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Zen and the Birds of Appetite

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Merton felt that his journals contained his best writing. I'll offer a different opinion; I think his essays and book reviews contain much of his best writing. "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" is a collection of essays on what's common to Zen and Christianity, and the book includes a book review and Merton's prefaces to two books by other authors.

He seems to write these prefaces not simply because he was asked to. He writes them, I think, because the books really inspire him. (Most of us write these reviews on Amazon.com for the same reason!) His prefaces present his thinking along with the author's thinking in a way that improves the overall publication. Comparing his thinking with another author's thinking seems to make Merton's writing even more succinct and sharply-reasoned than usual. And in "Zen" he's comparing his faith with another faith, so his sensitivity, appreciation, and sharp mind are even more in evidence than usual.

These essays don't amount to a textbook on Zen or Zen Buddhism, any more than a collection of short stories adds up to a novel. But together the essays address an overall question: what is it about Christianity that resembles Zen? In the process of approaching the question, Merton gives us some gems. His discussion of paradise, innocence, and knowledge is the best I've read. You may learn more about Christianity than about Zen in this volume.

His essays make up the first part of the book. The second part of the book is a "dialogue" between Merton and Diasetz T. Suzuki, a Zen scholar quite accessable to the Western mindset. These dialogue seems to devolve somewhat into a "point-counterpoint" duel, but that's fun and a lot of well-framed truth comes out.

Merton introduces Zen and explores his own Christian tradition, looking for similarities. Merton looks at Christian writers like Meister Eckhart, e.g., "The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out ... therefore if you want to discover nature's nakedness you must destroy its symbols...". What ever Zen is, Merton recognizes that it is somehow there in Eckhart. Merton outlines the differences also, in that Christianity is eschatological with the idea of salvation, grace and divine gifts.

Merton also grapples with whether Christianity is dualistic. The intuition of God's presence and direct experience in a mystic like Saint Theresa or the desert fathers sounds similar to the quest for direct experience in the Buddhist. The dialogue with the Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki in the book's second part further explores this dualism and differences. I think this book starts a dialogue that will deepen both Christian's and Buddhist's understanding.

Thomas Merton, a trappist monk who specializes in eastern philosophy and religion, writes a cogent, understandable, and compelling work on the nature of Zen. Zen, of course, is a difficult concept to pin down, but Merton makes it accessible to the western reader. If you have a critical eye, a moderate grounding in the Western classical tradition, and an interest in Zen, this book is for you.

Merton quotes D.T. Suzuki: "Zen always aims at grasping the central fact of life, which can never be brought to the dissecting table of the intellect"; and "Zen must be seized with bare hands, with no gloves on." No wonder Merton's reverence for Zen, for these are his own ideas of Christian monasticism. With his illuminating mind in full stride, and his interventions keen as crystal, if he went no deeper than to make an apparent synthesis, it would be enough. But Merton strives for farther fields, finds and feeds them, and not surprisingly leaves them flourishing. He leaps wholly into a personal embodiment of Zen and its spiritual complexities, and ends restoring his own monastic experience. The essay 'Zen in Japanese Art' pays loving homage to the classic spirit of Daisetz Suzuki's seminal 'Zen and Japanese Culture', but lives and breathes on its own. In its simple three and a half pages, Merton weaves the aesthetic ideas of Zen philosopher Kitaro Nishida, makes the case that Zen and Zen art are the exact opposite of Sartre's 'pessimistic nihilism,' and in a single amazing paragraph toward the end, beautifully finds in the formal "tea ceremony" a respect and harmony consistent with the simplicity of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture at Fontenay or Le Thoronet. But no idle intellectual excursions invade here; again and again Merton draws everything back to the Christ sought in the apophatic tradition with a faithfulness that exhudes an almost excruciating surfeit of spiritual understanding. Finding St Gregory's "No one gets so much of God as the man who is thoroughly dead" 'lying next' to Bunan Zenji's "While alive, be dead, thoroughly dead-- All is good then, whatever you may do", Merton turns a light on centuries of Christian ascetic experience with one true, bold stroke. Birds of Appetite is strewn with page after page not of ideas only, but wisdom. He responds to D.T. Suzuki's exquisite essay 'Innocence and Knowledge' (included in the book) with 'The Recovery of Paradise', arguing that the Desert Fathers sought the emptiness and innocence of Adam and Eve in Eden, invoking along the way John of the Cross, and making one of Dostoevsky's "saints," the Staretz Zosima, serve as antagonist throughout the essay. Merton notes "there is a dimension where the bottom drops out of the world of factuality and of the ordinary," an observation no doubt honed in the solitude of the hermitage, up the mountain above Gethsemane Abbey. He adds, "it might be good to open our eyes and see." I'm recommending a huge little book, meticulously published by New Directions with its customary attentiveness to shadow and light, inside and out. See for yourself.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I bought the book looking for backround on zen. I did get some backround on zen from the book, but more than that the book is about the relationship between zen and Christianity. This is not made clear on the cover, and it wasnt really what I had in mind. However the author covered this topic so well, and showed such insight into the relationships between all religions that I found the book very rewarding. I would recommend the book to Christians wanting to know more about zen and to anyone interested in the similarities between eastern and western thought, but not to those readers looking exclusively for insight on zen.

This 1968 publication is one of the most honest and objective interfaith dialogues I have yet encountered--atleast between Buddhism and Christianity. To unite them though and get past their mulititudes of blatant differences of opinion, it casts away the baggage of conventional religious doctrines and compares the mystical experiences of Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and those of the Japanese Zen masters. Under the discriminatory appearances of the doctrines present in both the essence is unified as the same. He refers to this fundamental truth with the equation zero=infinity. He describes the experience of being empty (the emptiness known as Shunyata) and simultaneously being full (in the Christ spirit of love). Now, you must understand that I am no theist atleast in any practical or religious sense but I still appreciate what he means with these terms and they do take on personal meaning. And that is the most important message underlying this book: namely, that true religion is not "religion" at all.
Or, to use his own words: "To define Zen in terms of a religious system or structure is in fact to destroy it, or rather to miss it completely, for what cannot be 'constructed' cannot be destroyed either.

There is something refreshing about this little book. The title will seem a bit misleading - if expecting to find an account of Zen per se - minus the Christian based reflections of the author. However, Merton is known well enough - and these essays show him at his best. The dialogue between D.T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton is fruitful. Christianity and Buddhism have often been presented as antithetical, working from bases too different - to afford dialogue. These essays challenge that perception, without falling into vague generalisations.

If anything, recent years have seen a 'hardening of the orthodoxies' - a retreat into numbingly conservative attitudes. Happily, the essays in this book evoke a more open-ended perspective. There is something arrogant and unspiritual about the wish to deny the value of dialogue between spiritual traditions. Where the 'birds of appetite' wheel and prey, the truth has fallen from sight - be it Christian 'innocence' or the 'fundamental face' of Zen.

We can't deny the merits of a Christian who endeavoured, with a whole heart, to take stock of what goes on in the other World religions. Similarly, we can't look badly upon a Buddhist, who was large-hearted enough to share the workings of the Christian mind and spirit. Merton's encounter with Buddhism exerted a seminal influence upon his whole life-thought. Suzuki's encounter with Christianity - chiefly, through Eckhart, exerted a similar influence (the Eckhartian equation 0=infinity -found its way into Suzuki's hand-written notes appended to the Mastsugaoka Zen Bunka ed of the Rinzai Roku). Let's hope that this new century of ours witnesses more dialogues in this vein.

This is one of Merton's best but most difficult books, one of his most misunderstood by both his devotees and his critics. It is usually either too enthusiastically embraced for the wrong reasons, or glibly dismissed for superficial and ignorant ones.

First of all, Zen is not a religion, it is a way of thinking and seeing, in key ways much like an aesthetic, except that it is an aesthetic toward all of life and not just individual tastes in the plastic arts. The whole concept of a faith in a Western sense is alien to its spokesman here, Suzuki, and Merton is not out to convince he or you otherwise. But Zen can have consequences for faith and belief.

Merton and Suzuki are both old pros and well seasoned in their respective traditions before they get here. Similarities and affinities between Christian monasticism and Zen monasticism are explored, yes, and they are mainly outward. But it is the inner and intrinsic differences which one will remember afterwards. There is no attempt on either side of trying to "bridge" them or paste them over with verbal formulas. True, Merton sometimes picks a poetic statement to explain something basically untranslateable. These statements are pleasing to a Western poetic sense, sound a little mysterious, and apparently constitute "wow" moments for certain Western readers which they assume are appropriately "Zenlike." The title metaphor is a key case in point. But the fact is Zen is absolutely unsentimental and not even "sympathetic" in the Western sense. And to the extent certain Zen sayings or "koans" sound like poetry, this is not their intent but, at best, a secondary effect. Zen is really "nothing" in an absolute sense -- a way so uniquely Oriental that it is really grasped by few Western seekers. It is arguably not even graspable by someone raised, say, to about age 6 in totally Western surroundings. Indeed it is arguably ungraspable even by its most ardent devotees and practicioners. One might call it a sort of cosmic joke except that it is deadly serious. Here is where the consequences for the muddle headed Westerner come in. Whatever Zen "is" or "isn't", it can be overwhelming and, yes, potentially destructive (not just to faith but also to basic sanity) for one not properly mature, seasoned, sane, grounded in a full and deep Christianity. It is worth knowing about and this book is a big aid, but it is not a plaything. As indeed Christianity is not, although unfortunately as now practiced in the West it has been heavily sentimentalized. Zen, if properly pursued, will indeed expose and probably shatter such a weakness -- without really having that aim. Its serious accounting of the void it posits will have such an effect on anything in its path.

Merton and Suzuki approach their dialogue fairly dispassionately, and what proceeds is something of a dissection of the DMZ between these "two paths." Both men are honest enough not to mince or blur distinctions. The potential "equality" of the "two ways" is not explored or promoted; it is irrelevant to both men, not even an issue. While Merton was engaging in this partly in response to a contemporary call to ecumenical "dialogue," in no way does the discussion follow by now classical ecumenical approaches, ie. theological agreements, doctrinal differences, etcetera. Again, Zen is not a theology. Nor is it the difference, here, between apples and oranges -- more between apples and a perfect vacuum. The fact that the vacuum may elude perfect linquistic expression, as any "god" or specifically the Christian God is ultimately a mystery, is not set up as a similarity in other than the most superficial sense. And of course many modern philosophies, even in the West, explore the limits of language as to any subject or even any concrete thing conceivable.

If this all sounds somewhat dry, it is because it is. Frankly, I question how many supposed "readers" or "reviewers" have actually read this dialogue completely, or in any event not by "speed reading." I suspect about as many people have actually read it as claim to have read Finnegan's Wake. No, its no thriller. Its charm is its candid air and the human respect between the two men speaking, across a gulf mutually acknowledged as about as wide as the Grand Canyon. But it remains, after many years, about the most cogent and honest thing on its subject. It might even prove to be the last -- eventually it might be seen that the beginning was the end. And if that's not Zenlike enough, of course, it was really all for nothing anyway . . . .

Just don't capitalize it: ie. "Nothing." Then, no you didn't get it . . . To the extent of course it matters . . . .

The most important part of this book is the debate between Merton and Suzuki. Merton falls short of establishing his theories in respect to the Desert Father's similarity to Zen Masters, Suzuki brilliantly counterpoints and illustrates the differences.

Merton shows incredible integrity in publishing a debate he clearly loses.

This little set of essays on Zen Buddhism by one of the great Catholic thinkers of this century, a Trappist monk often associated with peace theology, is challenging and unique. It is clear the Merton is well-informed about Zen and approaches it from an open mind, seeking affinities between his faith and that of the Zen masters. I half expected a syncretic approach but, for all of his acceptance of ideas and concepts of Zen, Merton never compromises his essentially Christian view of the world. Rather, he embraces Zen mysticism; its apophatic approach to the universe and divinity; its rejection of the world and self; and he finds parallels in Christian life and thought down through the ages. He also describes his discussions with D.T. Suzuki in a way which clearly shows his delight with the man and his ideas. The dialogue between the two men shows the similarities as well as some of the differences in their thinking.

While most of the book elucidates Zen philosophy and relates it to western Christian thinking, a chapter on Zen and art rounds things out nicely. For anyone interested in Zen or Christianity this book will definitely be of interest. It has, in my opinion, the added benefit of pointing out the many parallels between Christian mystical and ascetic practices and Zen without confounding or conflating them.