| PAGE ONE Fall, 2001 Issue: Spirit & Crisis EDITOR'S NOTE BUDDHASCOPE DHARMATALK FOUNDOBJECTS GUESTCOLUMN QUOTES POETRY READING ROOM REVIEWS CONTACT US SITE INDEX SUBSCRIBE |
MERTON'S OWN WORDS say it best as he relives approaching the Buddhas at Polonnaruwa:
- “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 Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything… For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening…
- 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…
- All problems are resolved and everything is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya… 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. Surely… my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.
- The whole thing is very much a Zen garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence… a beautiful and holy vision.” ("Asian Journal" pgs. 233 -236)
This experience is for Merton not only a hierophany -- a breakthrough of the sacred into human experience -- but also the epitome of his love of paradox and mysticism. On another side of the world from his old Kentucky home at the hermitage, at a Buddhist sacred place, Thomas Merton embodied the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity that he had so sought. His very life was a living experience, experiment and nexus for that dialogue.
Shortly after Polonnaruwa, Merton was in Thailand for the monastic conference at which Buddhists were to also attend.
Suffering, Unknowing, Freedom and Death
D.T. SUZUKI HAD WRITTEN that “Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points” ("Introduction to Zen Buddhism," p. 38). Merton was able to encourage and participate in dialogue with Buddhism because he reached the point of not only accepting, but embracing a necessary ambiguity about ultimate concerns.
He was able to live with what the 19th century poet, John Keats, called “negative capability,” a not reaching for too easy or too ready rational answers when hard questions pressed down hard, but to live the questions and live them well. Implied here is that 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 koans.
Merton was deeply attracted to Buddhism’s long and persevering tradition of compassion and nonviolence, especially in a world of persistent and profound suffering. He would say that:
- 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” ( "Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 51").
The anguish of the modern person, for Merton, was often based upon an addiction to a false self, one’s ego-mind, that only a realization of the no-self (Buddhism) or dying to one’s self (Christianity) could transform.
Thus, the dialogue was not to be only an intellectual exercise, but a vital and compelling way to directly address the absence of freedom, compassion and meaning in contemporary living and society. And only people authentically free could really value and beneficially contribute to the dialogue since the purpose of it was to free people from the wheel of causation and suffering.
On December 10, 1968, at the conclusion of a talk at the conference, Merton said he was going to disappear for a while before the afternoon session. Later, he was found in his room, dead, evidently electrocuted by a faulty fan. His body was flown back “home” from his Asian “home” in a B-52 bomber, along with the bodies of American soldiers who had died in the Viet Nam War, a war he strongly opposed.
IN THE DECADES SINCE HE DIED, the Buddhist--Christian dialogue has proceeded and continues. Thomas Merton himself was a seed for that dialogue. He overcame youthful religious fervor and exclusivism to become a more maturely spiritual man who was not afraid to seek truth wherever it may be found, no matter how difficult or long the search. He would have liked what the Muslim, al-Bistami, said long ago: “This thing we speak of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.”
One of the continuing gatherings for dialogue took place in 1996 at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani where Merton (“Father Louie”) is buried under a simple white cross like generations of other monks who have lived and died at the Abbey during the last 150 years.
To this East-West gathering of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, arriving by helicopter under heavy security because of threats upon his life, comes the Dalai Lama. He kneels at the grave of his old friend, Merton, along with Abbot Timothy Kelly, and prays. When he rises from the ground, he says: “Now our spirits are one; I am at peace.” ("The Dalai Lama Visits Gethsemani").
For Thomas Merton the Buddhist-Christian dialogue was as simple and complex as that: spirits converging. Merton was an aspect of the nascent Buddhist-Christian dialogue in person, integrating contradictions, embracing emptiness and reaching for the vision of the Ultimate, with his fallible and full heart, wherever it may be found, or wherever it might find him.
The dialogue, and Merton, were as a lotus, that powerful symbol of the spiritual life for Asians. The lotus flower may bloom on the surface of the water in the spontaneous beauty of the light, but it is the intricate complex of roots reaching into the unseen and unknowing mud that makes the fruition of the lotus possible.
Merton's life, a perseverance in contemplation, gave a unique personality to the Buddhist - Christian dialogue by showing how the transformative flower of spirit can emerge from the muddy, but necessary, roots of daily life, a rare bloom opening in silence to the dawn.
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.
Alan Altany is a professor of religious studies at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and a Christian who values interreligious dialogue. Visit his web page at this address.
PAGE 6: Resources on Merton and Christian/Buddhist Dialogue