Going East with Merton: Forty Years Later—And Coming West with Paramahansa Yogananda Today

Abstract

Going East with Merton: Forty Years Later—And Coming West with Paramahansa Yogananda Today Emile J. Farge Parallels As the plane bearing him to Asia lifted off in October of 1968, Thomas Merton entered into his journal “I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny…may I not come back without having settled the great affair…I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body.”1 The “great affair” was his need to deepen the mysterious thoughts, feelings, prayerful yearnings, as well as the theological implications which seemed to be common to more and more students of religion as the twentieth century unfolded. He sought a deeper understanding of the sameness versus the differences between the fundamental Eastern and Western concepts of God and man’s relatedness to him/her. This article examines parallels in Merton’s life‐work with a remarkable mystic. Long before this final journey Thomas Merton had been engaged as a student of Buddhism (for some years, primarily in the Zen tradition), yet also of Hinduism and Gandhi, as well as several distinct Christian traditions other than his Roman Catholic faith to which he converted at age twenty‐three. His first journey out of the monastery and back to New York City was in 1964, after twenty‐three years of being cloistered. He went to New York to spend a few hours with Daisetz Suzuki as the Zen scholar was visiting there.2 It had become quite clear to Merton that no one religious tradition should dare to monopolize the entirety of humankind’s ability to relate to his creator, sustainer, and intimate lover. Indeed the 1968 journey to Asia, then twenty‐seven years since entering a Cistercian monastery, seemed to deepen Merton’s long‐held notion that East and West have a great deal to teach each other and to learn from the other. After eight intensive weeks of visiting Buddhist and Hindu masters, Merton’s urgency for more interplay among religious traditions would become still more compelling. He had prepared a talk he was to give in Calcutta. This was not to take place. Thomas Merton died on December 10, 1968 from a tragic accident with a faulty electric fan.3 He had written that one can remain quite Christian while learning intimately from Buddhist or Hindu masters, adding “…I believe that some of us need to do this in order to improve the quality of our own…life and even help in the task of…renewal.”4 Another planned encounter on his unfulfilled itinerary was to meet with Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk who had lived for thirty‐five years in an Indian ashram. In that place Griffiths (aka Swami Dayananda—bliss of compassion) was a lone Catholic among the God‐seekers from various religious traditions, being enriched by his colleagues, the Hindu environment and his own Roman Catholic tradition. We are today deprived of the possible content of the meeting between the two that was never held.5 In an earlier article published in The Merton Annual, I analyzed the similarities in the understanding of several key teachings of Christ and Christian living as taught by the Cistercian Father Louis (known to the world as Thomas Merton) and the Hindu Master, Paramahansa Yogananda.6 Both men were born and educated on another continent (France/England for Merton, and India for Yogananda); both came to the United States and stayed thirty‐two years after their arrival until their death. Both had their autobiographies published in the post‐WWII 1940s, and both of those autobiographies are classics.7 Both died before reaching age sixty. Despite so many similarities the two spiritual masters did not, to the best of our knowledge, read the other’s offerings or ever quote the other. Followers of Merton have established an international organization (The International Thomas Merton Society) to mine, publish and propagate his writings and spiritual teachings. The society both monitors the spreading world impact of this modern God seeker, and now officially supports an Annual concerning Merton’s poetry, literature, prayer life, and social concerns as well as a quarterly Seasonal review in existence for over thirty years. Merton...