‘Mystics and Zen Masters’: On Eastern and Western Spirituality
A review of ‘Mystics and Zen Masters’, by Thomas Merton; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Mystics and Zen Masters is a work of compare-and-contrast. Its author, the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, explores Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen, and its relation (or not) to the Christian contemplative tradition. Across a number of essays, Merton deals with the universal insights of the mystics, the primacy of silence, and the difference between experiential and intellectual knowledge. He makes connections; but crucially he leaves much unconnected, convinced both of the intrinsic difference between the world’s religions and the shallowness of trying to pass them off as the same.
That is to say that Merton treats his subject with respect. He judges Zen not in the light of Christianity but on its own terms. With clear admiration, he elucidates Zen’s embrace of the moment and its notion of ‘no-mind’ (mushin), finding points of comparison in the writings of the great Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart, whose views were so cryptic that he was tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII with the bull In Agro Dominico in 1329. (He died before a verdict was given.)
With clear admiration, he elucidates Zen’s embrace of the moment and its notion of ‘no-mind’.
Merton also shows a keen understanding of Zen, discussing how the Zen master ‘does not teach but only points’, recognising that almost alone among major spiritual traditions, Zen aims to shed all intellectualising and strive for experiential understanding. Zen understands religion is, as it were, the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. Zen seeks an experiential, non-intellectual spirituality, beyond ‘words or letters’. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Zen has proven, including for this writer, to be an invaluable means of helping non-Buddhists rediscover and deepen their faith.
Merton draws on the work of Zen thinkers like D.T. Suzuki, with whom he maintained a long correspondence, as well as other Western commentators on Zen. He does not praise without question. He sees these thinkers as guides, helping the Western reader catch a glimpse of Zen’s ‘bare truth’, though never fully. Merton understands enlightenment not as self-actualisation, as we in the West are apt to consider it, but as a breakdown, a total loss of self.
A constant theme in Mystics and Zen Masters is Merton’s belief — which is also the basis of Zen — that in respect of spirituality, words are inadequate. St. Augustine wrote that ‘Si comprehendis, non est Deus.’ (‘If you understand, it isn’t God.’) Wittgenstein ended his Logico-Tractatus with the remark, ‘That whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.’ Merton thus calls for silence, for only in silence can we experience the mysteries of faith. ‘Listen to silence,’ wrote Rumi. ‘It has so much to say!’ Zen, to Merton, is the peak expression of this moving beyond words, of pushing past strict, articulated, intellectualised faith into a ‘cloud of unknowing.’
St. Augustine wrote that ‘Si comprehendis, non est Deus.’
The risk with this sort of undertaking is always of creating a competition or, on the other hand, falling in love with one’s subject. Merton is careful, so fussily dispassionate, in fact, that at times we want him to be bolder. He is very cautious about, as it were, mapping Zen onto Christianity, as others (Dom Aelred Graham in his Zen Catholicism is a stand-out case) have done. Clearly, he holds Zen in high regard; but he remains a Christian. He is mindful of the contrast between the experiences of the Christian saints and mystics, which are invariably rich and colourful, with the more arid accounts given by the Zen masters. He may find close parallels between Eckhart’s thought and Zen’s ‘letting go’; but Zen, he suggests, is a mirror for Westerners, or a lens through which Christian mysticism may be gainfully refracted.
Merton writes in a simple prose style that both reflects his subject matter and ensures he cannot hide any lack of understanding behind words, as, regrettably, seems so common in academia. Which is not to say it is immediately graspable: Merton is, after all, attempting to ‘eff the ineffable’. His book, in the end, exhorts us to be neither naïve about Zen nor cynical; not to see patterns where they do not exist but also to note the similarities; certainly to avoid the temptation to a knee-jerk syncretism, a kind of religious merger. Merton does hopes that studying Zen and its most devoted adherents can throw light on Christian spirituality.
