Merton and Friends Weblog

Contemporary Dialogue Connecting Religion and Spirituality with Love and Compassion

Merton’s views on Eastern Religions

Posted by Mark Shaw on May 5, 2008

For those of you that are interested, Merton’s views on Eastern Religions may be found, among others, in Thoughts on the East, Zen and Birds of Appetite, and his Asian journal. The latter is quite illuminating when Merton visits the huge Buddhist statutes at Polonnaruwa. He writes, “Looking at these figures I was suddenly, amost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious.”

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>