The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch seemed like it had a great point to make, but I didn't have a deep enough understanding of Buddhist thought to appreciate it. I wrote a few letters to local colleges asking if there were any basic books on Buddhism available. A woman on the staff of one of the colleges forwarded my letter to the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California, and they sent me a little book called The Teaching of Buddha . Reading this book was like discovering common sense right in front of your face. It covers Buddhist principles in such a basic way that anyone can gasp the concepts.
People suffer because of attachments of one sort or another.
This whole prison is full of people who couldn't control their attachments, their greed, lust, hate or whatever. By synchronicity or karma, a professor of the Chinese language with whom I had been corresponding wrote to me that he had just learned of a new organization, the Prison Dharma Network. Through PDN my name was matched with that of Gelong Tsultrim Tondrup, an American who, while serving with the Peace Corps in India in 1970, became a monk in the Tibetan tradition. One of the important lessons I learned was that, monastic vows or not, Tsultrim was still a person. Monks don't just cash in their personalities for robes.