Bill Kostura and Phil Goodwin present the third talk in a speaker series on The Engaged Buddhist. They describe their experience teaching dharma at a California men's prison over a period of several years. Their stories evoke the feelings of traveling the long distance to the prison, the difficulties of entering a secured facility, both tender and challenging interactions with inmates, and the refuge created by the practice for the inmates and even themselves.

Meditation instructions are sometimes misinterpreted to imply that one should disengage from activity and suspend all judgment. Buddhist advice on “letting go” can be misunderstood to suggest that problems in the world can or should be ignored. Yet the Pali canon shows that the Buddha taught practical social and economic remedies, and urged monks to travel so they could benefit the largest number of people. Thích Nhất Hạnh coined the term “engaged Buddhism” to describe efforts to respond to the suffering in his country during the Vietnam war, work he saw as part of meditation and mindfulness practice rather than something apart from it. In this series, some local “engaged Buddhists” will share how they personally apply Buddhist wisdom to engage with the suffering around us, in areas such as social action, prison ministry, and environmentalism.