‘Zen and the Birds of Appetite’: A Dialogue Between East and West
A review of ‘Zen and the Birds of Appetite’, by Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki; New Directions, 1968.
Zen and the Birds of Appetite takes its striking name from its prologue, in which Thomas Merton sets the teachings of Zen against the restless, anxious cravings of the human being. These ‘birds of appetite’ are persistent and destructive: circling before swooping down to disrupt our attempts to find peace with clamorous thoughts and desires. It sets the stage for the essays that follow: in the first part, Merton, a Trappist monk and writer whose spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a runaway best-seller, attempts to grapple with Zen and its central ideas. In the second, he enters a written dialogue with D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese religious scholar, philosopher and expositor of Zen in the West.
Merton was a mystic in the sense that he was more concerned with direct experience of the divine, through contemplative prayer or sudden insight, than with following rules. St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart and the Desert Fathers were major influences. It is no surprise, then, that he was also an ecumenical figure, for the fount of all mature religion is the experience of ultimate reality, and only from this experience do rules, rites and rituals spring. Zen, which stresses experience, was of particular interest to Merton. As Suzuki himself writes in his Introduction to Zen Buddhism: ‘Zen has nothing to do with letters, words, or sutras. However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it.’
The fount of all mature religion is the experience of ultimate reality,
There is a thoroughly inquisitive way in which Merton explores Zen. He is not reporting: he is trying to understand. He sees as Zen as a means of cutting through conventional ways of seeing; this is the essence of the koan and of paradox in general: it explodes either/or thinking, yielding, in some cases, sudden insight into the nature of things. We, then, are spectators to Merton’s inquiry. He is not so much talking to us as allowing us to share in his exploration. He is not interested in dumb things down to please the ordinary reader: either that reader keeps up or she doesn’t. One shines through is his deep respect for the traditions of which he is not a part, and his wonder at the wisdom of the great figures in Zen is plain to see. He neither romanticises the East nor renders it exotic nor condescends to it.
One of the key themes that emerges in the book is the idea of emptiness — sunyata in the Zen and wider Buddhist tradition. This is not a void but a space in which freedom may be found. By letting go of our pride, of our clinging and our craving, we can reach a state of pure awareness in which the consciousness which, in my view, is everywhere can express itself fully through us. And here is where Zen and Christian mysticism meet. Both traditions exhort us to shed our false selves and uncover the true one. In Zen, the self is an illusion: a label applied to the stream of consciousness. In Christian thought, the ego must be surrendered to God. C.S. Lewis writes: ‘Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing.’ Here, he invokes Christ Himself: ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.’
It is in many ways quite encouraging that Merton does not attempt to reconcile the true traditions. Certainly they have common features (as Dom Aelred Graham sets out in his wonderful book, Zen Catholicism); but they are not the same. It is fitting that Merton celebrates the richness of each and their seeming contradictions without asserting the superiority of one over the other, since — as I have alluded to already — Zen, Christian mysticism and a paradoxical ‘both/and’ approach to the world come together to form the essence of his discussion. Nevertheless, the differences between the two traditions does give him some trouble. Language and culture represent a gap that neither Merton nor Suzuki are always able to bridge.
It is in many ways quite encouraging that Merton does not attempt to reconcile the true traditions.
Typically, Merton writes in a style that is both poetic and profound. Since style is an expression of personality, I am always interested in the way in which spiritual writers communicate; invariably, the prose style of this category of writers is simple, even spartan in some cases; but punctuated by flights of lyricism. In his Biography of Silence, Pablo d’Ors writes ‘Meditation cracks the structure of our personality until, from so much meditation, the crack widens and the old personality breaks and, like a flower, a new one begins to be born. To meditate is to attend this fascinating and tremendous process of death and rebirth.’ (David Shook, who translated the book from Spanish, ought to be celebrated for rendering this beautiful snippet so well and so faithfully in English.)
In the end, this is a book that raises more questions than provides answers; but anyone with a philosophical spirit will know that part of intellectual adventure entails asking better and better questions and letting the answers emerge by themselves. Which is not to say that Merton does provide sharp insights, or exhort us in any way to look at things differently. He asks the reader to shed her biases, open her mind and heart, and find peace in the swirling vortex of daily life. Put another way, he asks us to ignore the birds of appetite high in the sky above us, to let them be: because, if we do, we might find that one day, they are no longer there.
