THE TRAPPISTS WERE A cenobitic order focusing upon living in a community of monks under the prescription “God Alone” and an “ora et labora” (pray & work) way of life little changed over the past 700 years. Merton taught young monks and gradually would develop a contemplative imagination and mind, in spite of his tendency towards intellectualization. This contemplative attitude and practice would later link him, at the root level, with Buddhism and Buddhists that he met.

The 1950s was also a time of crisis for Merton. He awoke to the notion that monastic life was not an isolated enclave of holiness, separate from and superior to the ways others lived. A compassion for people in distress also led Merton to begin writing on the social issues of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including civil rights, nuclear weapons, war and peace, and the Viet Nam War. If fact, his religious superiors silenced him because of his literary protests.

Some people wanted him to leave the monastery and join the movements for peace and social justice, but Merton felt his view from the monastery was both unique and indelibly his to retain. It was his Christian mysticism that he saw as the necessary foundation for anything of value he might have to say about suffering in the world and to people of other religions (my article “Thomas Merton: The Rediscovered Geography of an American Mystic” talks about that mysticism).

AS HIS STUDY OF BUDDHISM continued, Merton had no intention to abandon his Christian faith and tradition. Just as the early Church had to face the influence of Hellenistic thought and the later Church the rise of modern science, so too the contemporary Church had to take seriously the other religions of the world and the reality of religiously pluralistic cultures.

Merton was becoming actively involved in dialogue at a time when his Church was holding its Second Vatican Council (1962 --1965), a Council that would issue a decree in 1965, Nostra Aetate, which Wayne Teasdale says “may well be considered the most significant document of Vatican II because it has altered forever the church’s attitude toward and relationship with the other religions” (Wayne Teasdale: "Interreligious Dialogue Since Vatican II").

The decree said:

"The Church therefore has this exhortation for her sons: prudently and lovingly, through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, and in witness of Christian faith and life, acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual and moral goods found among these men, as well as the values in their society and cultures (NA 2)."

Merton’s own Church was now beginning to call for the kind of dialogue that Merton, and others, had been doing for some time. It was a major development in the Catholic Church’s understanding of the value and validity of other religions and the official beginning of a theology of interreligious dialogue. There seemed no return to a religious exclusivism that found no value in Buddhism, and thus no reason for dialogue--only reason for efforts at conversion.

MERTON WAS A MAN OF PARADOX and that would fuel his fascination with Zen, the epitome of a paradoxical way of experience.

Being so deeply infused with his own spiritual tradition was what really allowed him to, paradoxically, appreciate people in other religions also so rooted and to appreciate their traditions, as from the inside--as vehicles of truth-telling and enlightening experience.

Thus, religious dialogue for Merton was not a syncretism or an eclectic accumulation that ignored real differences in an attempt to create a universal religion (without specific roots). Gandhi had spoken of “experiments with truth” and this describes Merton’s attitude towards his dialogue with Buddhism as well as other religions.

The dialogue was not a luxury, but a necessity. For Merton, if the West were to continue to ignore “the spiritual heritage of the East,” it would “hasten the tragedy that threatens man and his civilizations” ("Mystics and Zen Masters," p. 46).

Compassion and hope were the motivations for his immersion into Buddhism. He was not a formal theologian and found that compassion and shared spiritual experience, more than just analysis and the discursive intellect, encouraged dialogue which, in time, could include, but not be limited to, doctrinal and theoretical topics.

PAGE 3: Where Zen and Christianity meet

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