Not long before he died, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton told Brother David Steinal-Rast, “I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism." Merton developed his understanding of Buddhism—as well as Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, Indigenous traditions, and many more religions—through study, but also through years of correspondence and dialogue with dozens of practitioners and scholars from other traditions, including Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and the Zen writer D.T. Suzuki. The latter engaged in a substantive conversation with Merton which was published in Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite. There, Merton asks, “Is it therefore possible to say that both Christians and Buddhists can equally well practice Zen? Yes, if by Zen we mean precisely the quest for direct and pure experience on a metaphysical level, liberated from verbal formulas and linguistic preconceptions” [1].
Merton may be taken to task, however, by postcolonial critics—for instance in asserting that the doctrinal elements of Zen “are entirely secondary to the inexpressible Zen experience.” As Richard King points out, despite his warm reception in the West, D.T. Suzuki was writing from a minority viewpoint within Zen Buddhism: “D.T. Suzuki’s version of Zen and Vivekānanda’s neo-Vedānta became ideal Asian exports to the disaffected but spiritually inclined Westerner searching for an exotic alternative to institutional Christianity and the religions of ‘the Mystic East’” [2].
Indeed, for King, “Suzuki’s abstract, universalized and non-institutionalized ‘Zen’ […] provided a classic example of the universality of ‘mysticism’, increasingly conceived as the experiential ‘common core’ of the various ‘world religions.’” His writings were celebrated by disciples of Rudolf Otto, who had posited in his Mysticism East and West that global mysticisms all revealed “an inward hidden similarity of the human spirit.” King critiques “the Western construction of Buddhism” as part of a larger Orientalist project that imagined “the mystic East” as offering “a way of defining the West as quintessentially ‘modern’ in contrast to the ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ cultures of the East.” This project, which began in the late nineteenth century, imposed a Western Protestant framework upon Asian cultures and practices, eventually yielding what Tomoko Masuzawa has called “the invention of world religions” using Christian assumptions as a prototype. [3]
One might therefore be tempted to dismiss Merton’s understanding of Buddhism as the chauvinist dalliances of a white Christian dilettante, perhaps driven by monastic cabin fever into the arms of various “exotic” world religions in order to revitalize his own sagging spirituality. On this reading, Merton’s and Suzuki’s correspondence is a well-meaning act of complicity with a larger project of Western commodification of Buddhism and cultural colonization of “the East” for the benefit of American consumers, desiring the individual benefits of “mindfulness” and “wellness” through Yoga practices and meditation.
This paper, however, argues that such a dismissal is premature, for several reasons. First, Merton is not a vulgar syncretist or Christian assimilationist, but understands the profound differences between the two traditions. He writes, “you can hardly set Christianity and Zen side by side and compare them. This would almost be like trying to compare mathematics and tennis.” Second, while he does indeed wonder, “can one distill from religious or mystical experience certain pure elements which are common everywhere in all religions?”—yet Merton is lucidly aware that it is too simple to say that all religious mystics are essentially experiencing the same thing, and that “All religions thus ‘meet at the top.’” So, contrary to King, it is possible to entertain the hypothesis that our common membership in the human species yields some fundamental phenomenological similarities in religious experience, without thereby succumbing to a gross generalization that all religions teach the same thing. And third—and most importantly—Merton was not an Orientalist scholar, but rather a Trappist monk who spent his days and nights in silent contemplation, prayer and chant, and study. Thus, in his book Mystics and Zen Masters, Merton writes, “The author 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 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.'” More succinctly, Merton says, “It takes more than study to penetrate Zen.” [4]
I argue that Merton was uniquely qualified to explore comparative mysticism—not because he was a scholarly expert, but because he was a mystic. Rather than study Zen for the purpose of publishing peer-reviewed journal articles, he studied it 1) to develop his own spiritual practice, and 2) to advance the cause of justice and peace through dialogue. Merton saw interreligious dialogue not as an academic exercise but as a vital practice of peacebuilding. Consider Merton’s friendship with fellow antiwar activist and monk Thich Nhat Hanh—whom Merton referred to as “my brother” in an impassioned plea for the exiled Nhat Hanh to be received as a refugee. Of their friendship, Merton wrote:
I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans, and I do not hesitate to say it. It is vitally important that such bonds be admitted. They are the bonds of a new solidarity and a new brotherhood which is beginning to be evident on all the five continents and which cuts across all political, religious and cultural lines to unite young men and women in every country in something that is more concrete than an ideal and more alive than a program. This unity of the young is the only hope of the world.
This paper, then, explores Merton’s interspirituality and dialogue with Buddhists as a radical alternative to the kind of Orientalist colonizing King rightly critiques. Merton’s life and impact are a case study in how interreligious dialogue can cut instead in the opposite direction, creating possibilities for cross-cultural peacebuilding and the imagination and creation of a radically new world.
[1] Coleman, "Thomas Merton and Dialogue with Buddhism," America (2012); Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 44.
[2] Merton, 35; King, Orientalism and Religion, 156.
[3] Merton, 156; Otto, v; King, 147.
[4] Merton, Zen and Birds, 33, 43; Mystics and Zen Masters, ix.
[5] Merton, "Nhat Hanh Is My Brother," Jubilee (1966).
Thomas Merton was a pioneer in interreligious dialogue and interspirituality, engaging in years of correspondence with practitioners from Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Indigenous and other religious traditions. His extended dialogue with Zen writer D.T. Suzuki was published in Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and many of Merton's final days in Asia were spent with Tibetan monks and other Buddhist practitioners. Yet, Richard King and others have argued that despite Suzuki's warm reception in the West, he occupied a minority viewpoint within Zen which was tailor-made for such export. But this paper argues that Merton is no Orientalist appropriator. He was uniquely qualified to engage in interreligious dialogue, not because he was a scholarly expert, but because he was a mystic. Merton cultivated dialogue for the purposes of deepening his own monastic practice and fostering justice in the world. His pathbreaking interreligious exploration shows how interreligious dialogue can move in decolonizing directions.