Mystic's Last Journey

He left San Francisco with an exhilaration that approached ecstasy --"with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around." Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, the best-known Christian mystic of this century, had been given leave from Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to participate in a conference of monastic leaders near Bangkok. The trip was also to be a long-awaited personal encounter with the spiritual disciplines of the East, particularly the esoteric forms of Buddhism that Merton wished to explore in India with the exiled lamas of Tibet.

In a suburb of Bangkok, on Dec. 10, 1968, barefoot and wet from a shower, Merton touched a defectively wired room fan and was electrocuted. His death prompted friends to speculate whether Merton would ever have returned to the U.S. from his enthusiastic plunge into Buddhism. The answer now seems to be yes, though he might not have returned to Gethsemani itself.

His record of that final, searching trip has just been published as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions; $12.50). Painstakingly edited by a team of scholarly admirers, but still tantalizingly unfinished, the journal is a collage of Asian images, sacred and profane. Merton talks at length of Buddhist mandalas, the mystical cosmograms that often represent the diversity and unity of the universe. And the book itself is a kind of mandala, drawing the reader deep into a philosophical analysis, then abruptly forcing him out into the physical world: Ceylonese girls bathing in country streams, Indians in Darjeeling with "English hats, walking sticks, old school ties," a swami in Calcutta of whom Merton notes, "Even his Kleenex is saffron!"

Merton's sensitive social conscience made it difficult for him to confront the immense poverty he saw. Shortly after he arrived in Calcutta, a small beggar girl appeared at his taxi window before he could buy any Indian money. Merton was helpless. He recalled "the utterly lovely smile with which she stretched out her hand, and then the extinguishing of the light when she drew it back empty. She fell away from the taxi window as if she were sinking in water and drowning. I wanted to die."

The many spiritual encounters in his travels included three talks with the Dalai Lama. But Merton seemed most at home with a master of the ancient Tibetan Buddhist way of Dzogchen, a mystical method that like Zen stresses the ability to achieve sudden illumination. "The parting note was a kind of compact that we would both do our best to make it [to complete Buddhahood] in this life." Yet what Merton found most striking in his exploration of Buddhism was the realization that the contemplative ways of the East were for him only an analogue of his own methods. Though he greatly admired the spirituality of Asian holy men, he remained steadfastly Christian, always aware that there were on both sides "differences that are not debatable."

Just a few days after meeting the Dzogchen master, Merton was in solitary retreat near Darjeeling. "I have a definite feeling," he wrote then, that the Asian trip "was something I didn't need to do," that there was "too much movement. Too much 'looking for' something." Yet even to learn that, he felt, the journey had been worth it. Later in the day he seemed profoundly content. "The sun is high, at the zenith. Clear soft sound of a temple bell, far down in the valley. Voices of children near the cottages above me on the mountainside. The sun is warm. Everything falls into place. Nothing is to be decided. There is nothing to be judged."

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