Thomas Merton and the Synergy of Christianity and Buddhism

I had a very interesting conversation with a good friend recently. My friend is a lifelong Catholic who has attracted more recently to evangelical faiths of the “personal savior” variety. I mentioned to him Thomas Merton, who he had never heard of, much to both my surprise and his.

My friend is more on the fundamentalist spectrum of things, which is okay – unlike many progressive Christians, I don’t think fundamentalism is completely out of bounds. I told my friend about the parallels between Buddhism and Christianity, and he began to say he was “worried” that Merton was trying to equivocate the two faiths when Christianity is the “ultimate truth.” As a whole, however, my friend was receptive and was very interested in the idea that Buddhism, founded in a much different part of the world at a much different time, formed very similar theological practices and outlooks.

In Merton’s last address, in Bangkok, Thailand, he said that as Western Christians who have an “openness with Buddhism, with Hinduism and with great Asian traditions, we learn more about the potentiality of our own traditions because they have gone from the natural point of view so much deeper in to this than we have.”

When Merton met with the Dalai Lama in the late 1950s, His Holiness was the subject of vicious international bullying and harassment – as Merton put it in his last address, the Dalai Lama “made every effort to coexist with the Chinese government and he failed.” He had been expelled from his own country, Tibet, and met with the most baseless forms of disrespect from Chinese politicians. Much of Western notions of Buddhism may have been shaped around that experience.

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