after that.
During my investigation I met people who had known Jarvis in foster care and institutions, and they told me he had always had a lot of potential. They remembered a smart and articulate youngster with a sense of humor. But too many times he was pushed—and he went—in the wrong direction.
At the age of seventeen, when he was a very angry young man, he was released from the California Youth Authority and went on a crime spree, holding up stores and restaurants until he was captured and sent to San Quentin. He never shot anyone, but the big stack of reports that I read about his crimes was scary. As I told him, I’m glad I wasn’t in Taco Bell when he came through.
When Jarvis arrived in San Quentin in 1981 he was nineteen. Right away he got involved in what the prison system calls a gang. Most young men coming into prison—black, brown, and white—group together for a sense of belonging, for family. In those days, older African American prisoners passed on political education to younger ones.
In 1985, an officer named Sergeant Burchfield was murdered in San Quentin, stabbed to death at night on the second tier of a cell block. At the time, Jarvis was locked in his cell on the fourth tier.
Although many inmates were suspected of conspiring to murder Sergeant Burchfield, only three were tried, Jarvis among them. One was accused of being the “spear man”—of actually stabbing the sergeant. Another, an older man, was accused of ordering the killing. Jarvis was accused of sharpening a piece of metal which was allegedly passed along and later used to make the spear with which the sergeant was stabbed.
In one of the longest trials in California history, all three were convicted of their parts in the conspiracy to kill Sergeant Burchfield. But their sentences varied. One jury gave the young spear man the death penalty, but the trial judge changed his sentence to life without parole because of his youth. Another jury could not reach a verdict on the older man’s sentence, and so he was also given life without parole. Jarvis was sentenced by that same jury to death in the gas chamber, partly because of his violent background.
Although his lawyers asked the trial judge for leniency, also on the basis of his youth—he was twenty-three when the crime occurred, just two years older than the accused spear man—she denied this appeal and sent him to death row. He has been there since 1990. There he must be patient, waiting for appeals to be filed, waiting for the outcomes.
Jarvis’s situation is unique in one way: he is the only man on death row living in his crime scene. It’s as if he’d been convicted of killing a store clerk in a robbery, and his cell had been set up in that same store, so that for the rest of his life, his every move was watched and he was even fed by people who identified with his victim, people who thought every day about the dead clerk’s wife and children. And some day, several of the workers at that store might participate in executing Jarvis. Jarvis has more opportunity than most people on this earth to face up to how people feel about him.
Jarvis is usually stoic about his situation. He talks about karma, and the path he himself took, the choices he made. He often asks me to tell the “at-risk” youths I volunteer with, “You guys still have choices!
The hardest thing is that he has so few. He doesn’t live on ordinary death row. Because the crime he is convicted of involved a guard, he lives in San Quentin’s security housing unit called the Adjustment Center. Men on the more relaxed part of death row can make phone calls, listen to tapes, use typewriters. Those in the security housing can have only a few books and a TV. They stay in their cells for all but a few hours of yard time three times each week. Jarvis cannot choose what or when to eat, when to exercise or shower. He can’t turn the tier lights off or on, regulate the temperature in his cell, or have any control over when he receives visits or how long they last. I think it must be almost impossible to grow into a mature, responsible man when one is infantilized this way, and yet I have seen Jarvis grow.
Jarvis is very different today from the troubled defensive young man I met in 1986. He even looks different. When I met him, his face had a sullen, callous expression. But, as happens so often to patients with fatal or life-threatening illnesses, facing his death has opened him up. Having arrived at San Quentin with minimal reading and writing skills, he began to educate himself and to meditate. As I write, he is a mature thirty-five-year-old man, and he plays a constructive role on death row, helping younger men.
Not all officers hold a grudge against Jarvis. Quite a few have told me they respect the changes he has made in himself. I can tell from the relaxed bodies of the officers who know him that they do not fear him. In contrast to how they handle some other clients of mine, many greet Jarvis, smile at him, touch his shoulder. When I arrive for a visit, typically several officers I run into on my way in tell me to say hi to him.
Sergeant Burchfield was killed in June, and if Jarvis is going to have trouble with staff in the prison, it sometimes comes in the month of June. A few times during this month, Jarvis has been placed in the worst part of the prison—on the bottom tier of the security housing. The authorities who make this decision explain it as a “convenience.” This move is usually stressful at first, because Jarvis’s belongings—including his personal books and legal papers—are all taken from him, although they are later returned.
On that bottom tier of the security housing is a row of cells where the most problematic prisoners are kept. There, Jarvis’s neighbors yell all day and all night, and some have hallucinations in which insects are crawling on their bodies or other people are in their cells. Some do not clean themselves or refuse to eat for fear of being poisoned. If inmates in this condition don’t improve, they are eventually sent to hospital prisons and officially designated mentally ill. But in the meantime, they can be segregated, as they are in the security housing.
During those hard months Jarvis spends on the bottom tier, it is particularly difficult for me to watch him get ready to go back to his cell after our visits, which are among the few pleasant times he has. Ordinarily, Jarvis smiles and says good-bye, holding his hands behind him, close to the portal in the metal door so that the officer can reach through and ratchet cuffs onto his wrists. But when he’s living on this tier, when the time is up, he doesn’t smile. I don’t know what else to do, except stand patiently an extra second holding my papers, waiting for him to go.
During those months, I worry more about him than I usually do, afraid he will get sick or depressed. But he keeps up his spirits amazingly well. He says that in a way his new neighbors are easy to live with, because no matter what they do, he can’t really get mad at them.
Currently, Jarvis is living back upstairs in a warmer, drier cell. The men on either side are very quiet, giving him the best meditating and writing conditions he has had at San Quentin. Across from his cell is a window. Jarvis is glad the glass is broken, because although the air is cold sometimes, it’s fresh. Best of all, through the window Jarvis can see some far-off houses. Several children play outside, riding tricycles and throwing balls. Jarvis has given the children names, and he’s gotten to know them individually by watching them for hours as they play. At Christmastime, he can see the homes decorated with colored lights, the first he’s seen for many years.
Jarvis has been in prison so long, he loves to hear about the details of ordinary life. (I tease him that he probably went to jail before airplanes were invented. It’s true he’s never flown in one.) So I describe the pungent, crowded atmosphere of a favorite café, the students with their laptops, the smell of espresso, the stacks of free weekly papers.
Jarvis wants to know all about a hike or a family dinner, how it looked, felt, tasted, all the flavor of life that’s missing inside. When I tell such stories, we’re not exactly living in the moment. In fact, we’re not present in San Quentin at all. He is leaning back, smiling, imagining himself with my family or friends. I am reliving some recent event in my own life, seeing it all again. From Jarvis’s perspective my life is so rich, so complex, the world so beautiful.
I usually write with Jarvis, not about him. When we write together at the prison, we take a break from discussing the appeal of his case. I take off my watch and put it where he can see it on the ledge between us and one of us says, “All right, ten minutes, OK? Go!” The idea of this exercise is to loosen up our writer’s muscles without worrying about results. We just write, sometimes about a particular topic, such as “A Conversation Overheard” or “Rain.” Sometimes we write whatever comes, just keeping our pens moving. He on his side of the thick wire mesh, and I on my side, the side with the door to the outside world—we both of us put our heads down and scribble away. We are breathing the same stale prison air. We can both hear the murmur of other visits through the walls, and occasionally a guard’s voice calling out. Jarvis has more light—the visitor’s side of the visiting booth is dim and the prisoner’s side is brightly lit with a fluorescent tube.
I have an ordinary ballpoint pen, but he has only the innards of one; he’s not allowed to have the hard plastic case, so he writes with the flimsy plastic tube of ink. We are both equally intent on getting words onto paper.
When our writing time is over, Jarvis and I read the results to each other. These brief shared writing exercises encourage both of us to keep on writing, and sometimes together we produce seeds that later grow into Jarvis’s stories and my essays.
His writing and his meditation practice are what make life worth living for Jarvis. Studying Buddhism these past few years has helped him to gain remarkable insight. Neither he nor I have any illusions about the fact that he has harmed others. But he has taken the precepts of dedicating his remaining life to compassion and nonviolence—not an easy path in a violent prison.
There are many constraints on what Jarvis can write about, many of which can easily be imagined by any reader, as well as others that might be apparent only to those working or living within the penal system. And because his appeals are pending, Jarvis cannot write about his case. His appeals will go to both the state and federal courts, and he will not be close to execution or freedom for at least two more years.
Jarvis hopes, as he has written, that “those who want to try to make sense of it will see, through my writing, a human being who made mistakes. Maybe my writing will at least help them see me as someone who felt, loved and cared, someone who wanted to know for himself who he was."
Some readers may find themselves eager for more details about Jarvis's life and transformation. It is my hope and fervent prayer that the conditions of Jarvis's life will change so that those stories may be written.
Melody Ermachild Chavis
May 1997
Sanctuary
When I first entered the gates of San Quentin in the winter of 1981, I walked across the upper yard holding a box called a “fish-kit” filled with my prison-issued belongings. I saw the faces of hundreds who had already made the prison their home. I watched them stare at me with piercing eyes, their faces rugged and their beards of different shades—all dressed in prison blue jeans and worn, torn coats—some leaning against the chain fences, cigarettes hanging from their lips, others with dark glasses covering their eyes.
I will never forget when the steel cell door slammed shut behind me. I stood in the darkness trying to fix my eyes and readjust the thoughts that were telling me that this was not home—that this tiny space would not, could not be where I would spend more than a decade of my life. My mind kept saying, “No! Hell no!” I thought again of the many prisoners I had seen moments ago standing on the yard, so old and accustomed to their fates.
I dropped my fish-kit. I spread my arms and found that the palms of my hands touched the walls with ease. I pushed against them with all my might, until I realized how silly it was to think that these thick concrete walls would somehow budge. I groped for the light switch. It was on the back wall, only a few feet above the steel-plated bunk bed. The bed was bolted into the wall like a shelf. It was only two and a half feet wide by six feet long, and only several feet above the gray concrete floor.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by the time I turned the lights on. But until now I hadn’t seen the swarms of cockroaches clustered about, especially around the combined toilet and sink on the back wall. When the light came on, the roaches scattered, dashing into tiny holes and cracks behind the sink and in the walls, leaving only the very fat and young ones still running scared. I was beyond shock to see so many of these nasty creatures. And although they didn’t come near me, I began to feel roaches climbing all over my body. I even imagined them mounting an attack on me when I was asleep.
This was home. For hours I couldn’t bear the thought. The roaches, the filth plastered on the walls, the dirt balls collecting on the floor, and the awful smell of urine left in the toilet for God knows how long sickened me nearly to the point of passing out.
To find home in San Quentin I had to summon an unbelievable will to survive. My first step was to flush the toilet. To my surprise I found all I needed to clean my cell in the fish-kit—a towel, face cloth, and a box of state detergent. There were also a bar of state soap, a toothbrush and comb, a small can of powdered toothpaste, a small plastic cup, and two twenty-year-old National Geographic magazines, one of them from the month and year of my birth.
It seemed that time was now on my side. I started cleaning vigorously. I began with one wall, then went on to the next, scrubbing them from top to bottom as hard as I could to remove the markings and filth. I didn’t stop until I had washed them down to the floor and they were spotless. If I had to sleep in here, this was the least I could do. The cell bars, sink and toilet, and floor got the same treatment. I was especially worried about the toilet. I had heard that prisoners were compelled to wash their faces in their toilets whenever tear gas was shot into the units to break up mass disruptions and the water was turned off. I imagined leaning into this toilet, and I cleaned it to the highest military standards.
I spent hours, sometimes on my hands and knees, washing down every inch of my cell—even the ceiling. When I had finished, I was convinced that I could eat a piece of candy that had dropped onto the floor. The roaches had all drowned or been killed. I blocked off all their hiding places by plugging up the holes and cracks in the walls with wet toilet paper.
After the first days had passed, I decided to decorate my walls with photographs from the National Geographic magazines. The landscapes of Malaysia and other parts of the world had enormous beauty, and I gladly pasted photos of them everywhere. These small representations of life helped me to imagine the world beyond prison walls.
Over the years, I collected books and even acquired a television and radio—windows to the outside world. And I pasted many thousands of photographs on the wall. The one that has made my prison home most like a sanctuary to me is a small photograph of a Buddhist saint that a very dear friend sent to me. It has been in the center of my wall for a number of years.
I now begin every day with the practice of meditation, seated on the cold morning floor, cushioned only by my neatly folded blanket. Welcoming the morning light, I realize, like seeing through clouds, that home is wherever the heart can be found.
The Empowerment Ceremony
It was noon when my name was called out. A guard handcuffed me and escorted me to the visiting building of the prison. I silently repeated the prayer to Tara as I went, right up to the moment my eyes met Rinpoche’s, for the second time in my life.
After ten years of incarceration, I had a real fear of calling myself a Buddhist and of being seen by prisoners in a cross-legged position, praying or meditating. Meditation was for me a quiet practice that, to the extent I could, I kept secret from my fellow prisoners and the prison guards, so it would remain meaningful and pure in my heart when I sat each morning in the most tranquil hour of prison life.
I was especially uneasy about being seen receiving an empowerment, a formal introduction to Vajrayana Buddhism. I’d been denied my request to receive the empowerment in a private prison room. Rinpoche’s presence with an interpreter in the visiting room would most likely raise eyebrows. While my heart cherished this opportunity, other voices inside me questioned it. Could this
be just a phase I was going through? Would I later betray myself and the sacredness of this empowerment? Was I a Buddhist? Would I take vows that might require me to sacrifice my life? How would I respond to all the violence around me?
In prison, no one believes that conversion to religion is real. Most prisoners think that anyone who suddenly catches religion is playing a game or trying to con their way out of the system. Inmates distance themselves from religious prisoners, believing religion will make them weak.
I had spent almost a year overcoming these doubts, one by one, through my meditation and Rinpoche’s teachings. Yet somehow they had all resurfaced on the morning of the ceremony. The prison echoed with the routine vulgarity of hundreds of inmates cursing, arguing, and yelling all at once. I tried to ignore it, like most mornings when I meditated, but I was too unsettled.
I just sat still, repeating the prayer to Red Tara, the female Buddha, the embodiment of wisdom. Lisa had given this to me long ago to benefit my practice and prepare me for a future empowerment. “Illustrious Tara, please be aware of me, remove my obstacles and quickly grant my excellent aspirations.” With each repetition I searched for the strength to dispel my worries, to open myself fully to the empowerment, to embrace the day of my first proclamation of Buddhism.
I remembered what someone had said to me long ago: “All you need is a pure heart. It’s what’s in your heart that counts the most. Quietly listen for it.” This is what I was doing. I felt fortunate.
I sat down facing Rinpoche through the glass window. With him was Tsering, a close student, who had come to interpret for him. Melody was also there to celebrate this experience with me and, luckily, she took notes. We greeted each other warmly as other prisoners’ visitors looked on.
I picked up the phone. Tsering held the phone on their side of the booth. With a bright smile, she asked how I was doing. I smiled back and assured all of them I was doing fine. We were all smiling. Tsering then turned to Rinpoche to receive his words.
She looked back at me. “Rinpoche is asking if your mind is clear.”
“Yes, I think so,” I replied.
This is my best memory of Rinpoche’s words:
“You may feel that your circumstances are hopeless and serve no purpose. But difficulties are not caused by others; they are the result of your own previous thoughts and actions. This is what we call karma—our actions give rise to our future experience.
“Through spiritual practice, we purify the karma we have created in the past while creating the conditions for future happiness and eventual awakening, or enlightenment. We make a commitment: ‘I rely on the Buddha; the dharma, the Buddha’s teachings; and the sangha, those who practice those teachings. I won’t harm anyone with my body, speech, or mind.’ If you keep this promise, you won’t make future unhappiness for yourself or others. This is called the vow of refuge. It provides for your safety; just as if you don’t drink poison, you won’t get sick.
“But it’s not enough to think only of saving ourselves from suffering, because everyone suffers. People don’t realize that only thinking of themselves works against them, resulting in bad karma. That’s why we also promise to always think of others, to help them grow in their minds and hearts. But now we aren’t fully capable of this, so we do spiritual practice, removing our faults and increasing our capacity to help.
“In your heart, repeat this promise three times: ‘I rely on the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. From this day forward, I won’t harm anyone. I will work hard on my spiritual practice in order to accomplish the goal of enlightenment, removing all faults and revealing all positive qualities so that I may be of ceaseless benefit to others. That will be my priority every day, even if it costs my life.’”
After a few moments, I repeated this solemn vow.
Rinpoche continued, “Now you have taken the refuge vow and the bodhisattva vow—the vow of one who lives selflessly. Now you are a bodhisattva.”
I wanted to make sure I fully understood. “Helping others could cost me my life in here. Can I qualify my vow by common sense? Can I use my intelligence not to cause my own death?”
“If you help one person today and it costs your life, there is benefit, but only to one person,” Rinpoche replied. “But if you train your mind to help in the best way, you’ll help many—a hundred, a thousand, countless beings.
“This empowerment is the entrance to Vajrayana Buddhism, a very swift path to enlightenment. Usually the ceremony is done with many ritual objects, but the point is to touch your mind. Because karma is created with our body, speech, and mind, we must purify all three. In Vajrayana Buddhism, we do so by practicing recognizing, through meditation, the inherent purity of our body, speech, and mind. . . .
“One way of understanding the deeper nature of our experience is to think of this life as a dream. Enlightenment is waking up, finding freedom from the dream of suffering. Through meditation we come to realize that everything is like an illusion. . . .
“Just as movies are really only light on cellophane, realize that all this is really the movie of your mind. Try to understand that the true nature of your body, speech, and mind is deathless, faultless, and pure. . . .
“Your thoughts, whether good or bad, just come and go—they’re only firings of your brain—whereas the essence of mind is open, present, aware.
“There are two ways to change the mind. One is to think, think, think. The other is to let go of thinking and just let the mind settle. . . .
“From now on, your spiritual practice will involve these three commitments: harmlessness, helpfulness, and purity. Eventually, you will realize your own pure nature. As long as the dream of life seems real, you will feel heaven and hell, experience helpful and harmful people. These are simply the displays of mind’s purity and mind’s hatred. It’s like being surrounded by mirrors—if we are dirty and ugly, that’s what we will see. We have to clean ourselves for the image in the mirror to change. It’s all a function of mind.
“For example, someone may feel there is nothing worse than living in prison, but a person who lives in a beautiful house might be so miserable that he kills himself. No matter how much you are suffering, there is always someone suffering more. . . .
“Life is impermanent. Whoever is born will die, but we don’t know when. All we can be sure of is the present moment. Every moment is a chance to practice these three commitments. This is how we break out of the cycle of karmic existence.
“At the end of every day, confess your negative thoughts and actions and recommit yourself to spiritual practice, taking your vows again. All the merit, the positive energy, that you have created throughout your life, give it to all beings—to victims and aggressors, to animals and all. Every time you do something good, instantly give the merit away.”
It sounded so easy when he said it. “I feel pure when I am with you,” I told him, “but it’s easy to forget.”
“Remember the three steps,” Rinpoche reminded me. “First, ask for support from Tara. Second, with sincere regret for the harm you have done, confess your mistakes. Third, renew your vows not to harm, to try to help, and to recognize purity. Visualize Tara’s blessings in the form of light and nectar washing you, cleansing you, filling you with bliss. Pray and visualize the light and nectar blessing you and all beings.”
“If I have wronged someone, do I have to tell them?” I asked.
“It may or may not help. What’s most important is to confess within yourself and pray for that other person.”
Our visit lasted close to two hours. After the empowerment ended, it became very difficult to hear anything over the phone. The din of inmates speaking through a chain of phones to their visitors made it a struggle to hear my own. Had the noise been this loud during the empowerment? I felt as if I had taken plugs out of my ears—as though I had just reentered the vast door of prison reality.
t the end of the visit, I thanked Melody for being there and asked her to thank Rinpoche for his many blessings. I told her that I had stopped short of expressing myself fully to him and to Tsering because I had felt so much gratitude welling up and didn’t want to be seen in such an emotional state. Melody understood. She hung up the phone and departed, waving good-bye with Rinpoche and Tsering. I waved back.
As I waited for my escort to take me back to my housing unit, an inmate called over to me and asked if I was a practicing Buddhist. I paused. Just as I began to answer, a prison guard came and stood between us to listen in. When I looked at the guard, his eyes wandered away. “Sure I am,” I said to the prisoner. I looked at the guard. “There may just be a taste of Buddha in us all.”
The guard turned to me with a surprisingly nice smile, and then walked off. I was amazed! I looked back through the window with a powerful sense that Rinpoche was still there. I bowed three times to the empty chair.
Understanding impermanence, that things are here today and gone tomorrow, really helps. No matter how bad something is, you can remind yourself, “Damn, this won’t last long.” Then when it doesn’t last, you can laugh and say, “I knew it!” What goes around, comes around, and what comes around doesn’t last. Everybody gets their turn: the police jump on you, the light goes out, there’s a roach in your soup.
My only real hope is to stay in my center, not wishing for something good or fearing something bad. It’s very freeing, because if good things happen and you get attached to them, you’ll suffer when the bad inevitably comes. You have to learn to accept both.
I know what it feels like to lose a mother. Rinpoche tells a story of a woman whose son dies. She goes to a lama, and he tells her to try to find someone who hasn’t lost someone. She goes from house to house, village to village, until she realizes that everyone has lost something or someone. Then she starts to feel more pain for them than for herself. She ends up spending half her time helping others. But that’s what heals her.
I imagine that in teaching meditation on the streets, you’d teach people how to better themselves. Here, I learn how not to dive deeper into this hellhole. I’ve learned more about the things I don’t want to do: cuss out other prisoners or guards, argue for two hours about whether or not the lunch meat is spoiled. I don’t want to become angry about things like that.
Every effort I make to love means I don’t have to feel hatred. When I’m compassionate, all my energy goes in a positive direction, and there’s no room for negativity. My tires can’t go backward, they can only roll forward.
Afterword
H.E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
All of us live in a prison called samsara, cyclic existence, and not one of us is free from suffering. In addition to distress experienced in the course of birth, old age, sickness, and death, we find ourselves in situations of anguish, prison, war, famine, abuse, grief, and acute frustration of our needs and desires. To find release, we must first recognize the source of our pain.
Nothing is accomplished by blaming God, or parents, or the police, or outer enemies. The source of suffering is karma ripening from seeds we have planted in the long-forgotten past, including previous lifetimes. Whatever actions we took based on virtue—kindness, compassion, and love—are the cause of the happiness we experience now. And vice versa, the pain and negative conditions we experience have arisen from selfishness and anger and ignorance of what to accept and what to reject. Few people should trust their past karma. Rich, dynamic, good-looking people can experience shocking reversals of fortune, including violent attacks, accidents, sickness, and other causes of ruin. “What an unbelievable tragedy!” we exclaim, not realizing that it is an inevitable outcome of unrecognized, unpurified karma.
To acknowledge our own karma as the cause of our experience empowers us to purify it and transform our future. To understand that we are not unique in our suffering, to look for a way to reduce suffering for ourselves and others, gives birth to authentic compassion, beyond mere pity. In this book, Jarvis Masters demonstrates taking these steps and entering the path toward liberation. Against great odds, he has made the commitment to refrain from harsh responses and harmful actions. He has found the basic goodness of his own true nature and extended his intention to benefit others. Ultimately, compassion and beneficial intention must become impartial and include both victim and aggressor. If we contemplate deeply, we may even develop more compassion for the aggressor because, while the moment of suffering purifies the victim’s karma, in the same moment the aggressor is creating the causes that give rise to cycle after cycle of hellish pain in the future.
We need not wait passively until our nonvirtuous karma flares into unfortunate circumstances before we purify it. We can invoke as our witness an enlightened presence—God, Jesus, Buddha—whomever we recognize as the embodiment of supreme compassion, omniscience, and power. We acknowledge our negative actions of body, speech, and mind—actions remembered or not, actions in this and former lifetimes. Surely some negativity remains or we would now be enlightened wisdom beings ourselves, devoid of anger and selfish desires. We then make the commitment not to repeat such actions and visualize that, from our spiritual witness, radiant light or purifying nectar arises, completely pervading us and cleansing our nonvirtuous karma.
When past harmfulness has already ripened into difficult situations, we can still use this meditation to purify it. And if, during a painful period, we can transcend self-focus for even one instant with the thought, “May my own suffering prevent others from having to experience this,” the power of our compassion will purify immense amounts of negative karma and the power of our good heart will guarantee more pleasurable circumstances in the future.
May such happiness arise for Jarvis and for all who read his book. Ultimately, may all beings be released from the endless cycles of karmic delusion and find liberation into a state of enlightenment.
H.E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master and the author of three books: Gates to Buddhist Practice, Lord of the Dance, and Life in Relation to Death.
Jarvis can receive and will try to answer letters mailed to the following address. In accordance with prison regulations, all other materials sent to him are discarded or donated.
Jarvis Masters
P.O. Box C-35169
San Quentin, CA 94974
