Drug Addict Serving His Time as a Zen Novice in Buddhist Monastery

Heroin addict Keith Scofield had three choices: Go to jail, go to Colorado for drug treatment or check into a monastery.

He chose Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a Buddhist monastery sitting atop a mountain in the Catskills, 80 miles northwest of New York City.

Scofield is about a third of the way through a self-imposed two-year sentence as a Zen novice, using 2,500-year-old meditation techniques to relieve his craving for drugs.

“If I had gone back into drug treatment, I would have wound up back in jail, or dead,” says Scofield, 31, a heroin addict since he was 13. Five previous drug programs had failed him.

“The reason I got lost into drugs is that I didn’t care,” he adds.

In Colorado, he would have spent two years in a boot camp-style program, where “I would have been thinking, ‘Don’t just shave my head and have me scrub floors with a toothbrush. Give me something new, something to be excited about.’ ”

Scofield’s foray into Buddhism began a year ago, when he was sitting in Loudoun County Jail in Virginia. He was jailed in June, 1989, after he was caught shoplifting, a violation of his 1988 probation for drug possession. That drug arrest came after he overdosed on heroin.

In his cell, Scofield began reading Zen manuals and meditating. After five months, he went before a judge who gave him two options: five years in prison or two years at the Colorado military camp. Scofield, encouraged by the tranquility he had found through Buddhism, suggested a monastery as a third alternative.

The judge agreed, with the understanding that if Scofield left the monastery before his two years ended, or if he broke the monks’ rules, he would be jailed for five years.

Last December, Scofield was freed and exiled himself to the remote monastery, which can be reached only by a 20-mile trip up a winding, narrow dirt road. His case was assigned to a New York probation officer.

Since then, Scofield’s days have begun at 5 a.m., with a regimen of chanting, meditation, manual labor, yoga and Spartan vegetarian meals.

“Some people thought I somehow scammed my way out of a prison sentence,” Scofield says. “But if I had chosen jail, I could have just sat tight, done my time and walked out.”

He also could have been paroled in less than two years.

Conventional drug treatment gave Scofield the rational reasons to quit drugs, but no emotional or spiritual ones, he says. A year was the longest he stayed off drugs after conventional treatment.

The introspective searching of Zen philosophy fills that void, he says.

“Drugs are a symptom. You’ve got to come to a deeper realization of the truth,” says monastery vice abbot Junpo Dennis Kelly.

Kelly, who was reluctant to let Scofield come to the monastery, now gives 2-to-1 odds that Buddhism will help him overcome his addiction.

“At first I said, ‘He’s a junkie, and junkies break down,’ ” Kelly says. “You’ve got to be desperate to come here, because this is spiritual graduate school. But Keith’s been a very, very good student.”

Kelly says his own background as an LSD manufacturer and user makes him sympathetic to Scofield. Kelly spent a year in federal prison in the 1980s for drug trafficking.

Scofield could be a pioneer for the monastery, which may take in more criminal drug users. That would have been unthinkable two years ago, says abbot Eido Roshi, who founded the traditional Japanese monastery in 1976. But the monastery is “Americanizing” itself, blending Zen spiritual tradition with Western worldliness.

Drug rehabilitation experts say they had never heard of anyone trying to overcome addiction at a monastery, but conceded that different addicts need different handling.

“Recovery is a journey for anyone who is addicted, and people take different paths in their recovery,” says Jane Fedderly, spokeswoman for the Hazeldon Rehabilitation Center in Center City, Minn.

“The name of the game is recovery. I wouldn’t knock what he’s doing,” Fedderly said.

Scofield says that his well-ordered 16-hour days are at least as taxing as the boot camp that awaited him in Colorado. And monastic life is far more strenuous than life in prison or a conventional drug program.

Yet he’s approaching his new life with zeal. The day begins with group chanting before the monastery’s carved wooden Buddha. After breakfast, Scofield works chopping wood, painting, repairing walls and ceilings.

Four hours of meditation are spread throughout the day, the longest period coming before the lights go out at 9 p.m.

“I really got lucky,” Scofield says. “I didn’t know what sort of place this would turn out to be. I remember thinking, what if it’s an old barn with 20 monks sitting in a circle chanting. But then I thought, it really doesn’t matter as long as I change my life. What I had before wasn’t really much of a life.”