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VOLUME X:2
July-December 2020 
“TO LEARN IN DEPTH FROM A HINDU OR BUDDHIST EXPERIENCE” Thomas Merton’s Spiritual Journey in Dialogue with Eastern Spiritualities*
Abstract
This article traces the stages that marked the Asian pilgrimage of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), that is, the spiritual journey that the American Trappist monk made when he entered the terrain of “Eastern spiritualities,” in particular Buddhism. Merton’s spiritual journey is an inspiring model for an existential dialogical encounter between the experience of Christian faith and Eastern spiritual experiences. It suggests that the transforming fruitfulness of the encounter between these two religious paths does not lie in the enjoyment or pursuit of a convergence between similar or parallel mystical experiences, but rather in the dialogic tension between irreducibly different experiences. In this perspective, Merton’s experience also suggests an original interpretation of the phenomenon of the so-called “double religious belonging,” which nowadays is the subject of lively debate. Précis
Cet article retrace les étapes qui ont marqué le pèlerinage asiatique de Thomas Merton (1915-1968), c'est-à-dire le voyage spirituel que le moine trappiste américain a effectué lorsqu'il est entré sur le terrain des "spiritualités orientales", en particulier du bouddhisme. Le voyage spirituel de Merton est un modèle inspirant pour une rencontre existentielle dialogique entre l'expérience de la foi chrétienne et les expériences spirituelles orientales. Il suggère que la fécondité transformatrice de la rencontre entre ces deux voies religieuses ne réside pas dans la jouissance ou la poursuite d'une convergence entre des expériences mystiques similaires ou parallèles, mais plutôt dans la tension dialogique entre des expériences irréductiblement différentes. Dans cette perspective, l'expérience de Merton suggère également une interprétation originale du phénomène de la "double appartenance religieuse", qui fait aujourd'hui l'objet de vifs débats.
“God speaks, and God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger.” (Thomas Merton) [1]
Introduction
One way of considering the relationship between Christian and Eastern spirituality [2] that differs from the strictly rational method of speculative theology is an “experiential” approach to interreligious dialogue. The “experience” I will reflect on in this study is that of a pioneer of interreligious dialogue whom I would call a “prophetic” forerunner of the dialogue between the Christian faith and the spiritual paths that arose in East Asia. I speak of Father Louis of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, better known as Thomas Merton (1915-1968). I propose that we direct our attention to the spiritual pilgrimage this Trappist monk embarked on as he directed his attention to the world of Buddhism. One author describes his pilgrimage as that of “a sentry listening to the East.” [3] In the course of his short life Merton brought passion and intellectual acumen to the word addressed to him by all the great spiritual traditions of the East—Hinduism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism [4]—but it is clear that he gave special attention to the latter. The reason for this was that “the Buddhists whom he met, and the teachings [about Buddhism] he read, seemed to resonate more directly with his own articulation of the spiritual, contemplative life.” [5]
The interest and usefulness of retracing the stages that marked Thomas Merton’s Asian pilgrimage consist, I believe, in the fact that his spiritual journey, with all its strengths and weaknesses, is an inspiring model for an existential dialogical encounter between the Christian faith and Eastern spiritual experiences. It is in fact true that
He [Merton] did not construct a systematic structure for the dialogue, but as a poet and contemplative, his life, with all its strengths and weaknesses, came to be as a model for actually engaging in such dialogue. . . . His very life was a living experience, experiment and nexus for that dialogue. [6]
Thomas Merton’s intellectual and existential spiritual journey makes him an inspiring model of the “dialogue of spiritual experience,” an essential form of interreligious dialogue that compliments and completes the dialogue of everyday life, the dialogue of action, and the dialogue of theological exchange. The “dialogue of religious experience” is one in which “persons, rooted in their own religious traditions, share their spiritual riches, for instance with regard to prayer and contemplation, faith and ways of searching for God or the Absolute.” [7] In particular, Merton offers prophetic inspiration for Christian-Buddhist dialogue, encouraging all Christians and Buddhists to go further along the path they have travelled, aware of the potential and the limits of the paths previously taken. [8]
Some of Merton’s “last words,” which he prepared for an inter-religious meeting in Calcutta in October 1968 and which culminate in the striking affirmation that inspired the title of this essay, offer the prerequisites and the gateway to our path:
Even where there are irreconcilable differences in doctrine and in formulated belief, there may still be great similarities and analogies in the realm of religious experience. . . . Cultural and doctrinal differences must remain, but they do not invalidate a very real quality of existential likeness. . . . On this existential level of experience and of spiritual maturity, it is possible to achieve real and significant contacts and perhaps much more besides. . . . I have left my monastery to come here [in Asia] not just as a research scholar or even as an author (which I also happen to be). I come as a pilgrim who is anxious to obtain not just information, not just “facts” about other monastic traditions, but to drink from ancient sources of monastic vision and experience. . . . I think we must seek not merely to make superficial reports about the Asian traditions, but to live and share those traditions, as far as we can, by living them in their traditional milieu. I need not add that I think we have now reached a stage of (long-overdue) religious maturity at which it may be possible for someone to remain perfectly faithful to a Christian and Western monastic commitment, and yet to learn in depth from, say, a Buddhist or Hindu discipline and experience. [9]
In this study, as we examine the stages of Merton’s interreligious spiritual journey, we will make some general observations, which will be more in the form of questions opened by the “Mertonian model” than of certainties clearly offered by it. [10]
1. Exposure
As is the case in every relationship, when one decides to set out on the adventure of inter-religious dialogue, the basic attitude one must have includes a preliminary sympathy, a positive predisposition, a fundamental kindly approach to the religious path of the other. This attitude constitutes the preparation, the premise, and the foundation for real dialogue. The other interests me, concerns me. In order to approach the other and his/her spiritual treasure with confidence, I must recognize the mutual interdependence of human beings. Merton already recognized this, but his conviction became even stronger when he delved deeply into Zen. Already in 1955, he had chosen a line of the English poet John Donne (1572-1631), No Man Is an Island, as the title of one of his book. By doing so, he expressed his conviction that “every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind.” [11]
“Exposure” is the term chosen by David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who knew Merton personally, to sum up the attitude of Merton throughout his spiritual pilgrimage to the East. [12] Merton insisted that exposure—that is to say, openness, self-exposure—requires the inner posture of “exposed consciousness.” [13] Exposure that is prior to any subsequent and necessary discernment is what is needed to “affirm” the other. As he put it in an especially eloquent passage,
The more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says “yes” to everyone. I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot “affirm” and “accept,” but first one must say “yes” where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it. [14]
Merton’s well-known “sympathy for Eastern religions” was based on an innate inner resonance [15] with his spiritual interlocutors. A good example of this is his immediate sympathy, his natural affinity for the Chinese master Zhuangzi (fourth century BCE), when, referring to this Daoist, he states that he is “consorting with a Chinese recluse who shares the climate and peace of my own kind of solitude, and who is my own kind of person.” [16] Merton’s affinity with Zhuangzi was so great that his Chinese friend John C.H. Wu (Wu Jingxiong, 1899-1986) confided to him, “I have come to the conclusion that you and Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi] are one.” [17]
In the case of interreligious encounter and dialogue, however, it is not sufficient to regard such personal affinity as “consonant.” Merton shows us that a Christian can approach another spiritual seeker with what might be called “positive spiritual tension” since there can be a profound assonance in what Christians would see as an irreducible difference between certain dimensions of the Christian way and the way of others. One’s spiritual intuitions, of course, must then be verified through real contact, through immersion in the tradition of the other. What counts in this “preparatory phase” is the perspective, the attitude, the gaze. The example of Merton in his exploration of spiritualities other than his own shows us his determination to look inward, his partiality for participation. This is very clear from the autobiographical words he wrote as a preface to his book Mystics and Zen Masters:
The author has attempted not merely to look at these other traditions from the outside, but, in some measure at least, to try to share in the values and the experience which they embody. In other words, he is not content to write about them without making them, as far as possible, “his own.” [18]
Although he himself was aware that this kind of insider perspective was unattainable to an outsider, the tension is palpable in all his writings and in all his “interreligious letters,” in which the “gift Merton had of writing to people from almost within their own skin” [19] is perceptible. This remarkable intuitive perception of the other, of their heart, of their faith, is further demonstrated by the responses of people of other faiths with whom Merton had very intense personal and epistolary relationships throughout his life.
What was it about Buddhism that so captured Merton’s sympathy that he set out on an ever deeper exploration of that tradition, convinced that following this path would be spiritually fruitful? “The non-doctrinal aspects of Buddhism, as Merton encountered them, make the tradition both acceptable to explore and potentially helpful to non-Buddhists like himself.” [20] To be more precise,
What Merton eventually came to value in the Buddhist tradition, whether Zen, Thai, Sri Lankan or Tibetan, was its apparent lack of emphasis on doctrine, its deep contemplativeness and stress on spiritual experience and awareness, and its ability to transform the monks whom he met into persons of evident holiness. These were aspects of the spiritual life that he already deeply treasured in his own Catholic practice. . . . In a sense, then, one can say that it was only natural for him to go through the concept of kenosis and the apophatic school to various forms of Buddhism, especially Zen, where the emphasis is on true self-forgetfulness, beyond images and concepts . . . Everything that he found attractive in the Buddhist teachings that he read or in the living Buddhist masters whom he met . . . had to do with this stress on the in-the-present awareness that could be cultivated through meditation and contemplation, experience always taking precedence over explanation. [21]
Hence Merton’s reassuring conclusion that Christianity and Zen are compatible. Since Merton understands Zen as “the ontological awareness of pure being beyond subject and object, an immediate grasp of being in its ‘suchness’ and ‘thusness,’” [22] it then follows that
the supernatural kérygma and the metaphysical intuition of the ground of being are far from being incompatible. One may be said to prepare the way for the other. They can well complement each other, and for this reason Zen is perfectly compatible with Christian belief . . . (if we understand Zen in its pure state, as metaphysical intuition). [23]
For Merton, Zen offers the Christian faith a way to recover its original spirit, before it was “imprisoned” in theological formulations elaborated on the basis of Hellenistic philosophy that produced an “obsession with doctrinal formulas, juridical order and ritual exactitude [that] has often made people forget that the heart of Catholicism, too, is a living experience of unity in Christ which far transcends all conceptual formulations.” [24]
We will soon see that it is precisely Merton’s understanding of Zen as “pure metaphysical intuition” that is questionable and risks mystifying it. What is needed is direct immersion in the reality of Buddhism, in order finally to arrive—at the end and not at the beginning—at Zen as a spiritual experience and not just an intellectual one.
2. Immersion
If Merton’s basic attitude to Buddhism was one of innate curiosity and unconditional openness to religious otherness, together with a natural sympathy for Taoism and Zen Buddhism and a perceived affinity between the latter and Christianity, we still need to ask how the concrete encounter between Merton and the Buddhist way took place. It did so through progressive “immersion.” [25] The three steps—welcomed or missed, corrected or distorted—that articulate this meeting are paradigmatic for every program of concrete interaction between practitioners of different spiritual paths: (1) exploration, (2) encounter and (3) experience.
2.1. Exploration
The first step that Merton took to immerse himself in the world of Eastern spiritualities in the 1950s and ’60s was that of exploration, by which I mean coming to know them through conversation and, above all, through reading. [26] For various reasons, his was a partial exploration. His monastic enclosure, which was particularly severe in the Trappist tradition, greatly limited his ability to meet people outside his community. Furthermore, in his lifetime he was hampered by the limited quantity and difficult accessibility of sources and advanced studies on Eastern religions.
This seems true with regard to Hinduism. He had read relatively little about it before arriving in India in 1968, and his few relations with contemporary Hindu believers and intellectuals apparently gave him only limited knowledge of its traditions. [27] In the case of Taoism, Merton read, meditated, and was greatly influenced by the two most important Chinese Daoist texts, Daodejing and Zhuangzi. However, his main literary contact was the man of letters, philosopher, and sinologist John C.H. Wu, whose presentation of this tradition was already a rereading “mediated” by his own conversion to Christianity. [28] Merton favored the “sapiential” and “humanistic” dimensions of Confucius’ teaching, but his partiality seems more tied to a conscious selectivity (in view of his “spiritual” interest) than to a deficient approach, even though the studies available to him had not yet made sense of the complexity of Confucianism. [29]
Before Merton’s trip to Asia, other than a brief encounter with Thich Nhat Hanh, [30] his main interlocutor with Buddhism [31] was the Japanese scholar Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki (1870-1966). [32] In recent years, some scholars have questioned the knowledge of Buddhism Merton acquired through Suzuki, who would only have reinforced a certain “orientalism” already present in Merton’s approach to Asian spiritual traditions. [33] His understanding of Zen Buddhism in terms of the rather simplistic, ahistorical, distorted, and nationalistic version of Zen “for export” that Suzuki offered would therefore have been “imperfect and incomplete,” [34] not least of all because of his ignorance of Asian languages. In this sense, Merton “sometime overstated and oversimplified the facts [of Zen . . . and] tended, on occasion, to over conceptualize Zen.” [35] In the case of Tibetan Buddhism, an objective impediment to serious knowledge of it was the lack of access to the sources of the Vajrayāna tradition before the 1960s. For this reason and also because his approach was colored by “orientalism,” “it is no wonder that Merton had odd ideas about Tibetan Buddhism.” [36]
Thus, before going to Asia, Merton was limited to an initial exploratory phase of his interreligious pilgrimage. “As a matter of fact, Merton never tried to know a non-Christian community by experience; his explorations tended to be through conversations and reading,” [37] which, by their nature, offered only indirect contact with the reality of Asian spiritual traditions. Moreover, they presented incomplete and sometimes deformed, presentations of these traditions. However, Merton seemed to be aware of this shortcoming when, in 1965, he confessed to the Jesuit William Johnston that he had “no real knowledge of Zen as it actually is in Japan.” [38]
2.2. Encounter
Merton’s personal encounter with the living traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism came about only with the realization of his long-desired journey to Asia, which began on October 15, 1968, and ended with his death on December 10 of the same year. His dream of an ideal spiritual Asia now had to come to terms with the real spiritual Asia. We find a trace of this transition in his Asian Journal. Writing in the context of what he called his search for the “real Asia,” on November 18, Merton, during a retreat in the mountains of Darjeeling, asked himself, “Or did I find an illusion of Asia, that needed to be dissolved by experience? Here?” [39]
This transition took place in India, mainly through the friendly encounters he had on several occasions with Tibetan monks and masters (rinpoche). One of them was the little more than thirty-year-old Dalai Lama, [40] with whom he had stimulating conversations and experienced deep communion. At the end of a conversation on “hermit questions” with Kyabje Chadral (1913-2015) rinpoche on November 16, 1968, Merton noted,
The unspoken or half-spoken message of the talk was our complete understanding of each other as people who were somehow on the edge of great realization and knew it and were trying, somehow or other, to go out and get lost in it—and that it was a grace for us to meet one another. [41]
On his meetings with the Dalai Lama, Merton comments,
Meeting the Dalai Lama and the various Tibetans, lamas or “enlightened” laymen, has been the most significant thing of all, especially in the way we were able to communicate with one another and share an essentially spiritual experience of “Buddhism” which is also somehow in harmony with Christianity. [42]
Moreover, in Merton’s Asian Journal we find evidence that “he learned deeply about himself and his own tradition by listening and sharing with his [Tibetan] Buddhist contemplative partners. [43] As one author notes, “Merton’s discovery of Zen was really a fuller discovery of the authentic treasures of Roman Catholicism.” [44] In other words, Merton rediscovered his most authentic Christian and monastic vocation through that revelatory deepening of his own identity that every true interreligious encounter stimulates and often generates. Merton is certain of this mystery of the gift of self-knowledge that only others can give us:
The full spiritual identity not only of cultures but of individual persons remains a secret gift that is in the possession of another. We do not find ourselves until, in meeting this other, we receive from him the gift, in part at least, to know ourselves. [45]
It was Asia, and Buddhist Asia in particular, that gave Thomas Merton the gift of authentically knowing himself, that is, his identity as a man, as a Christian, and as a monk. [46] Flying east, on October 15, 1968, Merton wrote on the first page of his Asian Journal, “I am going home, to the home where I have never been.” [47] The journey to a foreign land now becomes the journey towards the discovery of his true home.
2.3. Experience
Merton’s actual encounter with Buddhist monks in India and Sri Lanka, though fruitful and stimulating, was limited by being random and short-lived. His immersion in the spiritual world of Asia did not involve immersion in the direct experience of meditative practices and ritual moments of that world. At this level, according to Steindl-Rast, Merton remained a tourist. [48] From what he writes in his Asian Journal, Merton was seriously, but rather naively, intent on being initiated into Tibetan meditative practices. His “fantasy of becoming a Dzogchen practitioner [49] did not take into account the long process of study and training that this method of meditation involved. He may, in fact, have simply ignored this exigency.
However, it was during these experiences of contact with Buddhism as embodied in its monastic practitioners that Merton gradually became convinced of an absolute necessity, which he included in the draft he prepared for the conference given in Calcutta: “I think we must seek not merely to make superficial reports about the Asian traditions, but to live and share those traditions, as far as we can, by living them in their traditional milieu.” [50] “Live and share”: these two verbs refer to a “dream” that he had in July 1968, a few months before leaving for Asia. Merton held on to this dream, and writing about it in a letter to a friend, he spoke of “a Utopian plan, but [one] worth considering”: “the formation of an intermonastic community, with representatives of various traditions, living together and working together for the clarification of common elements in their thought and experience.” [51]
In conclusion, the process of immersion in Eastern spiritual traditions experienced by Merton over a period of about two decades is essentially a passage from the fictitious and ideal projection of orientalism [52] to the authentic and real dialogue of experience:
The emergent excitement about Buddhism in the 1950s and 1960s was pervaded by Orientalist perspectives. As an eager student, Merton had been reading in his hermitage about Buddhism for a decade, especially Zen, along with Taoism, Hinduism and Sufism. His lack of human contact with real Buddhists fostered an idealized caricature of Buddhism that became the basis of his Orientalism. . . . Once he was able to leave his remote hermitage and engage personally with remarkable Tibetan teachers in their own settings, his Orientalism was gradually “dissolved by experience” and what was left was the beautiful dialogue. This journey from Orientalism to genuine dialogue may be his greatest legacy regarding Buddhism. [53]
It is significant that, precisely in the course of this process of increasingly direct and real encounter with Buddhism, Merton felt the need to further deepen his intellectual knowledge of that tradition, especially of its articulated and complex philosophical speculation. We have evidence of this in the Asian Journal, where we find notes taken from numerous important and challenging philosophical works. [54] These readings made his journey in Asia a trip that was
. . . both a pilgrimage of body and mind; he tried to deepen his knowledge of the content of the tradition, while, I believe, also allowing that knowledge to inform or speak not just to his own intellectual categories concerning metaphysics and spirituality but also to his own lived experience of them as wisdom. The impression it conveys is that his selection of and reflection on these texts become a kind of cross cultural lectio divina fueling and nourishing his spiritual life. [55]
Merton’s dialogue with Buddhism gradually matured—a maturation all too abruptly interrupted by his premature death. As this dialogue was progressively articulated and enriched, it became an “integrated encounter” [56] in which intellectual knowledge, personal encounters, and the sharing of spiritual experience all worked together to bring about a transformation, the final stage and goal of the process of interreligious dialogue.
3. Transformation
For Merton all “spiritual” experience, Christian and non-Christian, and, even more radically, all monastic experience, Christian and non-Christian, can be traced back to this essential goal: “total inner transformation.” He clearly stated this in Bangkok at a pan-Asian monastic conference:
Christianity and Buddhism look primarily to a transformation of man’s consciousness—a transformation, and a liberation of the truth imprisoned in man by ignorance and error. . . . When you stop and think a little bit about St. Benedict’s concept of conversio morum, that most mysterious of our vows, which is actually the most essential, I believe, it can be interpreted as a commitment to total inner transformation of one sort or another—a commitment to become a completely new man. It seems to me that that could be regarded as the end of the monastic life, and that no matter where one attempts to do this, that remains the essential thing. . . . What is essential in the monastic life is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded in clothing, is not necessarily embedded even in a rule. It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule. It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation. All other things serve that end. [57]
Convergence to this same end, “total inner transformation,” is therefore the foundation, the means, the method, and the goal of Christian and Buddhist spiritual practitioners, be they monk or lay. For this reason, the interreligious pilgrimage must be seen as a process of mutual encouragement in quest of inner transformation. It is with this fundamental understanding, Merton reminds us, that “we will find our spiritual fulfillment, or, perhaps more accurately, be found in the process of seeking it, with the other in a common, spiritual quest.” [58]
This last stage, that of transformation, is not simply the final result of a process that began with the two previous stages, those of opening/exposure and immersion. It already takes place during the course of the whole process. The transformation itself is progressive. Merton’s interreligious journey provides us with some evidence of this transformation and indicates how it takes places.
Here too, it seems to me, I can recognize an evolution in the way Merton’s Christian faith and his Eastern spiritual experiences are given expression in his inner life. This evolution, to use terms that only partially account for reality, goes from assimilation with a view to integration and then to interaction with a view to communion. We will limit ourselves to considering this question only with regard to Merton’s contact with Buddhism, with Zen in particular, and we will focus on the existential-spiritual modality of this question, postponing to another time the discussion of the more properly theological perspective that Merton in his later writings brought to bear on the dialogue between Buddhist propositions and Christian experience (elaborated mainly from the perspective of his vision of contemplation). [59]
3.1. Assimilation-integration
Before leaving for Asia, Merton’s perspective on the question of the connection between Christianity and Buddhism seems to be that of “instrumental” assimilation. As Bonnie Thurston so well put it, Merton’s approach to Zen was aimed, on a spiritual level, at assimilating “techniques for facilitating [his Christian] spiritual journey. . . . Simply put, Merton looked East and especially to Zen to learn prayer practices.” [60] This would also be confirmed by the words of the Dalai Lama, for whom Merton “was a Christian monk who practiced and adopted Buddhist technique into [his] Christian practice.” [61] In reality, Merton’s writings provide very little information about his use of oriental techniques in his meditation or his prayer. One of the few fleeting hints of how he actually meditated or prayed is found in a letter written in 1967 to the theologian Rosemary Radford Reuter, in which Merton states in his telegraphic style:
Zen: not abstract at all in the way I see it. I use it for idol-cracking and things like that. Healthy way of keeping one’s house clean. Gets the dust out quicker than anything else I know. I am not talking about purity, just breathing, and not piling up the mental junk. [62]
“I use it,” he writes. This verb speaks explicitly and unequivocally of his adoption of Zen as a technique for an end, here defined in terms of mental cleansing to combat idolatry (of ideas?). Almost spontaneously a question arises: is it possible and, if possible, legitimate to reduce Zen to a technique to be appropriated? The question is still open and debated today.
As I review Merton’s life in an attempt to find clues about how he integrated Zen into his spiritual life, I find a visual, evocative, and synthetic image of his initial “inclusive” approach to Zen in the stone garden, the so-called “Zen garden,” that he set up in the novitiate wing of Gethsemani Abbey in 1963. [63] Merton’s integration of a “Zen perspective,” his assimilation of the “Zen spirit,” is especially perceptible in the multifaceted aspects of his artistic output. It can be found in his abundant literary works, both prose and poetry, [64] and in his teaching. Merton often spoke of Buddhism and Zen in his lectures to novices during the ten years (1955-1965) he was novice master at Gethsemani. His “Zen perspective” and “Zen spirit” can also be seen in his calligraphy [65] and in his photography. [66] As his Chinese friend John Wu Jr. said, “His writings are in fact full of Zen, and such elements can be found in the most unexpected places.” [67] I find one of the most exquisite examples of the way Zen permeated his art in his very original work Cables to the Ace:
Perfection and emptiness work together, for they are the same: the coincidence of momentary form and eternal nothingness. Form: the flash of nothingness. Forget form, and it suddenly appears, ringed and reverberating with its own light, which is nothing. Well then: stop seeking. Let it all happen. Let it come and go. What? Everything: i.e., nothing. [68]
This passage powerfully echoes the words of the renowned Buddhist text, the Heart Sūtra, with which Merton was very familiar: [69]
Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form. [70]
As he went further into Buddhist thought and engaged in what Ramon Panikkar would refer to as “intra-religious” dialogue, Merton made progress in integrating his experience of Zen, arriving at profound mature convictions that challenged the path he had taken up to that moment and led him further along his interreligious pilgrimage. I mention them here only to understand how, through these intermediate steps, he reached the final stage: (1) that it is a fundamental error to think that Zen can be compared with Christianity; [71] (2) that it is inappropriate to interpret Zen with theological (Christian) language; [72] (3) that “final integration,” that is, the stage of a transformed identity, is a “final maturity and integration” and “for a Christian, a transcultural integration is eschatological.” [73] For this reason this “final integration” involves tension
3.2. Interaction-communion
The maturation of these stages will lead Merton to progressively abandon the category of integration—which is to be reserved for the last times—and to relinquish, or rather, to allow the inner dialogue between Zen experience and Christian faith to dwell in him though interaction, a dynamic category that implies a perennial tension between differences. Merton’s journey to Asia seems to have been the catalyst that brought about this decisive transition to an interior interaction between his Buddhist experience and his Christian faith. For a Christian like Merton, who never ceased to be Christian, this interaction or complementarity has a more precise and more proper name: “communion” (koinonía), or, on the model of the Trinity, unity in difference.
The most evident sign of this for me is a dream Merton had in Dharamshala (India) after his first conversation with the Dalai Lama. On the night of November 4-5, 1968, Merton dreamt of returning to his monastery in Gethsemani, dressed as a more Tibetan than Zen Buddhist monk:
Last night I dreamed I was, temporarily, back at Gethsemani. I was dressed in a Buddhist monk’s habit, but with more black and red and gold, a “Zen habit,” in color more Tibetan than Zen . . . I met some women in the corridor, visitors and students of Asian religion, to whom I was explaining I was a kind of Zen monk and Gelugpa together, when I woke up. [75]
Merton sees himself at the final stage of his journey, which is the transformation of his own religious identity through the interaction of two identities: his Christian monastic identity, expressed by his being in his own home (the monastery of Gethsemani), and the Buddhist monastic identity, expressed by his “Zen-Tibetan” habit. There is no contradiction nor is there any confusion between the two identities. Could this be a sign that Merton had entered—thanks to Zen—the realization of non-duality (advaita) and thereby reached a spiritual maturity that went beyond a dualistic vision of religious identity?
Merton himself leads us to this understanding by writing, on the eve of his departure for Asia: “I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity. . . . I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.” [76] And for Merton “being as good a Buddhist as he could meant being a Christian more profoundly than ever which, to his delight, enabled him to be as good a Buddhist as he could.” [77]
Following the lines of this interpretation confirms the culminating experience of “realization” that Merton experienced at the Buddhist site of Gal Vihāra in Polonnaruwa, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), on December 2, 1968, a little more than a week before his death. Merton himself describes this experience, which “clearly represents the point of arrival in a book whose structure is that of a pilgrimage,” [78] "the fulfillment of Merton’s intense longing,” [79] in terms of a genuine spiritual bolt from the blue:
A wide, quiet, hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ānanda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. . . . I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Mādhyamika [80] of śūnyatā, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything—without refutation—without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape figure, rock and tree. . . .
Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ānanda standing with arms folded . . . The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. . . . everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. [81]
Merton’s openness, acuity, and spiritual depth allowed him to resonate unquestioningly with the blatant, glaring silence that “explodes” from the quiet and yet eloquent language of the aesthetic experience. True seeker that he was, Merton allows himself to be questioned by that silence, by that perfect silence of forms that invites him to abandon himself to the perfect silence of emptiness.
Merton describes his experience with a language that is completely Buddhist, and undoubtedly “for many of his Christian readers the Buddhist language Merton employs . . . is both intriguing and challenging. . . . It is the writing of a Catholic monk whose account of his intense spiritual vision is shot through with Sanskrit terms and without one explicit comparison or even allusion to a Christian frame of reference.” [82] As baffling as it may seem, it is clear that Merton, as a Christian monk, “would have been able to relate this experience to Christian symbols and language should he have cared to do so. But he did not.” [83] To do so would have meant interpreting an “other” experience with a Christian theological language. At a deeper level, this would have meant falling back into the kind of assimilation of the Buddhist experience into the Christian theological framework that he had come to reject as unwarranted. But how are we to read this experience through the language Merton uses to convey it and situate it against the background of Merton’s clear and profound Christian identity? [84]
Bonnie B. Thurston rightly dares to suggest the possibility that this, “Merton’s greatest illumination,” was “his satori.” [85] He finally found what he was explicitly looking for ever since his flight took off for Asia, namely, as he writes, “the great compassion,” mahākaruṇā. [86] Merton seems to have had the experience he mentioned in his Asian Journal during his conversation with Chatral rinpoche, the experience of “the ultimate emptiness, the unity of śūnyatā and karuṇā.” [87] As Donald Grayston put it, “a Mahāyāna Buddhist, then, reading Merton’s account, might well say that at Polonnaruwa he had entered into the ground level of the bodhisattva realm." [88]
Standing before the figures of the Buddha, Merton had a Buddhist experience of “awakening.” But he had it as a Christian. In other words, without abandoning his own Christian faith, Merton experienced what the theologian John S. Dunne calls passing over, by which he means a temporary immersion in or passage to a tradition other than one’s own, in order to deepen one’s understanding and appreciation of both the other’s tradition and one’s own. [89]
What exactly is it that Merton deepens, in a complementary way, from another tradition, Buddhism, and from his own, Christianity, when he has this experience at Polonnaruwa? Since he expresses himself in Buddhist terms, we can only clearly understand what he is discovering in depth from Buddhism. In short, he discovers the transcendence of duality that Buddhism reveals, particularly in the teaching of the Mādhyamika school, and this leads him to “realize” the link between “emptiness” (śūnyatā) and “compassion” (karuṇā). How this interacts with his own Christian faith, we can only assume. Even more mysterious—why not say it—is the question about the connection of this new understanding of reality that Merton “realized” in Polonnaruwa with the experience of his Christian faith, which he never abandoned. Assuming this to be true, some have described the connection in these terms:
Within Merton there is a complementary interpenetration of contexts, Buddhist and Christian, and his interest in the former always included the faith commitments he had made within the latter. Merton’s contemplative Catholicism provided him with a place from which to move into the Buddhist world, a first language with which to correlate meanings within a new linguistic frame of reference. . . . The “both/and” and “neither/nor” positions of Mādhyamikawould only support his faith in the paradoxical Christ who is both truly human and truly divine, neither imprisoned by suffering and death nor exempt from it; who is the begotten, incarnate Word of the Absolute, Eternal and Unbegotten.
The karuṇā (compassion) that Merton declares in union with śūnyatā (emptiness), was for him not something other than the compassion of the Christ, the one who reveals to him exactly what “compassion” can mean. . . . The kenotic hymn of Philippians and the passion of the Christ would, for Thomas Merton, reveal a profound and personal meaning for the śūnyatā and karuṇā. [90]
Conclusion
We can conclude that this experience does not call Merton’s Christian commitment into question, but rather reveals his understanding and attainment of a different level of religious identity, what William Nicholls and Ian Kent call “transcendent identity,” [91] a universal identity, a trans-religious identity, an identity that, transcending religious boundaries, brings together within itself, in tension, several radically different spiritual experiences. In this perspective, could Merton possibly be considered be a forerunner or even an “avant-garde prophet” of a phenomenon that is more evident and better studied today, namely, the so-called “dual or multiple religious belonging” characterized by an authentic and full involvement in two or more different religious ways simultaneously, without syncretism but rather with “only the legitimate integration of reconcilable truths”? [92]
In addition to the opinion of Paul Knitter, who without hesitation argues that “Thomas Merton is . . . a telling example of double [religious] belonging,” [93] a recent in-depth study of Merton’s approach to Christian-Buddhist dialogue carried out by the Korean Benedictine monk Jaechan Anselmo Park supports this intuition:
His [Merton’s] concept of a universal consciousness beyond religious structures also invites discussion about the possibility of Buddhist-Christian dual-participation and/or dual-belonging. . . . Merton’s view of universal religious identity provides a new way of understanding dual religious participation and belonging, which is currently one of the relevant issues in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. . . . This new way of interpreting transcendent identity will need to be further developed for a better understanding of dual religious belonging. [94]
As Park himself further clarifies, Merton’s experience shows how the acquisition of such a transcendent religious identity “[does not] call into question his Christian identity,” insofar as “Merton’s religious identity as a Christian was not denied but enriched when he moved toward Buddhism." [95] In other words, as Dennis McInerny states, “if we want to call Merton a Buddhist, . . . I certainly see no harm in doing so . . . [since] his being a Buddhist was in no wise contradictory to nor a diminishment of his being a Christian.” [96]
The path Merton trod intimates how the transforming fruitfulness of the encounter between Christian spirituality and Zen experience does not lie in the enjoyment or pursuit of a convergence between similar or parallel mystical Christian and “Eastern” experiences but rather in the tension proper to allowing irreducibly different experiences to enter into dialogue, an interior dialogue that is enlivened by a mysterious complementarity that questions those who live it, a complementarity that, above all, is not known in advance, but rather “produced” by the process itself:
Merton thought that Catholicism and Buddhism were mutually complementary since these traditions were dialogically engaged within him in a kind of mystical dance. [97]
The Buddhist-Christian dialogue for Merton was not about arriving at decisive answers, but calmly and passionately allowing oneself to become the questions, to be breathing kōans. [98]
The contribution that Thomas Merton made is “to create a space for those of us who are, and hope to, remain grounded where we first met God, even while opening our hearts and minds to God’s dwelling in innumerable familiar and unexpected places.” [99] Merton “offers . . . the inspiration . . . to find grace outside the familiar” [100] and spurs us all to set out towards this place of unfamiliarity, of otherness, in the deep awareness of finding our true home there, just as he found it: “I am going home, to the home where I have never been.” [101]
Notes
* English translation by William Skudlarek of the Italian original: M. Nicolini-Zani, “‘Imparare in profondità dall’esperienza buddhista o induista’. L’itinerario di Thomas Merton in dialogo con le spiritualità orientali,” in Archivio Teologico Torinese 26:1 (2020), pp. 155-178. [1] T. Merton, “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” in Thomas Merton. Selected Essays, ed. by P.F. O’Connell, Maryknoll NY 2013, p. 121 (emphasis in the original). [2] For the sake of convenience, I will use this ambiguous and certainly inadequate expression to speak of those spiritual paths that were developed in Asian lands—and are therefore “Eastern” compared to the European and American West—but then spread throughout the world. By the same token, to speak of Christianity as a Western religion is also ambiguous and inadequate. [3] Cf. J. Scheuer, Thomas Merton. Un veilleur à l’écoute de l’Orient, Namur-Paris 2015. [4] For a general overview of Merton’s interest and contact with Eastern spirituality see A. Lipski, Thomas Merton and Asia. His Quest for Utopia, Kalamazoo MI 1983. [5] R.F. McDermott, “Why Zen Buddhism and not Hinduism? The Asias of Thomas Merton’s Voyages East,” in The Merton Annual 23 (2010), pp. 29-46, here p. 45. [6] A. Altany, “The Thomas Merton Connection: What Was the Christian Monk Looking to Find in His Dialogue with Buddhism?,” http://thomasmertonsociety.org/Epubs/altany2.htm. [7] Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue – Congregation for Evangelization of Peoples, Dialogue and Proclamation. Reflection and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ(19 May 1991) §42, in http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_19051991_dialogue-and-proclamatio_en.html. On the theme of the dialogue of religious or spiritual experience see also P.-F. de Béthune, “Le dialogue interreligieux au foyer de la vie spirituelle,” in Nouvelle Revue Théologique 121 (1999), pp. 557-572. [8] Cf. C. Albin, “Thomas Merton and Inter-Faith Dialogue: Exploring a Way Forward,” in Thomas Merton. Poet, Monk, Prophet, ed. by P. Pearson, D. Sullivan and I. Thomson, Abergavenny 1998, pp. 154-168;R. Corless, “The Christian Exploration of Non-Christian Religions: Merton’s Example and Where It Might Lead Us,” in The Merton Annual 13 (2000), pp. 105-122; J.D. Dadosky, “Merton as Method for Inter-religious Engagement: Examples from Buddhism,” in The Merton Annual 21 (2008), pp. 33-43; Id., “Merton’s Dialogue with Zen: Pioneering or Passé?,” in Fu Jen International Religious Studies 2:1 (2008), pp. 53-75; J. Simmer-Brown, “‘Wide Open to Life’: Thomas Merton’s Dialogue of Contemplative Practice,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 35 (2015), pp. 193-203; J. Keenan, “Thomas Merton’s Unfinished Journey in Dialogue with Buddhism,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 37 (2017), pp. 103-128. [9] T. Merton, “Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue (Notes for a paper to have been delivered at Calcutta, October 1968),” in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, ed. by N. Burton, P. Hart and J. Laughlin, New York 1975, pp. 309-317, here pp. 312-313 (emphasis added). [10] I find a similar reading of this process in a very recent study by Jaechan Anselmo Park specifically dedicated to the subject. He summarizes the Merton’s spiritual journey of encounter with Buddhism through the following three stages: (1) the “exploratory period” (from 1937 to the middle of the 1950s); (2) the “transformational period” (1959-1968); (3) the “intensive and enlightened period” (1968). Cf. J.A. Park, Thomas Merton’s Encounter with Buddhism and Beyond. His Interreligious Dialogue, Inter-Monastic Exchanges, and Their Legacy, Collegeville MN 2019, pp. 63-73. [11] T. Merton, No Man Is an Island, New York 1967, p. 16. [12] Cf. D. Steindl-Rast, “Exposure: Key to Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal?,” in Monastic Studies 10 (1974), pp. 181-204, in particular pp. 187 ss. [13] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 159. [14] Id., Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Garden City NY 1966, p. 144 (emphasis in original). [15] D.J. O’Hanlon, “The Influence of ‘Eastern’ Traditions on Thomas Merton’s Personal Prayer,” in Cistercian Studies Quarterly 26:2 (1991), pp. 165-183, here p. 177. [16] T. Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, New York 1969, p. 11. [17] The Hidden Ground of Love. Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. by W.H. Shannon, New York 1985, p. 631. [18] T. Merton, “Preface,” in Id., Mystics and Zen Masters, New York 1967, p. ix. [19] J. Forest, “The Panel of Friends,” in Your Heart Is My Hermitage. Thomas Merton’s Vision of Solitude and Community, ed. by D. Sullivan and I. Thomson, London 1996, pp. 12-31, here p. 30. [20] McDermott, “Why Zen Buddhism and not Hinduism?,” p. 34. For a summary of the Merton’s “reading” of Zen, see M. Neuman, “Revisiting Zen and the Birds of Appetite after Twenty-five Years,” in The Merton Annual 8 (1995), pp. 138-149, in particular pp. 140-141, with references to passages of the work Zen and the Birds of Appetite. [21] McDermott, “Why Zen Buddhism and not Hinduism?,” pp. 32-33. [22] Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, p. 14 (emphasis in original). [23] Id., Zen and the Birds of Appetite, New York 1968, p. 47. [24] Ibid., p. 39. [25] I borrow this fruitful image from the Benedictine monk Pierre-François de Béthune, long-time Secretary General of DIMMID (Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique / Monastic Interreligious Dialogue), who speaks of “l’audace nécessaire pour tenter une immersion totale dans une autre tradition” (P.-F. de Béthune, “L’avenir du dialogue interreligieux: l’expérience spirituelle du dialogue,” in Dilatato Corde 8:1 [2018], https://dimmid.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7BDADFB957-89BE-4530-B174-B1B04224490B%7D). [26] Cf. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, ed. by W.H. Shannon, C.M. Bochen and P.F. O’Connell, Maryknoll NY 2002, p. 204: “Merton’s interest in Eastern religions, already in evidence before his conversion . . . grew in the 1950s and 1960s, when Merton immersed himself in writings of Asian religions. Personal contacts continued to play a role as Merton deepened his understanding of Eastern religion: Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism.” [27] Cf. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, s.v. “Hinduism,” pp. 203-205. R.F. McDermott makes an interesting observation: “If one were looking, today, for sympathetic academic treatments of Hinduism, the range of possibilities would be immense. It is tempting to infer that, were Merton to have lived longer, he would have availed himself of this literature” (McDermott, “Why Zen Buddhism and not Hinduism?,” p. 44). [28] Cf. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, s.v. “Taoism,” pp. 462-464; J. Wu, jr., “A Lovely Day for a Friendship: The Spiritual and Intellectual Relationship Between Thomas Merton and John Wu as Reflected in Their Correspondence,” in The Merton Annual 5 (1992), pp. 311-354; Merton & the Tao, ed. by C. Serrán-Pagán y Fuentes, Louisville KY 2013 (the book also contains the correspondence between Merton and John Wu); A.E. Clark, “Finding Our Way: Thomas Merton, John Wu and the Christian Dialogue with Early China,” in The Merton Annual 29 (2016), pp. 188-202. [29] Cf. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, s.v. “Confucianism,” pp. 74-75; C. Lee, Thomas Merton and Chinese Wisdom, Erie PA 1994; J. Wu, jr., “Thomas Merton and Confucian Rites: ‘The Fig Leaf for the Paradise Condition,’” in The Merton Annual 9 (1996), pp. 118-141; P.F. O’Connell, “‘A Way of Life Impregnated with Truth’: Did Thomas Merton Undervalue Confucianism?,” in The Merton Annual 28 (2015), pp. 112-133. [30] Cf. R. King, Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh. Engaged Spirituality, New York 2003. [31] Cf. S.E. Fittipaldi, “Preying Birds: An Examination of Thomas Merton’s Zen,” in Horizons 9:1 (1982), pp. 37-46; H.C. Steyn, “The Influence of Buddhism on Thomas Merton,” in Journal for the Study of Religion 3:2 (1990), pp. 3-13; The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, s.v. “Buddhism,” pp. 33-35; ibid., s.v. “Zen,” pp. 546-548; Merton & Buddhism. Wisdom, Emptiness, and Everyday Mind, ed. by B.B. Thurston, Louisville KY 2007. [32] Cf. Encounters. Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki, ed. by R.E. Daggy, Monterey KY 1988; J. Chu-Công, “Thomas Merton and the Far East,” in Cistercian Studies 14:1 (1979), pp. 45-58. [33] Cf. R. Corless, “In Search of a Context for the Merton-Suzuki Dialogue,” in The Merton Annual 6 (1993), pp. 76-91; R.H. Sharf, “Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited,” in Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism, ed. by J.W. Heisig and J.C. Maraldo, Honolulu HI 1994, pp. 40-51; J. Keenan, “The Limits of Thomas Merton’s Understanding of Buddhism,” in Merton & Buddhism, pp. 118-132. For a critical evaluation of the limits of Merton’s knowledge of Buddhism that is framed within the complex spiritual and intellectual universe of Merton studies and Merton’s dialogical approach to Buddhism, see: Dadosky, “Merton’s Dialogue with Zen: Pioneering or Passé?”; Park, Thomas Merton’s Encounter with Buddhism and Beyond, pp. 104-109. [34] Keenan, “The Limits of Thomas Merton’s Understanding of Buddhism,” p. 123. [35] C. MacCormick, “The Zen Catholicism of Thomas Merton,” in Journal of Ecumenical Studies 9:4 (1972), pp. 802-818, here p. 812. [36] J. Simmer-Brown, “Ambivalence in Shangri-La: Merton’s Orientalism and Dialogue,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 37 (2017), pp. 93-101, here p. 94. [37] McDermott, “Why Zen Buddhism and not Hinduism?,” p. 44. [38] The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 441. [39] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 150 (emphasis in original). [40] Cf. J. Simmer-Brown, “The Liberty That Nobody Can Touch: Thomas Merton Meets Tibetan Buddhism,” in Merton & Buddhism, pp. 51-90. More specifically, on the dialogue between Thomas Merton and Chögyam Trungpa (1939-1987), see Id., “The Heart Is the Common Ground: Thomas Merton and Chögyam Trungpa in Dialogue,” in The Merton Annual 23 (2010), pp. 47-58; S.R. Shippee, “Trungpa’s Barbarians and Merton’s Titan: Resuming a Dialogue on Spiritual Egotism,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 32 (2012), pp. 109-125. [41] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 143 (emphasis in original). [42] Ibid., p. 148. [43] Simmer-Brown, “Ambivalence in Shangri-La,” p. 100. [44] MacCormick, “The Zen Catholicism of Thomas Merton,” p. 815. [45] T. Merton, “Dr. M.B. Brahmachari: A Personal Tribute,” in Dr. Mahanambrato [sic] Brahmachari. My Impressions,ed. by W. Buchanan, Ganges MN s.d. [1964?], pp. 19-21, here p. 19. [46] Cf. W. Lai, M. von Brück, Christianity and Buddhism. A Multicultural History of Their Dialogue, Maryknoll NY 2001, pp. 248-249: “Christians . . . discover their specifically Christian identity in a new way through encounter with Buddhists.” [47] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 5. [48] Cf. Steindl-Rast, “Exposure,” pp. 191-192. [49] Simmer-Brown, “Ambivalence in Shangri-La,” p. 98. [50] Merton, “Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue,” p. 313 (emphasis added). [51] Witness to Freedom. The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis, ed. by W.H. Shannon, New York 1994, p. 257 (emphasis in original). [52] Cf. J.D. Barbour, “Thomas Merton’s Pilgrimage and Orientalism,” in Literature, Religion, and East/West Comparison. Essays in Honor of Anthony C. Yu, ed. by E. Ziolkowski, Newark NJ 2005, pp. 243-259. [53] Simmer-Brown, “Ambivalence in Shangri-La,” pp. 93-94. [54] By way of reference, the most cited works are Śankarā, The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, ed. by Swami Prabhavananda and C. Isherwood, Hollywood CA 1947; S.B. Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism, Calcutta 19582; T.R.V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. Study of the Mādhyamika System, London 19602; G. Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, London 1961; E. Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, Ann Arbor MI 1967. [55] T. Forsthoefel, “Merton and the Axes of Dialogue,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 37 (2017), pp. 65-72, here p. 66. [56] Cf. Park, Thomas Merton’s Encounter with Buddhism and Beyond, pp. 101-104. [57] T. Merton, “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives (Talk delivered at Bangkok on December 10, 1968),” in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, pp. 326-343, here pp. 332-333, 337, 340. [58] B. Thurston, “Waking from a Dream of Separateness: Thomas Merton’s Principles of Interreligious Dialogue,” in Cistercian Studies Quarterly 50:1 (2015), pp. 83-97, here p. 97 (emphasis in original). [59] Cf. E.C. Tam, Christian Contemplation and Chinese Zen-Taoism. A Study of Thomas Merton’s Writings, Hong Kong 2002; R. Lipsey, “The Monk’s Chief Service: Thomas Merton’s Late Writings on Contemplation,” in Cistercian Studies Quarterly 45:2 (2010), pp. 169-198; J.A. Park, “The Relationship of Contemplation to Self-transcendence: Thomas Merton in Dialogue with Zen Buddhism,” in Dilatato Corde 5:1 (2015): http://www.dimmid.org/vertical/sites/%7BD52F3ABF-B999-49DF-BFAB-845A690CF39B%7D/uploads/Park_Merton_and_Zen_pdf.pdf [60] B.B. Thurston, “Why Merton Looked East,” in Living Prayer 21:6 (1988), pp. 43-49; republished inMonastic Interreligious Dialogue. Bulletin 49 (1994), pp. 20-24. [61] Merton by Those Who Knew Him Best, ed. by P. Wilkes, San Francisco CA 1984, p. 147. [62] At Home in the World. The Letters of Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Reuter, ed. by M. Tardiff, Maryknoll NY 1995, p. 24. [63] Cf. R. Lipsey, “In the Zen Garden of the Lord: Thomas Merton’s Stone Garden,” in The Merton Annual 21 (2008), pp. 91-105. [64] Cf. B.B. Thurston, “The Light Strikes Home: Notes on the Zen Influence in Merton’s Poetry,” in Merton & Buddhism, pp. 199-213; Id., “‘A Ray of That Truth Which Enlightens All’: Thomas Merton, Poetic Language and Inter-religious Dialogue,” in The Merton Annual 22 (2009), pp. 106-119. [65] Cf. R. Lipsey, “Merton, Suzuki, Zen, Ink: Thomas Merton’s Calligraphic Drawings in Context,” in Merton & Buddhism, pp. 137-175. [66] Cf. P. Pearson, “Beyond the Shadow and the Disguise: The Zen Photography of Thomas Merton,” in Merton & Buddhism, pp. 176-197. [67] J. Wu, jr., “The Zen in Thomas Merton,” in Your Heart Is My Hermitage, pp. 90-103 (http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/Heart/wu.htm). [68] T. Merton, Cables to the Ace, New York 1968, p. 27, no. 37. [69] See Id., Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 7, where Merton cites the Heart Sūtra passage, showing that he knows it well. [70] Prajñāpāramitāhṛdayasūtra (Sūtra of the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom), in Buddhist Wisdom. Containing The Diamond Sutra and The Heart Sutra, trans. by E. Conze, New York 2001, p. 86. [71] Cf. Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 33: “You can hardly set Christianity and Zen side by side and compare them. This would almost be like trying to compare mathematics and tennis.” [72] Cf. Ibid., p. 139: “Any attempt to handle Zen in theological language is bound to miss the point.” [73] Id, Contemplation in a World of Action, New York 1971, p. 211. [74] Cf. J.Q. Raab, “Insights from the Inter-Contemplative Dialogue: Merton’s Three Meanings of ‘God’ and Religious Pluralism,” in The Merton Annual 23 (2010), pp. 90-105, in particular p. 105: “His understanding of religious pluralism will be one that tends to account for the transcultural phenomenon of ‘final integration’ in terms of the work of the Spirit which he does not see as restricted to the Christian community. . . . For Merton, wherever the Spirit is working, so too Christ is present.” Cf. also J. Conner, “Thomas Merton—Final Integration through Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Merton Annual 23 (2010), pp. 20-28. [75] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 107. [76] Cit. in D. Steindl-Rast, “Man of Prayer,” in Thomas Merton, Monk. A Monastic Tribute, ed. by P. Hart, New York 1974, pp. 79-89, here p. 88. Along the same lines, in a letter to Marco Pallis, Merton wrote, “I think that I am as much a . . . Buddhist in temperament and spirit as I am a Christian” (The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 465). In 1962 Merton was described as “a Buddhist” by his monastic community: “[Merton is] a hermit and a Buddhist and that in choir [he is] praying as a Buddhist” (The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 580). [77] Altany, “The Thomas Merton Connection.” [78] R. Labrie, The Art of Thomas Merton, Fort Worth TX 1979, p. 79. [79] J.Q. Raab, “Madhyamika and Dharmakaya: Some Notes on Thomas Merton’s Epiphany at Polonnaruwa,” in The Merton Annual 17 (2004), pp. 195-205, here p. 195. [80] One of the main schools of Indian Buddhism, founded by the philosopher Nāgārjuna, according to which all phenomena (dharma) are empty (śūnya) of “substance” or “essence” that gives them their own independent existence, since they are dependently co-originated. Moreover, even this “emptiness” is empty: it has no existence per se, nor does it refer to a transcendent reality beyond or above phenomenal reality. For Nāgārjuna the true “miracle” is already all here in phenomenal reality: “Saṃsāra does not have the slightest distinction from nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa does not have the slightest distinction from saṃsāra. Whatever is the end of nirvāṇa, that is the end of saṃsāra. There is not even a very subtle slight distinction between the two” (Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā [Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way] 25,19-20, translated by S. Batchelor, https://www.stephenbatchelor.org/index.php/en/verses-from-the-center). [81] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, pp. 233-235 (emphasis in original). [82] Raab, “Madhyamika and Dharmakaya,” p. 195. [83] T. Anderson, “What Matters is Clear,” in The Merton Annual 23 (2010), pp. 67-79, here p. 75. [84] For a summary of the different interpretations, see D. Grayston, “Thomas Merton in Asia: The Polonnaruwa Illumination,” in Thomas Merton. Monk on the Edge, ed. by R. Labrie and A. Stuart, Vancouver 2012, pp. 135-154. [85] B.B. Thurston, “Unfolding of a New World: Thomas Merton & Buddhism,” in Merton & Buddhism, pp. 15-27, here p. 21. Prior to Thurston, Cunningham had already asked himself: “Did Merton imply that he experienced Buddhist satori?” (L.S. Cunningham, Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision, Grand Rapids MI-Cambridge 1999, p. 177). [86] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 4. [87] Ibid., p. 143. [88] Grayston, “Thomas Merton in Asia: The Polonnaruwa Illumination,” p. 143. [89] Cf. J.S. Dunne, The Way of All the Earth. Experiments in Truth and Religion, New York 1972, pp. ix-xii. [90] Raab, “Madhyamika and Dharmakaya,” pp. 202-203. [91] W. Nicholls – I. Kent, “Merton and Identity,” in Thomas Merton. Pilgrim in Process, ed. by D. Grayston and M.W. Higgins, Toronto ON 1983, pp. 106-120, here p. 110. [92] R. Drew, Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration of Dual Belonging, New York 2011, p. 215 (emphasis in original). On the phenomenon of “multiple religious belonging,” see also Vivre de plusieurs religions. Promesse ou illusion?, ed. by D. Gira and J. Scheuer, Paris 2000; Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity, ed. by C. Cornille, Maryknoll NY 2002; C. Cornille, “Double Religious Belonging: Aspects and Questions,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003), pp. 43-49; C. Phan, “Multiple Religious Belonging: Opportunities and Challenges for Theology and Church,” in Theological Studies 64 (2003), pp. 495-519; Multiple religiöse Identität. Aus verschiedenen religiösen Traditionen schöpfen, ed. by R. Bernhardt and P. Schmidt-Leukel, Zürich 2008; P. Knitter – R. Haight, “Is Religious Double Belonging Possible? Dangerous? Necessary?,” in Eid., Jesus and Buddha. Friends in Conversation, Maryknoll NY 2015, pp. 215-233. [93] Knitter – Haight, “Is Religious Double Belonging Possible? Dangerous? Necessary?,” p. 221. [94] Park, Thomas Merton’s Encounter with Buddhism and Beyond, pp. 109-111, 115. [95] Ibid., p. 114. [96] D. McInerny, Thomas Merton. The Man and His Work, Spencer MA 1974, p. 94. [97] Raab, “Madhyamika and Dharmakaya,” p. 202. [98] Altany, “The Thomas Merton Connection.” In Zen kōans are short exemplary stories or “enigmatic cases,” elusive by means of logical intelligence, destined to produce the experience of awakening. [99] F.X. Clooney, “Thomas Merton’s Deep Christian Learning across Religious Borders,” in Buddhist-Christian Studies 37 (2017), pp. 49-64, here p. 64. [100] McDermott, “Why Zen Buddhism and not Hinduism?,” p. 46. [101] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 5. |
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