Open Buddha

I’ve received word back that I am now approved to visit and on the visitor’s list for San Quention. SQ is the big (and fairly famous) prison in the Bay Area of California. What many people don’t know is that it is also a facility with an incredible amount of volunteers and volunteer work. There are all kinds of groups and individuals meeting with inmates to try to help their lives or give them opportunities.

There has been a Zen sangha there for ten years or so. Most of the volunteers for it are affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center or East Bay Community of Mindful Living. It meets every week on Sunday evening and has a fairly regular population of inmates during its existence, though people do tend to come and go as inmates get transferred around, released, or simply move on.

A number of years back, I spent about a year and a half volunteering at McNeil Island in Washington State (the only surviving prison on an island, as far as I know). This was in a Neopagan context, working with a friend who had been running a group out of the chapel there for a few years. My own practice was transitioning to Buddhism at this point but he needed help, effectively running a one man shop on his own. I began helping him and quickly wound up running things as he was forced to go to Iraq for our lovely war there. Eventually, I simply couldn’t maintain the level of commitment involved, especially with the prison being hours and a ferry ride away, but I have been wanting to go back to working with inmates. The group at San Quentin, with its large volunteer pool, is a good opportunity to get back into this sort of thing. It’s only a 25 minute or so drive away on the other side of the Bay.

As I’ve mentioned to people before, prison really strips things to their essentials for a lot (if not all) people. The inmates have so little control over their lives and, really, so little to actually do that they wind up having a lot of things that we all tend to ignore in our lives made unavoidable. They have nothing but time to think and, if so inclined, they have ample opportunity something as straightforward as a meditation and study practice. Given the barrenness of life in prison, as well as the stresses, anything that can be done to support inmates in practice should be done, in my opinion.

This is leaving aside the unfortunately large part of the population that thinks inmates should be locked away for life, treated like animals, and forgotten by society while they are being punished. That doesn’t really play well with Buddhist ethics though. These people made mistakes, often many of them, and are, justly or not, paying a price for them. Cause and effect is karma in its essential form. That being true, they are still not any different than you or me and you have to ask yourself, when working with inmates, how easily it could be you on the inside there. I’ve certainly wondered at times. It is important to treat them as people and give them opportunities. If they don’t choose to avail themselves to them, that’s one thing, but it is one of the best ways to help them turn their lives around when they want to do so. We have one of the largest prison populations in the world and these are men and women that are shit upon by society, even once it is all over. The Dharma is for everyone, not just for supposedly perfect people. Everyone!

I’ve owned the onesangha.org domain for a while. In 2008, I made an attempt to get a group Buddhist blog going there drawing on people from a number of different traditions. For a variety of reasons, that blog never had more than a couple of posts, mostly because the other authors were just a bit too busy.

I’ve spoken about E-sangha here before and all of the problems that Buddhist forum had during the last few years (almost entirely problems of their own creation). As it turns out, E-sangha died a final death sometime in this last year. While the Zen guys have created the Zen Forum International, there hasn’t been any large scale replacement for a non-sectarian Buddhist web forum. All current efforts are organized around specific groups, traditions, or commercial enterprises. For example, the Karma Kagyu have a very active group on ning.com but it is limited to their own people. Tricycle magazine has an active site as well but it is a vehicle to support the magazine, its content, and community.

In the last few years, social networking has continued to move to the forefront of the daily activity of people, bringing more people into active participation online. Because of this, I think that this is actually a great time to have some sort of social networking site as well as something that can replace the aforementioned E-sangha. To this end, I’ve repurposed the onesanghga.org domain to create the, simply named, OneSangha community site.

The site is built using Buddypress, an add-on to WordPress that allows one to integrate social networking into a wordpress-based site. Additionally, Buddypress supports BBpress, a web forum software made by the same people. I’ve used WordPress for my blogs for years, which makes it pretty easy for me. We’re also using it (and probably Buddypress) on the Mozilla Quality site that I work on for work.

Buddypress is based around the concept of “groups” within it. People create their personal accounts and then join or create groups on the site. These groups act as a gathering place for activity, host personal updates and forums. There is also the possibility of adding a group blog to each of the groups through plugins. This means that each interest group, tradition of Buddhist practice, or organization can create its own group, such as “Kwan Um School” group or a “Avatamsaka Sutra” group.

The site also allows users to tie into twitter (which I use quite heavily), pulling their tweets into OneSangha and being able to post from OneSangha into twitter under their accounts as well. I’ve added RSS feeds for groups and posts, which will also make it much easier to read content when not on the site, which has been difficult with other forums in the past.

Right now, the site is very much in an alpha stage. There are all of six or seven users and two groups in existence on it. I’m encouraging people to make accounts, log in, create groups, and play around with the site. I’m also continuing to add useful plugins to enhance the existing functionality.

I’ll probably need to add some sort of text advertisements or something similar on the pages simply to pay for the hosting fees but I’m hoping to keep such things pretty low-key and as unobtrusive as possible.

Please come check it out if you are looking for a Buddhist social networking site and web forum. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t like (leaving aside Buddhist teachings about preferences for the moment). If you are interested in helping out in some fashion, please let me know as well. The theming, look and feel, etc. are all pretty basic at this point.