THIS BUDDHIST--CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE for Merton centered upon experience supported by an accurate historical, cultural, theological and phenomenological study of religion. He wanted to be the good Buddhist only because he found himself to be more Christian than ever. In those depths Merton found an ancient teaching that he started to take very seriously in his study of Buddhism. Ambrose, a 4th century Christian bishop of Milan, had said that “all that is true, by whomever it has been said, is from the Holy Spirit,” which can be related to the Buddhist Bankei’s “the farther one enters into truth, the deeper it is.”

Merton was manifesting a humility that had little room for his earlier contempt for the world and for religions not his own. In the preface to "Mystics and Zen Masters," Merton says that he has attempted not merely to look at these other traditions coldly and objectively from the outside, but, in some measure at least, to try to share in the values and experience which they embody. In other words, he is not content to write about them without making them, as far as possible, “his own.”

Merton was able, to some significant degree, to “see” Buddhism from the inside, to virtually be a real Buddhist. Or perhaps to really be a virtual Buddhist because of his contemplative imagination and his knowledge and experience of a kind of mysticism that resonated with the Buddhist meditative experience.

He 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 (see George Kilcourse’s “When the Heart is Right: Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Contribution to Interreligious Dialogue”).

A path for tracing Merton's appeal to Zen can be found in his poetry. In particular, his "Emblems of a Season of Fury" shows how far his dialogue with Buddhism had led to a theology of "unknowing" and the insights of mystical experience where God is beyond knowing and how he was changing in what he understood was meant by "God" in Christianity and emptiness and nirvana in Buddhism. (I have analyzed that poetry in an article, “Thomas Merton’s Poetry: Emblems of a Sacred Season.”)

IN 1965, MERTON, EVER DESIROUS of more solitude (even while communicating with people all over the world), was granted the unusual permission to live as a hermit in a building separate from the monastic enclosure at Gethsemani, but still on the monastic grounds. It was during his time in the hermitage that his dialogue with Buddhism would bloom and prepare him for unexpected contact with Buddhism and Buddhists in the future.

Canon A. M. Allchin would say in 1996 in the Presidential Address at the first general meeting of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland that:

“God’s heart could be his hermitage precisely because there was a hermitage, an unpretentious cinder-block building up there in the Kentucky woods, ten minutes walk from the monastery of Gethsemani. The hermitage could be everywhere because it was somewhere, the universal was rooted in the particular.”

That hermitage gave Merton an ever-deepening perspective into Buddhism because it also gave him a deeper insight into his own Christian faith.

“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” (Asian Journal, p. 313).

Thus, Merton would go to Asia to be with Buddhists in Buddhist cultures.

Merton thought it was the contemplative Buddhist and the contemplative Christian who could best make contact with the other. He would even come to say that he felt more in common with such Buddhists than with noncontemplative Christians. It was Zen’s concentration upon direct experience instead of doctrinal formulations and its sometimes brutal rejection of the false self, or ego, that spoke directly to Merton, who believed God was experienced in the center of the true self.

The dialogue would therefore include a focus upon points of contact between the Buddhist teaching of anatta (no self) and what Merton understood by the true self in the context of his idea that “Zen is perfectly compatible with Christian belief and indeed with Christian mysticism (if we understood Zen in its pure state, as metaphysical intuition)” (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 47).

Merton’s view of the sacred as becoming ever more manifested in human experience was informed by this study of and dialogue with Zen Buddhism. Where the Zen Buddhist could say, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him!,” Merton could (with Protestant theologian Paul Tillich) say that God is beyond “God,” that God as God is, is beyond conceptions. This is reminiscent of the words of the Christian, Gregory of Nyssa, in the 4th century: “Every thought grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle to those who search.”

Even the most profound ideas about “God” or Buddha nature can become idols. Zen’s pointing towards the void (sunyata) and emptiness had meaning for Merton in connection with the Christian mysticism of “unknowing” and the “divine dark.”

See! See!
My love is darkness!

Only in the Void
Are all ways one:

Only in the night
Are all the lost
Found.

In my ending is my meaning.

(from “The Night of Destiny”)

IN ZEN HE FELT HE HAD found a way to see the Christian faith in its original spirit, before the theological formulations based upon Hellenistic philosophy became central. As he would say:

“This obsession with doctrinal formulas, juridical order and ritual exactitude 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." (Zen & Birds of Appetite, p. 39).

Merton had gone far beyond the Church’s old teaching of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation"). But he had not reached a definitive and comprehensive theology of religious pluralism or interreligious dialogue. Yet, the Buddhist--Christian dialogue had stimulated and further disclosed, in his view, his journey into the true self where God is, where “all is emptiness and all is compassion.” The night before his death Merton said to John Moffitt that “Zen and Christianity are the future.”

PAGE 4: Merton meets the Dalai Lama

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