Thomas Merton's Death-Before-Dying, December 4, 1968

Eckhart Tolle begins his "Power of Now" with a very powerful description of an enlightenment experience. The very same day I read it, a friend read me the following entry from Thomas Merton's Journals, dated June 4, 1968--four days before his death in Thailand at the age of 53. Merton, who was drawn to Buddhism in the last decade of his life, and who shared a profound friendship with D.T. Suzuki, went on his Buddhist pilgrimage in late 1968. In the following passage, Merton travels to a Buddhist shrine-retreat built into the side of a mountain in Sri Lanka--one I imagine similar to those the Taliban destroyed in Afghanistan in 2001. If only Allah's henchmen had approached those statues with the same amazement-prone reverence and awe as Merton did. Here, in a sense, is a description of what should have happened when God's troops entered those caves: from troop to trope in a non-combatant flash, dying in the same same moth-friendly fire of fanna [extinction]. Note how the multiple, multiplying presences of those Buddhas engulfed and awakened Merton. In my mind's eye, I saw an Olympic diver caught in every station of a perfect dive into what my teacher called "the ocean of ilm [divine knowledge]." Now, days later, I still experience an easily-summoned afterglow from the gift and grace of being able to look over Merton's shoulder into that cave. Thanks Bonnie Ostroff. for sharing this eternal glimpse with me. May it be awakened every day of my remaining life.

December 4, 1968. Colombo [Sri Lanka].
Polonnaruwa with its vast area under trees. Fences. Few people. No beggars. A dirt road. Lost. Then we find Gal Vihara and the other majestic complex stupas. Cells. Distant mountains, like Yucatan.

The path dips down to Gil Vahara: a wide, quiet hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. I am able to approach the Buddha barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. The silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, or sunyata, which has seen through everything--without refutation--without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures.

Looking at the figures, I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tired vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The sheer evidence of the reclining figure, their smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more "imperative" than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, no "mystery." All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life is charged with dharmakaya--everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual vitality running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuran and Polannaruwa, my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains, but I have now seen and I have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered with garbage, Asian or European and American. It is clear, pure, complete. It says everything. It needs nothing. Because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it.

--Thomas Merton, "The Intimate Merton: His Life from Journals," Harper One, 1999, pages 361-2.

The Crisis of Christianity in Wendell Berry's Eyes

Toward the tail end of the 19th century, Leo Tolstoy found himself, as an ardent Christian, in much the same quandary about his religion as did Wendell Berry a century later. How, both men asked in writings about Christ and the Gospels as profound and beautiful as any ever written, could people profess to be Christians without the slightest mindfulness of their guru’s teachings? Unconditional Love and Forgiveness are not occasional sentiments in the Gospels. They are their substrate in terms of human values and ontological foundations.

But what about those infamous references to the sword? Even when Christ mentions this weapon, it is a surgical instrument meant to cut Gordian knots of family ties and cultural emmeshment. As anyone who has ever taken vows to a spiritual teacher knows, the only sword permitted in the teacher’s presence is the one with which the umbilical chord is severed. And usually that sword is placed in the guru’s hands at the same time he is given permission to use it.

[When I was in the hospital recovering from my heart operation in 2003, I dreamed that I was rooming with another student of my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and that I happened to return to our apartment to find them in the bathroom where teacher was preparing to run a sword through student’s heart. “Are you ready for this?” Bawa asked the student. “Yes,” he answered, “I would have no life without you anyway.” Bawa ran him through, then withdrew the still-spotless sword. He looked over at me. “What are you looking at?” he asked. “I’m sorry, Bawa,” I answered, “I just happened to come home and heard a commotion in the bathroom.” My teacher looked at me with a perhaps the steeliest, sternest look I have ever seen, as if to ask, You think what you are seeing here is happening to someone else? He said, “Well, now that you are here, are you, too, ready to die?” “Yes,” I answered unhesitatingly. “Stand very still,” he commanded, and when I did as he said, he took the sword and ran it through my heart. Again, it was spotless when withdrawn from my body. Bawa smiled at both us us. “Now go forth as brothers into the world and see it as my children,” he commanded. It was the most beautiful stroll I have ever taken—true sauntering as Thoreau meant it in his essay on the etymology of that word from ‘sant’.]

And so we place ourselves in the hands of the teacher and the teaching. Examined from this standpoint, the religions we profess to follow seem betrayals of their core teachings. For instance, in one hadith, Muhammad refuses to condemn an adulterer to stoning, even though he repeatedly insists on confessing his sin and implicitly demanding punishment. Every time the man proclaims himself an adulterer, the Prophet turns away. Finally, after a full 360 degrees of refusal to judge (and implicit forgiveness) the prophet addresses the man, “Don’t force me to sentence you.” Today, thousands of mullahs everywhere are more than willing to pronounce sentence. And so are thousands of ministers and rabbis. How can submission to a teacher become so contrary to his teaching and example?

That’s the question Tolstoy asked in his book, “The Kingdom of God is Within You,” written to re-establish non-violence and pacifism as the core teachings of Christian doctrine. The central tenet, Tolstoy wrote, is this: “Resisteth not evil.” In other words, turn the other cheek, and keep turning it until you are a dervish of forgiveness. Further, Christ says, transcend, control or deny any impulse to violence or vengeance. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” he says—meaning one cannot harbor any thought or image of violence against another. This is a drastic teaching, but one necessary to true, fully participant friendship and neighborliness in this world.

Tolstoy was motivated to write his book after an army battalion sent to put down a serf uprising were dissuaded from violence by onlookers who had pity for the men and women about to be killed. They refused to carry out their orders and so proved to Tolstoy that civil law could bow to and blend with Christ’s commandments. A young lawyer named Gandhi read this book while in South Africa and named his ashram there Tolstoy Farm in honor of it.

Maybe we need farms, towns and villages in American named after Wendell Berry. In any case, here is the most succinct and powerful restatement of Tolstoy I have found in this still very new millennium.

Introduction to “Blessed Are The Peacemakers” by Wendell Berry (2005):

Any observer would have to say that Christianity is fashionable at present in the United States. This might be a good thing, except that the observer, observing more closely, would have to conclude that, to the extent Christianity is fashionable, it is loosely fashionable. It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught.

Especially among Christians in positions of great wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’s commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian.” (For don’t we know that everybody named Rose smells like a rose?)

This process appears to have been dominant among Christian heads of state ever since Christianity became politically respectable. From this accommodation has proceeded a monstrous history of Christian violence. War after war has been prosecuted by bloodthirsty Christians, and to the profit of greedy Christians, as if Christ had never been born and the Gospels never written. I may have missed something, but I know of no Christian nation and no Christian leader from whose conduct the teachings of Christ could be inferred.

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the Gospels without feeling something is amiss. One may feel that, in the name of honesty, Christians ought either to quit fighting or quit calling themselves Christians. One way to see how far belligerent Christians have strayed from the words of Christ is to make a list, like the one presented in the following pages, of the Gospel passages in which Christ addresses explicitly the issues of human strife, forgiveness, compassion and peacemaking.

The list that follows was made by me, with some help from friends. Other people’s lists might be somewhat different, but I think they would be substantially the same. I have also included, in italics, the two passages that loose interpreters might interpret as justifying war: Matthew 10: 34-37
[Matthew: Chapter 10: Verses 34-37
34: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
35: For I am come to set a man at variance against his father [just as Arjuna is commanded to do by Krishna at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita], and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
36: And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
37: He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.]
and Luke 22: 35-38.
[Luke: Chapter 22: Verses 35-38
35: And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing.
36: Then said he unto them, But now, he that have a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
37: For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end.
38: And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.]
In both of these passages Christ is using the sword as metaphor for the divisions He foresaw as results of His teaching and influence. If belligerent Christians wish to understand these passages literally, then they must explain why Christ speaks in the first passage only of “a” sword, and in the second of “two swords.” He clearly was not raising an army. The many other passages gathered here deny the acceptability of the usual justifications for violence, official or otherwise.

The translation I have used is the King James Version, not only because of my love and respect for the language of that version, but also because it is the version that most English-speaking Christians have been reading for the last four hundred years while disobeying or ignoring Christ’s commandments and praying for help in their wars.

They have justified their disobedience on the grounds of the impracticality of obedience, though we have little proof of the practicality of disobedience, and precious few examples of obedience. The implication invariably has been that for a few feckless worshippers of God to obey Christ’s commandments may be all right, but in practical matters such as war and preparations for war we will obey Caesar. The Christian followers of Caesar have thus committed themselves to an absurdity that they can neither resolve nor escape: the proposition that war can be made to serve peace; that you can make friends for love by hating and killing the enemies of love. This has never succeeded, and its failure is never acknowledged, which is a further absurdity.

The world’s survival, so far, of this absurdity is explainable by the relative smallness, until recently, of the scale of war, and by the relative controllability, until now, of the most destructive weaponry. But now the scales of practicality have come to be differently weighted. The official terrorism of the Col War and the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” have already made us familiar with the ultimate absurdity: that we (or some other “we” equally devout and patriotic) may have to destroy the world in order to defend ourselves. To the surprise of some, no doubt, it is possible to look upon such an eventuality as impractical. To avoid it, we are going to need a better recourse than Caesar’s. If we ever should become sane enough to reject total destruction as a means of victory, then, as my friend Wes Jackson once said to me, our evolutionary biologists will have to reckon how we could have received the best instruction for our survival two thousand years before it was most desperately needed.

Christ told us how to survive when He answered the question, Who is my neighbor? In the tenth chapter of Luke He tells the story of a Samaritan who cared for a Jew who had been badly wounded by thieves. As we know from the preceding chapter, in which the Disciples suggest in effect the firebombing of a Samaritan village, the Samaritans and the Jews were enemies.
[Luke, Chapter Nine, verses 52-56:
52: And [Jesus] sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of Samaritans, to make ready for him.
53: And they did not receive him, because his face was a though he would go to Jerusalem.
54: And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?
55: But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.
56: For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.]
To modernize the story, then, and to understand Christ’s answer, we may substitute any other pair of enemies: fundamentalist Christian and fundamentalist Muslim, Palestinians and Israeli, captor and prisoner. The answer: Your neighbor is any sufferer who needs your help.

--Wendell Berry, Introduction to Blessed Are the Peacemakers, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005, pages 3-7