Thomas Merton and Suzuki

A lovely little backwater here, far from the madding crowd. I was thinking of the great friendship between Thomas Merton and D. T. Suzuki, which flowered through the "spirit of all truth" in our world of division and conflict.

Merton, a Christian whose fidelity to Christ is unquestionable, once wrote this to Suzuki that the missionaries of our Western World should have approached the East truly in the spirit of Christ. Not to convert, but to learn, with the recognition that God is ever present in each and every heart.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Merton went on to say:-

I want to speak for this Western world.................which has in past centuries broken in upon you and brought you our own confusion, our own alienation, our own decrepitude, our lack of culture, our lack of faith...........If I wept until the end of the world, I could not signify enough of what this tragedy means. If only we had thought of coming to you to learn something..............If only we had thought of coming to you and loving you for what you are in yourselves, instead of trying to make you over into our own image and likeness. For me it is clearly evident that you and I have in common and share most intimately precisely that which, in the eyes of conventional Westerners, would seem to separate us. The fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk, far from separating us, makes us most like one another. How many centuries is it going to take for people to discover this fact?......


Possibly quoted before, but bears repetition.

Once when Merton escaped from under the monastery wall () he met up with Suzuki in New York. Near the end of their conversation Merton quoted the words of a South American theologian:- "Praise be to God that I am not good!". Suzuki responded:- "That is so important".

Theistic language, yet Suxuki saw through the "word as text" and has drunk from the Living Words of the spirit of all truth that blows where it will and not according to human understanding or reasoning.

In an essay contained in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" Merton writes this of Suzuki:-

Speaking for myself, I can venture to say that in Dr. Suzuki, Buddhism finally became for me completely comprehensible, whereas before it had been a very mysterious and confusing jumble of words, images, doctrines, legends, rituals, buildings, and so forth. It seemed to me that the great and baffling cultural luxuriance which has clothed the various forms of Buddhism in different parts of Asia is the beautiful garment thrown over something quite simple.

And further:-

But I did feel that I was speaking to someone who, in a tradition completely different from my own, had matured, had become complete and found his way. One cannot understand Buddhism until one meets it in this existential manner, in a person in whom it is alive. Then there is no longer a problem of understanding doctrines which cannot help being a bit exotic for a Westerner, but only a question of appreciating a value which is self-evident.

Yes. A value that is self-evident. Self-evident at least to those whose mind/hearts truly share the Living Word and have not been corrupted by the "word as text" and their own time conditioned understandings.

May true Dharma continue.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.