Zen and the Birds of Appetite (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite--one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey." This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki (included as part 2 of this volume), the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ. "It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it...." --Doug Thorpe

Product Description

Merton, one of the rare Western thinkers able to feel at home in the philosophies of the East, made the wisdom of Asia available to Westerners. .

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; Fourth printing edition (January 17, 1968)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081120104X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811201049
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,779 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Merton's Prefaces, July 5, 2003

By	Peter Stephens (Virginia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good dialogue between Zen and Christianity, November 14, 2000

By	Gary Sprandel (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to Zen for the Western reader., August 5, 1998

By A Customer

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.