Thomas Merton's spiritual transformation from Catholicism to Zen Buddhism

Thomas Merton's Journey into Buddhism
Introduction
Thomas Merton was the son of Ruth Jenkins and Owen Merton. His mother was an American while his father was a New Zealander. He was born in France, where his parents, who were experienced artists, were living. Thomas Merton's parents were Church of England adherents, and this is where he was baptized. Other than his baptism, he received very little Christian or religious education. At the peak of the First World War, Merton's family emigrated to the United States. A few years after Merton's family had moved to the U.S., Merton's mother died; she was killed by stomach cancer in 1921. At the time of her death, Merton was 6-years-old (Park, 6-8). After the death of his mother, Merton lived with his father and sometimes his grandparents in the United States. About five years after the death of his mother, Merton, and his father moved back to France and then later went to England. As a young person, Merton attended school in both France and England.
One of the unique things about Merton as a young man is that he was smart. This allowed him to get admission into the prestigious University of Cambridge. However, less than a year into his studies at Cambridge, Merton transferred to the equally prestigious Columbia University in New York City. It was in Columbia that he earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees. As mentioned earlier, for most of his young life, Merton had received very little Christian/ religious education.
For this reason, he embraced agnosticism. However, while he was studying at Columbia, he became a Catholic and began trying to lead a religious life. After completing his studies, Merton started teaching English. His first did this at Columbia in 1938 and 1939. He also taught the subject at Bonaventure University between 1939 and 1941. While teaching English at Bonaventure, he joined the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, which was based not far from the city of Louisville in Kentucky ("Thomas Merton's Life…"). Trappists are a Catholic monastic order. In this Abbey, Merton became a mystic and pursued several spiritual quests via his many writings and other actions. He became a priest by the year 1949.
During Merton's last year, he became overwhelmingly fascinated by Zen Buddhism and other Asian religions and was very keen on East-West monastic dialogue. Merton visited Asia several times as a monk and met various individuals, including the Dalai Lama, in 1968. The Dalai Lama, he met several times in 1968, later commented that he had never met any other Christian with as much knowledge about Zen Buddhism as Merton ("Thomas Merton's Life…"). Merton died later in 1968 during his last trip to Asia for East-West monastic dialogue. By the time Merton died, he had been a monk for nearly three decades.
In 1936, Merton's grandfather, Samuel Jenkins, died. In February 1937, Merton read a book that opened his mind to Catholicism, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Étienne Gilson. He had purchased the book for a class on medieval French literature, not seeing the nihil obstat in the book. In it, he encountered an explanation of God that he found logical and pragmatic. "That book, and the extraordinary variety of Catholic churches in Manhattan, almost all of which he seems to have visited, led Merton inexorably to an embrace of Catholicism." Another author, Merton, began reading was Aldous Huxley, whose book Ends and Means introduced Merton to mysticism. In August that year, Tom's grandmother, Bonnemaman, died.
Thomas Merton met Brahmachari, either n 1937 or the next year. Brahmachari was a Hindu monk. Brahmachari recommended Saint Augustine's book Confessions, the Imitation of Christ to Merton. This book is also said to have played a significant role in convincing Merton to embrace Catholicism by the end of 1938. Merton would later write in his book, The Seven Storey Mountain, about the Hindu monk's recommendations and how they helped him to embrace Catholicism. According to Merton, the monk was probably sent by God from India to America to help him with his conversion. As mentioned earlier, Merton later became a Trappist monk at a Kentucky abbey. While at the Abbey, Merton focused both on studying works by Catholic authors and by other authors. From the year 1949, Merton started seriously focusing on Asian religions (Merton, "The Asian Journal" 72). He particularly loved the idea of Buddhism and its teachings.
By the early 1950s, Merton was seriously reading about Zen Buddhism and was very interested in the Asian religion's messages and teaching. Merton believed there was a resonance between the Desert Fathers and Zen. The Desert Fathers had tried to lose control of their selves to understand bigger realities, and so did Zen roshis. The meditation on the emptying of the Messiah and the similar emptying in frugality and embracing of suffering by Monks appeared to Thomas Merton to be very similar to the idea of emptiness in Zen Buddhism. Merton researched Zen Buddhism more to discover more about it and its differences with Catholicism. He later wrote a research paper on the topic and forwarded it to D.J. Suzuki – one of the leading proponents of Zen Buddhism in the United States. After receiving this copy, Suzuki sent a letter to Merton, and the two started frequently communicating via long letters (Coleman).
Merton, who early on in his career, showed a keen interest in dialogue with the religions of Asia (Hinduism, Sufism, as well as Buddhism) tended to think such dialogue should, primarily, focus on practice and experience and less on doctrine or beliefs, as such. He believed that sharing experiences brought more understanding and enhanced dialogue than arguing about beliefs. One of the biggest inter-faith dialogues happened at Merton's Abbey, where Christian and Buddhist monastics met in 1996. The meeting entailed discussions that Merton would have approved of. Merton was convinced that Christian monastics who were interested in communion with other religious monastics could quickly become partners with Buddhist monastics, and this could benefit both groups.
In the years before his death, Thomas Merton was heavily engaged in inter-faith dialogue. Merton's religious knowledge and background made him open and helped him in his quest to increase inter-religious dialogue. He was also influenced by his increasing spiritual knowledge and his in-depth knowledge of Taoism and Zen Buddhism (Park, 32). His increasing knowledge of Asian religions inspired him and invigorated him. It is important to note here that Merton not only wanted inter-religious dialogue. He was also a proponent of inter-denominational unity and supported many Protestant ideas and practices. However, it was his opinion that sacramental or institutional union should not be the focus of the interdenominational dialogue. What should be the focus is a spiritual union, according to him.
Merton's experiences with Buddhism and Buddhists changed his inner experience. His inter-faith dialogue programs also changed him and his religious awareness. In 1958, seventeen years after he had joined the Louisville abbey and shunned the normal way of life, Merton opened his mind and heart to Asian religions, including Buddhism. Specifically, Zen Buddhism. He discovered the religion from his frequent and thorough reading of different Zen Buddhism articles and works and his constant communication with Eastern religion experts such as Dr. D.T. Suzuki. His friendship with Buddhists changed his views towards Eastern religions and towards Christianity. Apart from engaging in discussions with Eastern religion experts, Thomas Merton proposed spiritual collaboration/ communion between the monks of different religions. Just what he meant by these and other points will be fully explained in this work. One more thing that changed views and his thinking toward religion was his meetings with lamas and monks from Tibet during his 1968 Asia trip. It is important to note that Merton continued with his dialogue meetings until he passed away.
Probably the most important dialogue Merton ever had was in the town of Polonnaruwa in central Sri Lanka. This dialogue resulted in a transformative experience in which Merton understood that "everything is emptiness and everything is life" (Park, 5). The transformative experience and the message he got from it symbolized a bridge, a bridge that could connect Christianity to Buddhism. Even though Merton was not an expert on matters of Buddhism, his personal transformative experience revealed to him a method that could be used to enhance Christian-Buddhism dialogue and other interreligious dialogues. However, he died not long after his transformative experience. Therefore, it is impossible to tell how he could have acted after the experience.
Nevertheless, some evidence exists that he planned to explore Tibetan Buddhist traditions more as a student of Rinpoche. Nevertheless, regardless of what he could have done next, he still believed that reflective dialogue could result in mutual acknowledgment and acceptance of the usefulness and importance of both Christian and Buddhist traditions. In other words, he believed that all religions are one and that reflective dialogue could help restore the original unity that existed despite diversity.
Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means, Merton showed an interest in Asian religions. When he was a student at Columbia University, Merton sought out a Hindu monk named Brahmachari for some counsel. The monk advised Merton to follow his Christian tradition to find what he was most deeply looking for.
Thomas Merton liked Mahatma Gandhi. He wrote how Gandhi, despite being a Hindu, found refuge in the Biblical Sermon on the Mount. Merton began seriously exploring Buddhism as a religion in the early 1950s. He had a specific interest in Zen Buddhism. He believed there were several similarities between the Desert Fathers and Zen. For instance, he noted that the Desert Fathers, like Zen Roshis, desired followers to lose themselves to transcend their bodies and merge into a bigger reality which transcended their objects/ selves. The Desert Fathers frequently gave tough and unsolvable riddles (koans) to monks that followed them. Their way of meditating and the way the monks emptied their selves into poverty and accepted suffering made Merton conclude that religion is very similar to Buddhism in terms of tradition. To be specific, it is very similar to the Buddhism concept of emptiness (Coleman). Merton believed that the unsolvable riddles made monks experience themselves as unsolvable riddles with no easy answers. After studying about Desert Fathers for a while, Thomas Merton published a paper and then sent one copy to D.J. Suzuki, who was one of the leading experts on Zen Buddhism in the United States. Suzuki and Merton began corresponding via letters after he replied to the first letter from Merton. This was in the 1950s.
Despite communicating with each other via letters for many years, Merton and Suzuki never met for over five years. They two met face to face for the first time in the year 1964 in New York. While communicating with Suzuki via letters, Merton uses Aquinas' argument that God is a non-being because to say that He is a being yet he transcends the characteristics of beings we know is erroneous or misleading. Merton, in his letters, seemed to be quite interested in the Christian mystical tradition of un-knowing when contemplating God. In one of his letters to Suzuki, he told him that he had his way of walking and that somehow wherever he went, he always found Zen right in the road. He further wrote that he felt like he always needed Zen to breathe and that without Zen, he felt like he was being suffocated (Coleman). In his letters, he also told Suzuki that being a monk, he liked 'emptiness' when he did not need to speak about it. Suzuki wrote back to Merton every time he got a letter from him. In addition to letters, the two also exchanged books and manuscripts. The two also exchanged written dialogue. Excerpts of their written dialogue are included in Merton's work Zen and the Birds of Appetite that was published posthumously.
In addition to Zen and the Birds of Appetite, the book Mystics and Zen Masters also has Merton's name on it. The book contains some of his most popular Zen ideas. For instance, he defines Zen as a live and real ontology that defines itself by the acts that emerge out of increased awareness and consciousness and not theoretical propositions. According to him, Zen can only be judged by the quality of awareness and consciousness. Merton believed that Zen was not unchristian. He argued that Zen Buddhism is all about suffering, all about its causes and all about the right paths to follow. And at the same time is all about emptiness, which is the delusion of the subject-object difference and the fleeting/ non-substantiality of existence. Zen is also defined by compassion and kindness. Christianity is about most of these things and, therefore, in this aspect Thomas Merton is right. According to Suzuki, the most important thing in religions is love, and Merton agrees with this argument.
Merton then makes the argument that Christian mystics also approach the emptiness, the void, and the subject-object transcendence as pure darkness, abandonment, and kenosis. For Christian mystics, pure light and pure void come together. The case is the same for Buddhists. Thomas utilizes John of the Cross's ironic statement, "everything and nothing at once!" He also uses the mystic Jacob Boehme's remark that God can be defined as the finding or seeing of nothing and, thus, can be referred to as nothing (though he remains God) because He is not easily expressible or conceivable. He uses John's and Boehme's remarks to show the similarity between Zen and Christianity. He also uses the arguments of Eckhart, who stated that for one's body to be the temple of God and to be fit for God's work, they need to be so poor (so needless) that there is no area for God to work on. Embracing poverty and abandoning self are common ideas in Zen Buddhism.
Entrance into priesthood
In January 1939, Merton had heard good things about a part-time teacher named Daniel Walsh, so he decided to take a course on Thomas Aquinas with Walsh. Through Walsh, Merton was introduced to Jacques Maritain at a lecture on Catholic Action, which took place at a Catholic Book Club meeting the following March. Merton and Walsh developed a lifelong friendship, and it was Walsh who convinced Merton that Thomism was not for him. On May 25, 1939, Merton received Confirmation at Corpus Christi, and took the confirmation name James. Merton met with his teacher Dan Walsh, whose advice he trusted. Walsh felt Merton was spiritually and intellectually suited for a priestly vocation in a specific order. They discussed the Jesuits, Cistercians and Franciscans. Merton had appreciated what he had read of Saint Francis of Assisi; as a result, he felt that might be the direction in which he was being called.
Daniel Walsh contacted Edmund Murphy, a priest at the Saint Francis of Assisi on 31st Street, to arrange a meeting between the priest and Merton. The meeting was successful, and Merton was offered the chance to apply. He also got a personal invitation from the priest to become a friar at the monastery. However, he told Thomas Merton that he could not enter or join the monastery until August of 1940 because that was the only time the monastery would be accepting novices. Thomas was excited that he got the opportunity to join the Franciscan order, but he was disappointed that it would take about one year before him joining the institution (Coleman). As time went by, Merton started doubting whether joining the monastery was his calling; he doubted his suitability to become a Franciscan. As the date to becoming one approached, Merton started feeling that he was not honest enough about his background with both Daniel Walsh and Edmund Murphy.
For this reason, he organized another meeting to see Murphy, the priest. The priest listened during the meeting but did not give his response immediately. He informed Merton to go back the next day and give him time to process the new information. The next day, the priest told him that he felt that he (Merton) was no longer suitable for training to become a Franciscan friar. He also told him that the positions for August were all filled. Because of this, Merton felt that he could no longer fulfill his calling.
However, in the month that he could have joined the Franciscan order, Merton traveled to Olean to stay at a cottage with his friends Ed Rice and Robert Lax. He had vacationed in the same cottage the previous summer. While relaxing, Merton knew he needed to find a job. Close to the cottage, there was a university by the name St. Bonaventure University. It was a Franciscan university that his friend Robert Lax had told him about the previous year. Therefore, when he arrived in Olean, Merton visited the university the next day. He had an interview with the president of the university – a priest by the name Thomas Plassman. Luckily, the university had a vacancy in its English Department. Merton was hired at the end of the interview. Merton was excited to find work at St. Bonaventure University because he still desired to become a friar and, therefore, felt that if he could not become one, then he could simply live like one among them ("Thomas Merton's Life…").
About a month after his interview, Merton moved into a room that was reserved for him on campus. While Merton did not teach for long at the university, the two years or so he spent at the university changed him a lot and influenced his next move. For instance, his spiritual life improved significantly as he became more prayerful. He also stopped smoking, stopped drinking frequently, and stopped reading every type of material. In his way, he renounced worldly pleasures. He changed so much in the few months he taught at the university that he decided to go for a week-long retreat at Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani located near Bardstown in the State of Kentucky. After the retreat, he went back to teaching, but he still was not sure about what he wanted to do in the future. In May in 1941, Merton opted to utilize an old Sortes Sanctorum bibliomantic ritual to find a clue or sign about his future. He would simply use his old Vulgate and point a finger randomly to get a clue. When he did this, he pointed at a verse that read behold and be silent. This clue made him straightaway think of the Cistercians.
In August of 1941, Catherine de Hueck visited St. Bonaventure to give a talk which Merton attended. Hueck was the founder of the Friendship House – an organization whose mission was charity and promotion of racial harmony. Merton was very impressed by Hueck's organization and mission and decided to volunteer at its Harlem center for 14 days (Merton and Pennington, 2). Harlem was quite different from what Merton was used to. It was dirty and full of prostitution and poverty. And Merton felt particularly troubled by the environment that children were being brought up in in the area. Friendship House organization tried much to help, and Merton has positively impacted the organization itself and its mission and would say this in his writings.
In November of 1941, Catherine asked Merton to consider becoming a member of the organization. Merton said he would consider it. However, in December, Merton told Hueck that he could not join her at the organization and explained his desire to become a priest.
December 1941 – Gethsemani
On December 10, 1941, Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani and spent three days at the monastery guest house, waiting for acceptance into the order. The novice master would come to interview Merton, gauging his sincerity and qualifications. In the interim, Merton was put to work polishing floors and scrubbing dishes. On December 13, he was accepted into the monastery as a postulant by Frederic Dunne, Gethsemani's abbot since 1935. Merton's first few days did not go smoothly. He had a severe cold from his stay in the guest house, where he sat in front of an open window to prove his sincerity. During his initial weeks at Gethsemani, Merton studied the complicated Cistercian sign language and daily work and worship routine.
In March of 1942, Thomas Merton was accepted at the Abbey of Gethsemani to work as a novice. A few months later, his brother, who went by the name John Paul sent him a letter and told him he was about to come back home from the war and that he would visit him at Gethsemani. He arrived at the Abbey as he promised a couple of weeks later, and the two brothers were happy to see each other and to catch up. Merton's brother told him that he wanted to convert and become a Catholic. This was arranged at a nearby Catholic Church in the town of New Haven. The brother then left shortly afterward (Jacobs). Unfortunately, this was sort of the brother's goodbye. Because he went back to war and his plane crashed less than a year later. Thomas Merton wrote a poem to his brother in The Seven Storey Mountain.
While the Gethsemani Abbey was a nice place to stay in, it did not end up being the home Merton expected it to be. For example, Merton did not feel very comfortable writing at the Abbey even though he was a very good writer and that he loved writing. This is because he felt that writing would make him different from his brothers and would, therefore, harm the communal lifestyle at the Abbey. While this could have been the case, the abbot asked him to write. He encouraged Merton to write because he felt that the young man was a talented writer. And when his autobiography was published, the abbot confirmed he had done the right thing because the autobiography sold many copies
The autobiography sold many copies, promoted Catholicism and monastic life. The next year after its publishing saw an increase in the number of people interested in joining monasteries across the United States. The book also increased the Abbey of Gethsemani's funds as all its royalties went to its account (Jacobs). Because of the book's content, its effects, and the fact that it brought money, the Abbot and other leaders at the Abbey saw no problem with Thomas writing. Nevertheless, as Thomas tried to write more, he became less available to complete communal tasks with his brothers at the Abbey. To try and solve this, one of the abbots who became in charge of the Abbey while Merton was there asked him to teach novices. This task, which Thomas happily accepted, made writing easy for him because he could easily convert his lectures into books.
However, Merton still felt that he was not participating fully with his brothers at the Abbey. For this reason, he asked to be permitted to start living as a hermit at one of Abbey's remote corners. This request was un-Trappist. However, it was permitted, and it was probably for the better as it allowed him to focus on his spiritual life and his writing. Regarding the talks to novices, Merton did collect some of them and published a book he called "No Man Is an Island" – a title that is both ironic and aspirational (Jacobs).
One of the many novices who Merton inspired and was closely linked to him was Ernesto Cardenal. Ernesto noted that when he wanted to join the Gethsemani Abbey, Merton told him and other novices words to the effects that monastic life is very private and not very highly exciting for many people. According to Ernesto, this did not scare him. However, he would leave the monastery less than 24 months after joining to pursue the priesthood.
Ernesto was from Nicaragua. He was a decade younger than Thomas. However, despite the age difference, the two became good friends. They initially became friends because they both loved poetry and because they both had pursued higher education at Columbia University, at least for some time (Jacobs). While at Gethsemani, Merton and Ernesto spend a lot of time together, and the two eventually hatched a plan which would involve Ernesto leaving the Abbey to learn and become a priest in a seminary in Mexico and then to establish a monastery in the country to seek justice for oppressed communities in the country and the region. The plan involved Merton leaving the Abbey to join Ernesto at the monastery after release from the Abbey of Gethsemani.
In the 1950's Merton began exploring Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism. He thought he found some resonance between Zen and the Desert Fathers. Like Zen roshis, the Desert Fathers sought a kind of loss of the self and its merger into a larger reality which transcended self or object. They often enough gave the equivalent of koans (unsolvable and puzzling riddles) to desert monks under their sway. Their meditations on the kenosis or emptying of Christ and the monk's similar emptying in poverty and acceptance of suffering struck Merton as akin to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. For Merton, the koan meant that the monk comes to experience himself as a riddle without any easy or facile answers. Merton sent a copy of his study of the Desert Fathers to D.J. Suzuki, the leading exponent of Zen in the west. They began a long correspondence in the late 1950s ( cf. Encounter: Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki Robert Daggy, ed., Larkspur Press, 1988).
In one of his letters to Suzuki, who was a leading expert in Zen in the Western World, Merton discusses Aquinas's argument about God being a non-being. He says this is correct because God greatly transcends the concept of being and, therefore, referring to him as a being would be misleading. Merton, in his letters, seemed to be quite interested in the Christian mystical tradition of un-knowing when contemplating on God. In one of his letters to Suzuki, he told him that he had his way of walking and that somehow wherever he went, he always found Zen on the road. He further wrote that he felt like he always needed Zen to breathe and that without Zen, he felt like he was being suffocated (Coleman). In his letters, he also told Suzuki that being a monk, he liked 'emptiness' when he did not need to speak about it. Suzuki wrote back to Merton every time he got a letter from him. In addition to letters, the two also exchanged books and manuscripts. The two also exchanged written dialogue. Excerpts of their written dialogue are included in Merton's work Zen and the Birds of Appetite that was published posthumously.
The close friendship between Merton and Suzuki made James Fox, one of the persons who became abbot at Gethsemani when Merton was there, to allow him to leave the monastery and travel a significant distance away from it to New York in 1964. The two writers met at a place near Columbia University and had long conversations. By the time Merton was meeting Suzuki, Suzuki was a ninety-four when he met Thomas Merton. His health was not excellent. In writing about his face to face meeting with Suzuki, Merton noted that Suzuki appeared to manifest all the key attributes of Superior Man, as explained in the ancient Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, and Asian traditions. He noted that his face to face meeting with was particularly exciting for him. One of the last statements he remembers Dr. Suzuki making in the meeting was that the key thing in life is love. This profoundly affected me (Merton, "D.T. Suzuki" 60- 62.).
The reason why Merton was interested in Zen Buddhism is found in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Merton used this book to explain what was long regarded as a significant deficiency in Western Thought. According to Merton, the high interest in Zen Buddhism in the United States is a reaction of individuals tired of over four centuries of Cartesianism – the reification of concepts, the promotion of reflexive consciousness, and the flight from being into rationalization, mathematics, and verbalism. According to Merton, the philosopher Rene Descartes made a big deal of the mirror where the self finds itself in but that this mirror is shattered completely by Zen (Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty" 285).
It is important to note that various Buddhism scholars faulted Thomas Merton for his reliance on Dr. Suzuki for understanding Buddhism. For instance, John Keenan, who was teaching religion in Vermont's Middlebury College, wrote that Dr. Suzuki's teachings about Buddhism were suited for sixties America. Professor Keenan also wrote that Dr. Suzuki's teaching on Zen was too simplistic, too naïve, too pure and too idealistic. He also wrote that Suzuki's writing distorted Zen and Buddhist traditions. According to Keenan, Zen is not unlike other religions. It is literate, it is rarified, and it abounds with rhetorical moves. It also places importance on scripture and encourages the studying of philosophy (Keenan, 121,126)
However, it is fair to say that Keenan was not very fair in his critique of Suzuki and Merton's reliance on him. This is because he focused on non-essential things in his critique. There is a parable by Sakyamuni Buddha that captures Keenan's critique perfectly. In the parable, it is asked, suppose a man is shot by an arrow that is poisoned and his friends go to get a doctor to remove it and treat him. Then the man says no this arrow should not be removed until he knows who wounded him, the kind of bow that was used, the type of string on the bow, the type of feathers on the arrow and so on. Would the man not die before he knows all this? The lesson in this parable is that trying to find answers to non-important or speculative questions is useless and a waste of time. The case is the same whether the questions are religious or not religious. The only important thing is the path that leads to the truth or the noble truth.
This simple and practice emphasis by parable by Sakyamuni Buddha is one of the many things that attracted Merton to Zen Buddhism, not the sophisticated philosophy that Keenan was a proponent of or that some Buddhist writers have come up with to explain the religion and its concepts and traditions. In his book Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Merton wrote an appreciation to Suzuki. He wrote that it appeared to him that there is a lot of cultural luxuriances clothing various Buddhist traditions in the different regions of Asia where the religion is common. However, he noted that cultural luxuriance is but beautiful clothing thrown over a very simple religion. According to Merton, the greatest religions among all religions are very simple. They all have significant differences, but they are all very simple and entail concepts including absolute void, absolute mercy, absolute love, absolute being, and awakened consciousness in daily living (Merton, "DT Suzuki" 61-62).
This stress on simplicity should be simply labeled as simplistic because the word simplistic has a negative connotation. This is according to Ruben Habito, a Buddhism scholar who studied the subject at the University of Tokyo. As per Habito, evidence of the awakening of consciousness in daily living is the easiest and best way to tell if an enlightenment experience is real or not real. In Habito's words, the Zen life is, after all, lived moment by moment, and being just there in the moment is sufficient as long as one is open and hearing the calls every moment brings and responding to them (Habito, 115). These statements from Habito are exactly following what Thomas Merton said decades earlier about Zen. He said that the seemingly cryptic and mysterious Zen sayings and traditions are suddenly seen as simple when they are considered in the context of awareness or mindfulness, which is simply bare attention. In other words, it is mindfulness that involves seeing but not adding any interpretation, any comment, any conclusion, or any judgment. It just involves seeing, and this is one of the most basic exercises of Buddhist mediation (Merton, "Zen and the Birds" 53).
Merton was very much interested in the Zen line of Buddhism. He was also interested in the Theravada line. He read and cited Theravada monks such as Nyanaponika Thera. While most of Merton's writings focused on Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Merton also relied on and valued the Theravada tradition. He kept a copy of The Heart of a Buddhist Tradition on his person. This was a book authored by Nyanaponika. The first religious person he met on when he started his Asian tour was also a Theravada monk. He chatted with the monk a lot about awareness and mindfulness. When he traveled and reached Sri Lanka, he met Rahula Walpola, another Theravada monk who was the author of many widely famed books, including What the Buddha Taught.
In Merton's book, Mystics and Zen Masters, he says of Zen that it is "a concrete and lived ontology which explains itself not in theoretical propositions but in acts emerging out of a certain quality of consciousness and awareness. Only by these acts and by this quality of consciousness can Zen be judged." Merton thought Zen compatible with Christianity. In its essence, Buddhism is about suffering, its causes, and the paths to live with yet beyond it. It is about emptiness (the delusion of a subject-object distinction and the non-substantiality and transient nature of all existence). It is also about universal compassion. Merton approves of Suzuki's comment that the most important thing is love.
Merton then makes the argument that Christian mystics also approach the emptiness, the void, and the subject-object transcendence as pure darkness, abandonment, and kenosis. For Christian mystics, pure light and pure void come together. The case is the same for Buddhists. Thomas utilizes John of the Cross's ironic statement, "everything and nothing at once!" He also uses the mystic Jacob Boehme's remark that God can be defined as the finding or seeing of nothing and, thus, can be referred to as nothing (though he remains God) because He is not easily expressible or conceivable. He uses John's and Boehme's remarks to show the similarity between Zen and Christianity. He also uses the arguments of Eckhart, who stated that for one's body to be the temple of God and to be fit for God's work, they need to be so poor (so needless) that there is no area for God to work on. Embracing poverty and abandoning self are common ideas in Zen Buddhism.
While Merton was quickly and forever attracted to Zen Buddhism, and he never questioned the awareness or mindfulness stressed by Theravada writers such as Nyanaponika, he did not approach Tibetan Buddhism with the same openness. He was very cautious at first. While preparing for his tour of Asia, he wrote in his diary about Tibetan Buddhism and the threat that was posed to it by the occupation of Tibetan land by the Chinese government. Based on his knowledge about Tibetan Buddhism before he traveled to Asia, Merton commented in his diary that he was not interested in not more about it. And he added that Tibetan Buddhism was characterized by magic, superstition, ritualism, and ferocity. He also believed that it was marked by mysterious things and, therefore, he felt that it needed to disappear (Merton, "The Other Side" 145). Also, on the possibility of him meeting the head of Tibetan Buddhism during his tour of Asia, Merton said to his friend Talbot that he was not interested. He argued that he had already met more than enough pontiffs. Talbott, who was a close friend of Merton and knew Merton from Abbey Gethsemani, was well aware that Merton was not a great respecter of authority and did not trust or like what he regarded organized religion. He added that his monk friend had not traveled to the Indian subcontinent to meet the elite of another Vatican (Simmer-Brown, 66-67). However, when Merton arrived in India and started touring the country and its religious institutions and attractions, he reached Dharamsala. This is the town where the Tibetan government in exile led by the Dalai Lama is located. Upon seeing the appalling conditions exiled Tibetans and their government was living in, he changed his attitude immediately.
In his journal entries and letters, before he embarked on the Asian tour, Merton repeatedly indicated his desire to get knowledge by experience with regards to monastic practices of contemplation and meditation. And his encounters with Tibetan monks allowed him to get the knowledge he was seeking. He was very impressed with their understanding of religion and their traditions/ practices. A few days after arriving in Dharamsala, he met Sonam Kazi. Kazi was a lay monk that followed the Nyingmapa lineage. He told Merton to find a proper Tibetan guru that could give him the knowledge on how to practice Dzogchen, which would lead him to a state of maximum awareness that he equated to being the true nature of the mind. After advising Merton, Mr. Kazi asked him if he could risk it. Merton said he could. He said his idea of meeting a master not about finding a magic master but about finding somebody experienced and knowledgeable from who he could learn something. From his encounters with Tibetan Buddhists, he concluded that they have a significant population of individuals who have achieved great heights in terms of contemplation and meditation. He also concluded that he felt peaceful and at home with Tibetans and concluded that much that had been written about them in Western books were sinister and misleading (Merton, "The Other Side" 239).
Therefore, as mentioned above, while Merton did not have a good opinion of Tibetans, his opinion of them quickly changed once he met them. His opinion of the Dalai Lama also changed once he met him. He met him thrice, and he was very impressed by him. He noted in his journal that while the Dalai Lama does not look very impressive physically, he is a warm, generous, energetic, and solid person that is quite capable of the big problems facing his people. Merton also claimed that during the three meetings he had with the Dalai Lama, the man never mentioned any of the political problems he and his people were facing. He solely focused on mediation, religion, and philosophy (Merton, "The Other Side" 251).
For Merton, Zen was much more than religion. This concept plays a key role in the way he understood and conceptualized things and how he intended to forward Christian-Buddhist dialogue. For example, for Merton, the sunyata experience in Zen is similar to the fullness and nothingness of God, which one can achieve in Christianity through losing oneself to Christ. Merton also believed that all beyond-human experiences for Christians involve the participation of Christ's mind and kenotic transformation to emptiness (Merton, "Zen and the Birds" 4).
Merton had a very strong attraction to Zen. In his lecture, " Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue," delivered in Calcutta shortly before he died, Merton said: " 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 seek not to just learn more quantitatively about religion and monastic life but to become a better and more enlightened monk ( qualitatively) myself." Again in Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Merton argues: " Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape. Suffering is not a ' problem' as if it were something we could stand outside of and control. Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls ' the great death' and Christianity calls ' dying and rising with Christ'."
Before the Congress, Merton traveled to Calcutta in India. He spoke with other religious leaders at the Conference for the Religious of India. During this conference and in other meetings, Merton emphasized the importance of monastic experience for the Buddhist-Christian dialogue and recommended the achievement of contemplative dialogue via spiritual communion between monastics from the different religions. While in his Asian tour, Merton met the Dalai Lama several times, the Rinpoches, Tibetan monks, Cambodian monks, Theravada monks and leaders of Sufism in Islam. He learned a lot from these people.
Merton also visited Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, where he had an enlightenment experience. The experience, which he called the Polonnaruwa Enlightenment Experience, was a trans-religious and trans-cultural, and it happened when he was touring the ancient city of Polonnaruwa and before massive stone statues of Buddha. He was very impressed by the towering statues that his consciousness was transformed into simultaneous fulfillment and emptiness. He noted this in his journal (Merton, "The Asian Journal" 82).
In early December 1968, Merton when to Bangkok, where he shortly gave a presentation he called Marxism and Monastic Perspectives. In the lecture, he compared Marxism and Monasticism. He said that monasticism is all about changing the globe by changing consciousness. In contrast, Marxism is all about changing social structures; he noted (Moffitt, 76.). He called on Asian countries to embrace openness, saying this would promote more understanding of Asian traditions and religions. Inopportunely, after giving this lecture, Merton got accidentally electrocuted in his hotel room by an electric fan. His body was taken back to the United States, and he was buried at Abbey Gethsemane. He died more knowledgeable and wiser about Asian traditions and religions than he probably ever expected to be.
Merton's experience in Asia revealed to him how deep and rich Zen Buddhism was.