have seen something in my expression, for he asked if I was all right. I replied that I was trying to sort out my feelings about a religious vocation, which drew a curious response from him: he advised me not to read the King James Bible, the translation being unfaithful to the original, then drove away. I walked on, resolving to change my life. I began to read more Merton.
His writings became central to me when I abandoned graduate school not long after my encounter with the professor and moved with my wife to New Mexico. It was a critical juncture in our lives: we were the caretakers of an estate at the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, with no money, health insurance, or prospects. Which is to say: we were free, even if we did not realize it at the time. I wrote in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked in the gardens, split firewood, and cleared the arroyo that irrigated the apple orchards in our canyon. At the end of the day I would hike among the junipers on the mesa rising above the estate, trying to figure out how to survive outside academia—to make a life in poetry, that is. In Merton’s versions of the sayings of the Desert Fathers I found a source of wisdom that seemed as fresh as the Zen koans dear to my Buddhist friends—parables and teachings illustrating the insight that poverty is integral to the spiritual life—and while it would be some time before I read Merton’s essays on Zen, and longer yet until I discovered his lectures on Sufism, his open-minded search for spiritual vitality convinced me that he was a reliable guide for what turned out to be a journey into the mystical ground of experience common to many religions.
He did not just strengthen the links between poetry and the contemplative life, building on the inheritance of mystical writers through the ages, but reached beyond the walls of his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, to the wider world, lending his voice to the civil rights movement, articulating protests against the war in Vietnam, drawing connections between Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. He likened the Zen experience of the Void to Christ emptying himself into human form for our salvation, Christian consciousness to Buddhist mindfulness; the “deep ontological awareness” that Buddhists cultivate in meditation was in his mind akin to the awakening that Christians experience in their obedience to God or what Sufis discover at le point vierge, the secret place in the soul where God reveals himself. Yet Merton was careful to distinguish between the central tenets of each religious tradition, refusing to blur the differences integral to their practice, and this added another layer of meaning to his work: he saw into the heart of things, which is by its nature multiple, world upon world, and what he kept finding were different versions of the truth, the gift, bestowed upon him by his Christian faith—a new nature. The perfect poverty of a Christian mystic was not so distant from the perfect freedom granted to an enlightened Buddhist or Sufi master. Merton considered Mahatma Gandhi to be the ideal thinker and man of action, someone who used the Bhagavad Gita to dedicate his life to the nonviolent resistance of British rule; the study of Taoism and Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, convinced the monk that East and West share “a unity of outlook and purpose, a common spiritual climate.”
This was the unity that he sought to explore when in December 1968 he traveled to Bangkok for a monastic conference, stopping en route to visit the exiled Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, in northern India; to see the giant statues of the Buddha in Sri Lanka; to listen to Vedic scholars chanting in Madras and Sufi music in Delhi. In Bangkok, he gave a lecture on Marxism and monasticism, concluding with a Zen saying: “Where do you go from the top of a thirty-foot pole?” Then he returned to his room, where some hours later his body was discovered in the bathtub—electrocuted, apparently, by the frayed cord of an electric fan. His death shocked a world still reeling from the assassinations earlier in the year of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, for now the spiritual voice of the civil rights and antiwar movements was also gone. Merton had written in his short life over a hundred books and pamphlets, a number of which I read sitting by the woodstove in the converted chicken coop that served as our caretaker’s residence, and when I climbed the mesa his words often seemed to guide my footsteps.
Which makes it all the more mysterious to me now that when I lived in New Mexico I did not visit the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, north of Abiquiu, a crucial place for Merton in the last years of his life. I knew that he had considered leaving his monastery to live in the Benedictine community tucked in a red rock canyon along the Chama River, which he had visited twice in 1968 (the second time at the outset of his fateful journey to Asia), and I imagined that traces of his restless spirit lingered in that spare landscape, which he credited with helping to clear his mind. Merton’s biographer reports that when he washed in the cold waters of the Chama he felt clean and awake; and when he met the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived nearby, he deemed her one of those rare people “who quietly does everything right”—an insight that governed the composite biography that I was assembling about O’Keeffe, collecting scholarly essays and reminiscences by those who had known or worked for her.
What began as a geographical convenience (a local symposium on O’Keeffe’s life and work had inspired an editor to commission the book) became for me an affair of the heart. Her paintings taught me to see flowers and canyons and bones in their essential strangeness; her letters opened new vistas on the nature of the artistic vocation; her physical beauty (preserved in photographs taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz) left me spinning. She was for me the embodiment of art as well as desire, living as authentically as she painted, and when I visited her house in the course of my research I convinced myself that I could not afford an extra hour to drive to the monastery in which Merton might have produced yet more enduring works if his life had not been cut short. In fact I had more time on my hands in those days than in any other period of my adult life, and now I realized that what I lacked was the courage to explore the intimate connection between artistic and religious impulses—to make a true pilgrimage.
One summer day, not long after I had turned in the manuscript for my book about O’Keeffe, I was digging up a new garden, when to my consternation I found that I had to stop every few minutes to get a drink of water—which, curiously, did not slake my thirst. I wondered if I was getting sick—did this signal the onset of diabetes, which runs in my family?—or if living in the desert had somehow changed my metabolism. Through the afternoon and evening I worked, and drank water from the well, and only grew thirstier. The next day, though, I felt fine, and because I never experienced such a thirst again it came to stand in my imagination for the unquenchable thirst of the spiritual life.
This all came rushing back to me in Eh Chom’s living room, when he rose to his feet, citing another obligation. During the proscription, he worked as a traditional healer, a bomoh, counseling couples with marital problems (his specialty, Eddin whispered with a grin). He was thus a busy man, and there was only time for him to take us on a quick tour of the temples by his house, a small dilapidated Thai structure and a larger, sturdier one, combining Thai and Chinese elements. He made a dismissive remark about the Chinese merchants whose donations were critical to the temples’ upkeep, then led us along a path lined with garish statues of the Buddha and across the road to the largest sitting Buddha in Southeast Asia—a brown, golden-lipped figure ten stories tall surrounded by Chinese figures, pillars, and carvings. Eh Chom’s second wife arrived on a motor scooter to take him to his appointment, and as they drove off Eddin said that while the Islamists despised this giant statue of the Buddha, which was ten years in the making, they had not forbidden its inauguration, in September 2001. The week-long celebration commenced with hundreds of Chinese Buddhists burning joss sticks and pinning pieces of gold foil to a teardrop-shaped heart displayed on a stage, and then they inserted into the heart a pair of gold and silver needles to signify their release from worldly attachments and rejection of hatred and greed—a symbolic act far removed from that of the al-Qaeda operatives who two days later crashed their planes into the Twin Towers. Like millions of people on 9/11, I had stared in disbelief at the carnage broadcast on television, wondering if, as the commentators kept saying, profound change was upon us. This Buddhist ceremony had continued, though, concluding with Thai monks installing the heart in the statue: a sign of the realm of pure light in which the enlightened dwell beyond change. And if I had thought that my travels in Malaysia would be undertaken in the light of a new dispensation now it occurred to me that from a Buddhist perspective perhaps nothing had changed at all. Back at my hotel, I sat down to make some notes on what I had seen since arriving in Kuala Lumpur the week before.
There was a crude swastika