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“This profound, gorgeous book displays the miraculous human capacity to find redemption, and even joy, no matter who or where we are. Jarvis Masters’ story proves that we are all united by our suffering and by our potential to help others who suffer.”

—Sr. Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

“An inspiring book about how meaning can be found even in—perhaps especially in—adversity. It’s a study of Buddhism, of criminal justice, of the ways people connect with each other, and it’s written with deep feeling and verve.”
—Andrew Solomon, author of New York Times Bestseller Far From the Tree

Early reviews

Kirkus Reviews
THE BUDDHIST ON DEATH ROW 
How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place
Author: David Sheff

The “Three Jewels” of Buddhism help an African American man dubiously convicted of a jailhouse murder overcome decades of hellacious abuse inside San Quentin State Prison. Jarvis Jay Masters entered San Quentin State Prison at age 19. One night, four years into a sentence for armed robbery, prison guard Howell Burchfield was stabbed to death on duty inside the penitentiary. Masters steadfastly denied any involvement in the deadly conspiracy but was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death. In response to his decades long imprisonment on death row—much of it in solitary confinement—Masters turned to an intense study of meditation and Buddhist thought. Those practices not only preserved his life and sanity—they ultimately transformed him from a stunted individual engulfed in anger and self-loathing into a purposeful man of compassion dedicated to uplifting everyone he could. Further directing his anguish and pain to writing, Masters began publishing a voluminous body of illuminating stories and poems that revealed him to be more of a bodhisattva than the death row monster the State of California penal system painted him out to be. An ever widening circle of friends and teachers became convinced of Masters’ innocence, too, and dedicated their own lives to his exoneration. The author would come to know Masters through his writings as well. Applying the same mix of empathy and journalistic integrity demonstrated in Beautiful Boy (2009), Sheff conveys Masters’ transformative jailhouse exchanges with Buddhist masters, family members, and special friends with poignancy and profound emotional power. During one episode, Masters attempts to counsel a young man newly arrived on death row. "When you’re in hell and things can’t get any worse, you can try things you never tried before," he says. "Like trusting people. Looking at yourself. Admitting you’re scared.” An indelible portrait of an incarcerated man finding new life and purpose behind bars.

Publishers Weekly
BEST BOOKS
Starred Review
THE BUDDHIST ON DEATH ROW
How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place
David Sheff. Simon & Schuster

Sheff (Beautiful Boy) draws from research and personal correspondence to tell the stirring story of Jarvis Jay Masters, a convicted murderer awaiting execution on California’s death row who converted to Buddhism and has found a kind of freedom despite the death sentence looming over him. Masters was 19 years old when he was convicted of armed robbery and sent to California’s San Quentin State Prison in 1990. Nine years later, he was convicted of the murder of a prison guard and sentenced to death. After being advised by a criminal investigator working on his case to perform breathing exercises to help with anxiety, Masters became interested in Buddhism. He discovered that practicing the faith allowed him to change the ways he related to himself and to others, and Sheff captures the difficult, powerful realizations Masters gained as a result of his practice (“Buddhism is about how we’re all the same, in this world together, struggling. Life is hard for everyone—we’re all suffering together”), leading him to become a comforting, beneficial presence to his fellow inmates. In an epilogue, Sheff asks readers to consider how one’s perspective can turn a situation of “sadness, pain, and regret” into “light and joy and love.” This Buddhist Dead Man Walking will pull at the heartstrings of any reader. (May}

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The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place
Simon & Schuster 2020

David Sheff is the #1 bestselling author of Beautiful Boy, which described the world of addiction as no book had before. With The Buddhist on Death Row (available May 5, 2020), Sheff offers a fresh view the tenets of Buddhism and the evils of the criminal justice system through the story of Jarvis Jay Masters, who has been imprisoned at San Quentin since 1981. After being accused of murdering a prison guard in 1986, a criminal investigator offered to teach Masters breathing exercises to help him deal with the rage, anxiety, and panic as he prepared for his trial. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he tried meditating and likened it to the George Clinton lyric, “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

The son of a heroin-addicted prostitute and a violent father, Masters’ horrific early life made his imprisonment at nineteen all too predictable. How he went from there to enlightenment is anything but predictable—a uniquely uplifting, fascinating story. Masters became one of America’s most respected Buddhist practitioners during his two decades in solitary confinement at San Quentin. And his Buddhist practice has helped him do something extraordinary—cultivate a meaningful life in a place which would seem devoid of hope. He has transformed his own life by embracing compassion, forgiveness, and the deep value of every moment. More remarkably, he has defused conflicts among prisoners, defended inmates who were vulnerable to attack, instructed young prisoners in nonviolence and challenged them to rethink their definitions of manhood. Reaching across the deepest prison divide, he has even counseled a guard who’d planned to kill himself. But despite this transformation, and the fact that most of those who testified against him in his original murder trial have since recanted their testimony, he still resides on death row. His most recent appeal in 2019 was denied by the California Supreme Court, and his case now moves to the federal court.

Sheff does a brilliant job of reifying Masters’ gradual but profound transformation into a bodhisattva— someone dedicated to reducing others’ suffering. Over the course of three years, Sheff made more than 200 trips to death row, recorded more than 150 hours of conversations, and spoke with Masters for countless hours by phone. Though not a Buddhist himself, Sheff learned a multitude of lessons from all the time he’s spent with Masters, which he shares with readers. Among those lessons: our astonishing capacity for change, the value of letting go of goals and embracing processes, and how to face pain head-on and rise above it, rather than avoiding it. This is a profound book about one man’s capacities for learning, enduring, and ultimately, inspiring others—capacities we all share.

BUDDHIST ON DEATH ROW by DAVID SHEFF

by Jessica Zack 
Psychology Today

Like a lot of people with newfound interest in Buddhist meditation, Jarvis Jay Masters struggled at first to sit still and quiet his mind. His thoughts wandered. Noises distracted him. Sometimes he was flooded with dark, shameful memories, so instead of serenity he felt panic. He worried he wasn’t breathing right. Most of all, he wondered, “Why bother?”

A mindfulness practice is challenging under the best circumstances, on a soft cushion in a quiet room, but Masters was attempting the seemingly impossible: turning inward, in search of greater peace and equanimity, while living on San Quentin’s Death Row.

“Sit? Close my eyes? Are you out of your goddamn mind? If you want to survive in here, you don’t close your eyes,” Masters told Melody Erimachild Chavis, the criminal defense investigator who offered to teach him some basic breathing exercises to quell his rage and anxiety as they prepared for his 1989 murder trial.

But out of desperation, he reluctantly took her advice and started sitting cross-legged on the floor of his 4½-by-10½-foot cell before dawn, on a folded blanket wedged between the steel toilet and the bed.

Marin County journalist and author David Sheff — whose best-selling 2008 book, “Beautiful Boy,” about his son Nic’s struggle with drug addiction, was made into the 2018 Steve Carell/Timothée Chalamet film — recounts this story in the opening pages of his fascinating, uncommonly uplifting new book, “The Buddhist on Death Row,” available Tuesday, Aug. 4.

Sheff chronicles Masters’ spiritual awakening and radical transformation into a deeply respected Buddhist practitioner, a man of uncommon wisdom and spiritual grace, over the three decades after those first awkward attempts at meditating behind bars.

Now 58, Masters arrived at San Quentin in 1981 at 19 years old, a hardened, angry young man who had been in and out of unsafe foster care and juvenile detention facilities since he was 9. He was serving a 20-year sentence for armed robberies in 1985 when he was accused of participating in a conspiracy to murder a correctional officer.

Masters has always maintained his innocence. Despite substantial holes in the prosecution’s case (no weapon was found; witnesses recanted their testimony), he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1990.

A vocal group of supporters, including San Francisco writer and activist Rebecca Solnit and Buddhist abbess and writer Pema Chödrön, continue to fight for his exoneration. A new podcast, “Dear Governor,” explores his case.

“The Buddhist on Death Row,” Sheff’s seventh book, focuses on Masters’ discovery that daily meditation could help him survive, and even thrive, psychologically and spiritually, while incarcerated. Being locked up and denied basic freedoms presented him with tangible reminders of some of Buddhism’s central, paradoxical truths: that fear and regret live in the mind, and mental liberation can be found anywhere.

“We all live in a prison, and we all hold the key,” Tibetan teacher Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, who guided Masters’ spiritual practice until his death in 2002, wrote to Masters in a letter. The key, the lama explained, is practice — meditating twice a day, even when it is difficult.

Sheff first learned about Masters 10 years ago from his friend Pamela Krasney, a Mill Valley prison reform activist. She had met Masters through Chödrön, and had been visiting him regularly for years.

“As a journalist, I’m sort of a cynic, so I didn’t quite know what to think when (Pamela) told me Jarvis was the most extraordinary person she’d ever met,” Sheff told The Chronicle by phone from his home in Inverness. “I wondered whether she and (his supporters) were naive. Doesn’t almost everyone in prison claim they’re innocent? But I was also intrigued by her description of him as somebody who is living in the most bleak place imaginable, and yet is positive, empathetic and uplifting. She said he’d become a Buddhist teacher himself, a force for good in San Quentin, teaching meditation to inmates and intervening to thwart acts of violence, and that he’d written books that have helped kids and others outside the prison. I thought, ‘Really?’ ”

Sheff attended Masters’ evidentiary hearing in San Rafael. He was intrigued but wasn’t ready to delve more deeply into Masters’ story because his family was living through the darkest, scariest period of Nic’s addiction, and Sheff was consumed with fear that he’d lose his son to an overdose.

Fast-forward to 2015: Nic was safe and sober for four years. After Krasney’s death that year, Sheff heard Chödrön read a heartfelt eulogy written by Masters at her memorial service.

“I listened to that letter and thought about how extraordinary it was that we were sitting in Mill Valley, and just around the bay Jarvis was sitting in a locked prison cell. I decided to go meet him and talk to him” about writing a book, Sheff said.

“I told him, ‘If I go forward, I’m going to write the truth, the whole story, the good and the bad.’ And he said, ‘I can’t be painted worse than I’ve been painted.’ For somebody on death row, that’s probably true.”

Over the next three years, Sheff made 200 visits to San Quentin and recorded more than 150 hours of phone conversations with Masters. “I started to open up about my own life, my struggles,” Sheff said. “and so a relationship naturally developed.”

As the two grew increasingly trusting, Sheff felt convinced “that Jarvis was everything Pamela and Pema and others had described to me: an extraordinary thinker, an incredibly thoughtful person, one who could have by all rights been angry and bitter, vengeful, depressed, suicidal as so many are at San Quentin. But he was the opposite: open, kind and truly concerned with people he knew in the prison who were suffering and struggling, and people on the outside too.

Sheff was still visiting Masters once a week, up until San Quentin’s COVID-19 lockdown. Masters became seriously ill with the virus the first two weeks of July. The prisoner in the cell adjacent to his died. (There have been 19 deaths and more than 2,100 confirmed cases at San Quentin.) Masters published an essay about mismanagement of the pandemic at the prison and spoke to The Chronicle about what the outbreak is like from Death Row.
“Jarvis has a wonderful sense of humor, and because we banter and laugh a huge amount when we talk on the phone, it’s dangerously easy for me to forget how utterly grim his circumstances are,” said Solnit, who considers Masters a friend and has written powerful essays about him. “David’s book really drove home the fact that Jarvis lives in some of the most brutal conditions of anyone on earth, and he is the most remarkable case of somebody overcoming circumstances to make a meaningful life.”

Sheff said he struggled in early drafts to strike the right balance between the intricacies of Masters’ legal case and a portrait of him as an unlikely spiritual warrior.

“In my view, anybody who does the reading will draw the same conclusion that I did, that he was framed,” Sheff said. “The injustice of living with that injustice is a challenge I can’t even imagine, but I really wanted to focus more on his journey, on how a person changes.”

While he’s not a Buddhist himself, Sheff admits that in the process of examining Masters’ life, he too changed in unforeseen ways. Masters’ journey to mindfulness taught him about the Buddhist notion that the more one accepts suffering, on a personal and universal scale, the less one suffers, and the more one can respond with compassion to others’ pain.

“I never imagined that I would be impacted to such a degree by reporting someone else’s story,” said Sheff. “I’ve spent a lot of time since writing ‘Beautiful Boy’ and my next two books (2013’s ‘Clean’ and 2019’s ‘High,’ co-written with Nic) traveling around the country talking to people impacted by addiction, especially parents. Afterwards, there were long lines of people wanting to connect with somebody who understood their story. It was so moving, but also overwhelming, people who would burst into tears before they said a word because they’d lost their child. I would leave those events completely drained, and really depressed.

“In the middle of all this, Jarvis got into my head, and I realized that people were in a sense giving me a gift, by opening up their hearts and souls to me and sharing their pain. … I was grateful for the connection with them, and that came directly from this journey,” Sheff continued.

“I mean, look what our world is like now. Look how much suffering is around us. But when we realize we’re all in this together, there is power in that and peace in that. I don’t think I ever would have gotten there if it wasn’t for those years spent talking to Jarvis.”

Link to original article here

Review, Shelf Awareness
Review
The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place

For 30 years, Jarvis Jay Masters has been a resident of San Quentin State Prison's death row, some two decades of them in solitary confinement. As one of 700 inmates currently in that grim status, his story would not be remarkable, but for the fact that during his long imprisonment he's become an esteemed Buddhist teacher, and a confidant of the well-known writer and teacher Pema Chödrön.

In The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place, journalist David Sheff (Beautiful Boy) renders Masters's story in highly sympathetic fashion, tracing his transformation and describing the efforts of Chödrön and a growing cadre of supporters to overturn what they believe is his unjust death sentence.

Though he seems to share a belief in Masters's innocence, Sheff is less concerned with the machinations of his subject's multiple (and so far unsuccessful) legal appeals than he is with the way Buddhist practices have helped him to cope with his dire circumstances. Through his deep engagement with these teachings, he explains, Masters has come to understand that "when his mind was free, he was free," and that many who live their lives outside the walls of a prison are themselves in chains.

For all its hardship and heartbreak, The Buddhist on Death Row is an inspiring story of one man's ability to surmount suffering by applying the power of his mind. Anyone who's been tempted to explore meditation and mindfulness but who hasn't taken the first step should find encouragement in Jarvis Masters's far more difficult journey.

link to original review here