Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – January 17, 1968

I enjoyed it so much ordered a paperback copy and rereading it.

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.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite (Thomas Merton)April 8, 2013Book ReactionInitial Question:How does Merton connect Zen (distinct from Buddhism) to the story of Jesus? What's "broken" and how does Merton suggest redemption and repair?Musings Influenced by the Book:Zen is not a thing; it's more of an absence. Within the Christian experience, it is the absence of resistance to Christ living in us and through us. Zen is not an obedience, but an alive-ness to what is, an absence of the question - it simply is.Stripped of its Buddhist story, Zen as a reality fits within the Christian experience. Zen is the experienced reality of St. Paul's phrase, "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." The ancient Christians referred to this as "union" with God - an expression of life that lived from the core of the human person and seen from within as an inability to discern the origin of action: was it God or me who did this? This blur, this lack of question, and this free expression of what is (without resistance) is living "Zen."My favorite quote:"...liberation from his inordinate self-consciousness, his monumental self-awareness, his obsession with self-affirmation, so that he may enjoy the freedom from concern that goes with being simply what he is and accepting things as they are in order to work with them as he can." *Zen and the Birds of Appetite* p. 31The general take away:Awakening is the goal. This is something Christians have always talked about. The Christian sense of awakening differs from the traditional Buddhist story with regards to what one awakens to.For the Christian, awakening is coming to the sense of the Father's divine love and present care and seeing all things that would flounder that reality purge away. It is in the life of Christ living in us that we come to see this love and have it live through us.For the Buddhist, the awakening is more of a coming to see that all things are life and that there is no individual "me" - I am the Life, you are the Life, and all things that exist are life in this moment.

If one is speaking of Christianity and Zen Buddhism at the core, Merton says, yes, they are incompatible. Buddhism would deny that there is value in the personality, that it must be deconstructed and absorbed into the One, while Christianity says the purpose of the Incarnation was to take down only what was false in man and give new life to his original design, his core being. Christian unity with God is not personal dissolution but the removal of all barriers between knowing and being known. (To be fair, not all Zen masters agree with the above classical Buddhist outlook-- D.T. Suzuki, for example.)When separated from Buddhism and seen as a discipline and a way of perceiving, Zen can be extremely useful to anyone who is seeking to know God and the true soul/spirit beneath the false self or the "old man", whichever you prefer. The world we live in (and the self that perceives it) really is one of pretense and illusion-- even in religion-- and the more tools we have to remove the masks and facades, the better. Merton's book is very helpful in removing some common fears and misconceptions about using these tools, and in increasing communication between people and cultures who use different words to describe a common goal.