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Emptiness as Transparency in the Late Poetry of Thomas Merton

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Robert E. Doud
Robert E. Doud*
Affiliation:
Pasadena City College
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Abstract

This article examines chiefly Buddhist influences in Thomas Merton. Cables to the Ace is a book based on the Buddhist idea of pratitya-samutpada, or dependent co-origination. Beneath everything there is a blissful emptiness, or shunyata. The ace is the poet's selfhood at the point vierge, here interpreted as a Buddhist no-self. Heidegger's Gelassenheit also defines the point vierge. In The Geography of Lograire, a supreme karuna, or compassion, is poured out for all the countries and peoples of the world. Footprints of the Buddha figure in, and so does the transparency which is also emptiness.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 253 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1994

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References

1 My concern here is with the presence of Buddhist themes, and especially of Emptiness as a spiritual ideal, in the late poetry of Thomas Merton. There are ten books of poems listed in the table of contents of The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1977);Google Scholar henceforth CPTM. I consider the last three of these books to be his late poetry. They include Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963), Cables to the Ace (1968), and The Geography of Lograire (1968). All of his work serves as a context for understanding this poetry, but especially germaine is The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965), Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968), New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1978), Mystics and Zen Masters (1967), and The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (1960). My vade mecum throughout is Sister Lentfoehr, M. Thérèse, Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1979).Google Scholar On emptiness as transparency, see Corless, Roger J., The Vision of Buddhism (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 27.Google Scholar Corless makes further reference to Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Creative Meditation and Multi-dimensional Consciousness (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical, 1976), 51.Google Scholar

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10 Jung, Carl Gustav, “Foreword,” in Suzuki, Daisetz T., An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1964), 9–29.Google Scholar Merton followed Suzuki in many of Suzuki's opinions about Buddhism, including this one: “Therefore I make bold to say that in Zen are found systematized, or rather crystallized, all the philosophy, religion, and life itself of the Far-Eastern people, especially of the Japanese” (37).

11 Merton, Thomas, Mystics and Zen Masters (New York: Noonday, 1989), 40.Google Scholar On perichoresis, see von Brück, Michael, “Buddhist Shunyata and the Christian Trinity” in Buddhist Emptiness and Christianity Trinity (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1990), 54–66.Google Scholar Von Brück finds congruence in shunyata, perichoresis, and the holomovement in David Bohm's physics.

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36 Merton, , “80,” Cables to the Ace, CPTM, 449.Google Scholar

37 “Why I Have a Wet Footprint on the Top of My Mind,” CPTM, 497.

38 Merton, , “With the World in My Blood Stream,” CPTM, 617.Google Scholar

39 Merton, , “Day Six O'Hare Telephane,” The Geography of Lograire, CPTM, 579.Google Scholar

40 Merton, , Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 74.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., 110.

42 Ibid., 67-70.

43 Heidegger, Martin, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 54, n. 4.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., 25.

45 Merton, , “84,” Cables to the Ace, CPTM, 452.Google Scholar

46 Merton, , No Man Is an Island, 75;Google ScholarMerton, , Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 12;Google Scholar and Carr, Anne E., A Search for Wisdom and Spirit (Notre Dame, IN; University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 69.Google Scholar