— I continue to do my purification practices so that maybe my next life will be devoted to practice and study. I think being alone in prison all these years, and all the years IÕve spent in isolation in the SHU have prepared me to be a monk in my next life. Well, thatÕs what I pray for. —

Richard Jacuinde, New Folsom Prison, California


— Worldly people, common people, believe that prison has a beginning and an end. But the real prison is being under the control of delusion and its action, karma. —

Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Liberation Prison Project’s Tibetan Calendar

Liberation Tibetan Calendar 2009, Year of the Earth Ox 2136BUY A CALENDAR

Every year since 1999, Liberation Prison Project has produced and sold thousands of Liberation Tibetan lunar calendars to support our work, helping people in prison with their Buddhist practice. Each year we give away at least 1,500 calendars to inmates studying with the project.

We are established as nonprofit organizations in the US and Australia with offices in San Francisco and the Australian Blue Mountains. We also have branches in Spain, Mexico and Mongolia.

“Whenever we get a chance to go outside where there is grass, and it corresponds to a Tsog offering day on my calendar, I pick fresh flowers and dedicate them to all the Buddhas of the three times and all sangha members,” says Chris Helstowski of Pelican Bay State Prison in California.

A small, elegant wall calendar, Liberation includes the Tibetan lunar calendar and information about more than thirty kinds of practice days and auspicious and inauspicious days for each month.

The calendar is prepared by astrologer Ngawang Thartho based on the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute’s calendar, with additional advice from Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Spiritual Director of FPMT, and Geshe Ngawang Dakpa, astrologer lama of FPMT’s Tse Chen Ling in San Francisco.

The calendar includes:


• Buddhist images

• Inspirational sayings from Buddhist spiritual masters

• Good days for practice

• Birthdays and anniversaries of holy beings

• Unfavorable days

• Medicine Buddha pujas

• No funerals or cremations

• Moons and eclipses

• No starting new business activities

• Fire pujas

• No weddings

• Tara days

• No parties


Each year we distribute thousands of Liberation calendars to Buddhist centers and bookstores throughout the world, raising funds for the prison project.

Liberation calendars cost US$9.00 plus the cost of shipping.