256 - Merton as Zen Clown

Merton as Zen Clown

By Belden C. Lane

"Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of 'levitation.' They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly." -G. K. Chesterton¹

"I do not think theologians can ever laugh," said D. T. Suzuki, presumably before he had met Thomas Merton. "They are too serious, too occupied in trying to identify themselves with the things of God, leaving no room for playfulness."² By contrast, Suzuki knew his own Zen tradition to be one in which spiritual masters continually refused to take themselves too seriously. From the seventh century monastery fools, Han-shan and Shih-té, bent over in uncontrolled laughter, to the dancing, pot-bellied Pu-tai (d. 916 C.E.), often pictured with a frog on his head, the image of the Zen clown has been a frequent one in the history of oriental art.³ "There is more honest 'belly laughter' in a Zen monastery than surely in any other religious institution on earth," says Buddhist scholar Christmas Humphrey.⁴ This is much of what first drew Merton to Suzuki and the Zen experience. He found there a self-transcending freedom that resonated so well with neglected elements in his own Christian tradition-the desert fathers and mothers, the early Russian yurodivye, and free spirits in the religious life like St. Philip Neri.⁵

I

While Merton's attraction to Zen Buddhism and its earlier Chinese roots has been extensively explored in relation to the question of the self

Belden C. Lane is Professor of Theological Studies and American Studies, Saint Louis University. His cassette tape series, Storytelling: The Enchantment of Theology, was published in 1981. He has appeared before in the pages of THEOLOGY TODAY, "The Spirituality of the Evangelical Revival" (July 1986) and "Language, Metaphor, and Pastoral Theology" (Jan. 1987). This present article grew out of a Thomas Merton Symposium at Saint Louis University in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Merton's death.

¹Quoted in The Dorothy Day Book, ed., Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate, 1982), p. 25.

²Daisetz T. Suzuki, Sengai: The Zen Master (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, Ltd., 1971), p. 7.

³Cf. Conrad Hyers, Zen and the Comic Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973) and R. H. Blyth, Oriental Humor (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 19 59).

⁴Christmas Humphrey, "Philosophy East and West "(Review Article) The Middle Way XLV:2 (August, 1970), p. 91.

⁵Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977), p. 153.

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and the mysticism of Eckhart or John of the Cross, little attention has been given to his fascination with Zen as a contemplative tradition giving value to foolishness and laughter.⁶ Laughing at what others take seriously and taking seriously what others laugh at becomes a dual theme in the thought of Suzuki and Merton alike. To speak of Merton as Zen clown is to discover the key to his understanding of the monastic vocation in particular and the freedom of the spiritual life in general.

In June, 1964, on one of his rare trips outside of the monastery, Thomas Merton traveled to Columbia University in New York to meet Suzuki the famous Japanese interpreter of Zen to the West. They had corresponded and even published a dialogue together, but this was their first meeting. Immediately, they found in each other much of the sensitivity and ability to delight in simplicity that they had valued most in each of their own traditions. Merton said he had the feeling that in this ninety-four year old man he had met the "True Man of No Title" of which Zen masters sometimes speak. Suzuki said that he had found no one in the West who understood Zen better than Thomas Merton. They celebrated tea ceremony in Butler Hall before departing, and Merton was deeply moved by the simple experience of listening to water boil, stirring green tea, and drinking it together in the three and a half sips required by Zen rubric. Watching Suzuki in this moment of ritualized silence, he later said:

It was at once as if nothing at all had happened and as if the roof had flown off the building. But in reality nothing had happened. A very old deaf Zen man with bushy eyebrows had drunk a cup of tea, as though with the complete wakefulness of a child and yet as though at the same time declaring with utter finality: 'this is not important!"⁷

It is this paradox of discovering the deeply holy in the midst of the patently ordinary that most captivated Thomas Merton about the experience of Zen.

Merton's interest in Zen Buddhism is seen in many of his writings, such as Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Mystics and Zen Masters, as well as scattered references in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and the Asian Journal. He also wrote explanatory prefaces to the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese editions of several of his books, penned letters to Suzuki and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and expressed a fine Zen sensitivity in much of his poetry. He even explored the Chinese Taoist roots of Ch'an Buddhist and Zen thought in his book,

⁶Studies of Merton and Zen extend from Chalmers MacCormick's article on "The Zen Catholicism of Thomas Merton," Journal of Ecumenical Studies IX:4 (Fall, 1972), pp. 802-818 and William F. Healy's dissertation on The Thought of Thomas Merton Concerning the Relationship of Christianity and Zen (Rome: St. Thomas University, 1975) to Alexander Lipski's book, Thomas Merton and Asia: His Quest for Utopia (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1983) and Bonnie Bowman Thurston's recent inquiry into "Why Merton Looked East," Living Prayer (November-December, 1988), pp. 43-49.

⁷"Learning to Live," July, 1967. Thomas Merton's Collected Essays (unpublished collection in the Thomas Merton Studies Center), vol. 12, p. 475.

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The Way of Chuang Tzu.⁸ This was no small part of his widening interests in the last decade of his life at Gethsemani Abbey.

II

Why, we may ask, was Merton attracted to this Japanese and Chinese tradition that seemed outwardly, at least, so different from his own formation as a Cistercian monk? He found in the laughter of Zen a means of deliverance from the calculative and sober analysis to which Cartesian thought was inevitably prone in the West. "We are plagued today," he wrote, "with the heritage of that Cartesian self-awareness which assumed that the empirical ego is the starting point of an infallible intellectual progress to truth and spirit, more and more refined, abstract, and immaterial."⁹

The self, as thinking subject, is continually involved in perceiving everything that is external to it as objects of intellection. In the process, we distance ourselves from reality, critically viewing the world from a hypothetical vantage point that stands completely outside of it. Subject to interminable reflection, our experience is always second-hand. Persons become objective personas, masks that serve as a shorthand notation for categorizing the rich diversity of human personality. Theology is reduced to abstract concepts that can be neatly catalogued. Language becomes exclusively descriptive. Action is the product of calculating purpose, subservient always to ends that lie beyond itself. The world, as a result, is stripped of surprise, immediacy, and laughter.

It was because of this disengaged calculus of Western consciousness that Merton celebrated Zen and its "quest for direct and pure experience liberated from verbal formulas and linguistic preconceptions."¹⁰ It by-passes altogether the incessant conceptual analysis that is central to our way of "making" the world. Zen is "nondoctrinal, concrete, direct, existential, and seeks above all to come to grips with life itself, not with ideas about life."¹¹ The celebrated foolishness of Zen is able to offer a way of abruptly emptying oneself (a thorough-going kenosis) of all the intellectual barriers that lie in the way of pure experience. Zen became, for Merton, an invitation to live without masks, without conceptual controls, without purposes.

⁸Cf. Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York: New Directions, 1968); Mystics and Zen Masters (New York: Delta, 1967); Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966); Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1968); Introductions East and West: The Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton (Greensboro, N.C.: Unicorn Press, Inc., 1981); The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters Of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed., William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1985); The Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1977); and The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1969).

⁹Mystics and Zen Masters, p. 26.

¹⁰Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 44. Merton said in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 28 5, that "the taste for Zen in the West is in part a healthy reaction of people exasperated with the heritage of our centuries of Cartesianism: the reification of concepts, idolization of the reflexive consciousness, flight from being into verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization. Descartes made a fetish out of the mirror in which the self finds itself. Zen shatters it."

¹¹Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 32.

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Drawn to the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism-with its use of shocking surprise in the attainment of enlightenment-he emphasized especially the role of the koan in achieving a sudden and direct experience of reality.¹² This use of enigmatic questions to confound one's trust in rationalization was able quickly to cut through many of the illusions by which he had lived as a Western Christian and as a monk. He could abandon the persona of the serious contemplative, ceasing to be the personage in which his ego had invested so much. He could give up the comforting distance of intellectualization that his many words as a theologian had always supplied. He could even let go of the fruit of his work, taking a new pleasure in simply doing things for their own sake, without forcing on them an ulterior meaning. The promise of such freedom, as one might expect, could lead any Trappist monk in the Western world to break into laughter.

Much of our spiritual dilemma in the West, Merton would observe, results from the fact that we have seldom associated the theological task with a sense of laughter and playfulness. Yet, as Johan Huizinga argued years ago, an essential playfulness lies at the heart of the most profound human experiences. Huizinga defines play as that activity which consciously stands outside the normal intensity of life, being not serious, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.¹³ What ritualized activities like the eucharist or tea ceremony attempt is to symbolize this powerful and immediate absorption of the participant into what is experienced. This is what Merton had prized most about his meeting with Suzuki-its clean immediacy and unpretentiousness, its attention to the ordinary. In approaching the esoteric seriousness of Eastern meditation, Merton would later ask, "Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it."¹⁴

In an article written for America in 1963, the Trappist theologian urged on readers the value of Zen because it provides "a deadly weapon against pious illusions [It] makes a point of exploding all forms of spiritual self-importance."¹⁵ Spirituality, from a Zen perspective, can never be seen as something to be "attained," a spiritual acquisition in which one might take pride.

Merton enjoyed telling the story of meeting a Zen novice who had just finished his first year of living in a monastery. He asked him what he had learned during the course of his novitiate-half expecting to hear of first encounters with enlightenment, exciting discoveries of the spirit, perhaps even altered states of consciousness. But the novice replied that during his first year in the contemplative life he had simply learned to

¹²Rinzai, as opposed to Soto Zen, with its emphasis on the slow, methodical discipline of sitting, had its roots in the teachings of Hui Nang (637-715 C.E.), an untrained peasant who became revered as the Sixth Patriarch. Cf. Mystics and Zen Masters, pp. 18f.

¹³ Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 13.

¹⁴A Thomas Merton Reader, ed., Thomas P. McDonnell (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), p. 433.

¹⁵Thomas Merton, "Zen: Sense and Sensibility," America 108 (May 25, 1963), p. 753.

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open and close doors. Learning the quiet discipline of not acting impetuously-not running around slamming doors, hurrying from one place to another. That was where he had to begin (and perhaps end) in the process of spiritual growth. Learning to open and close doors! Merton loved the answer. For him it exemplified "play" at its very best - doing the ordinary, while being absorbed in it intensely and utterly.

Such expressions of paradox became of increasing importance to Merton throughout his life. In his collection of journal entries entitled The Sign of Jonas, he spoke of himself as a prophet taking form in the belly of a paradox. There are three particular paradoxes, rooted in a Zen sense of playfulness, that can be discerned in Merton's growing consciousness of his own monastic vocation. It is in relation to these paradoxes that the image of the Zen clown becomes most appropriate for understanding the character of his spirituality. The paradoxes are these: (1) that the one (himself) who is celebrated so much by others for his sanctity, consistently refuses to take himself seriously; (2) that the one (himself) who manages to write so much (some 927 books and articles in his bibliography) begins to question the value of words; and (3) that the one (himself) who does so little (living in the woods south of Louisville for twenty-seven years of his life) is able to accomplish so much.

These paradoxes present themselves as classic riddles, echoing-as they do-the "Zen Forest" of paradoxes that were gathered together in a handbook for Zen training in late seventeenth-century Japan.¹⁶ They offer an occasion for human beings to step outside of themselves and laugh at the structured seriousness by which they live their lives. This is the function of a Zen clown, as Merton knew. It meshes well with the theme of Holy Folly-being "fools for Christ's sake"-that had occurred at times in his own Christian tradition, in Russian spirituality, Francis of Assisi, and the medieval Feast of Fools.¹⁷

The greatest spiritual teachers in Zen Buddhism were those who took themselves least seriously. When they met each other, they would roll with laughter at the idea that they were supposed to be holy and worthy of reverence-having somehow mastered the infinite in their teachings. They drew pictures of each other with fat stomachs and scowling faces, dressed in tattered clothes, playing in the dirt with children. They gave titles to each other, such as "Great Bag of Rice" or "Snowflake on a Hot Oven." Wang-hsia, a Zen master and artist in the eighth century, did half of his painting when he was drunk and would even dip his head into the ink well and paint with his hair. One of Merton's favorite figures was

¹⁶Selections from the Zenrin Kushu, or "Phrases from the Zen Forest," are offered in translation in A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters, edited by Soiku Shigematsu (New York: Weatherhill, 1981).

¹⁷Cf. Conrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981) and John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 1980).

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Tan-hsia, a ninth-century master who often is pictured warming his bare backsides at a fire which he had made with a wooden image of the Buddha.¹⁸ In the Zen tradition, it is understood that idols of every sort are to be relentlessly smashed-whether they be one's dependence upon the ego, doctrine, scriptures, or even the Buddha.

III

The three paradoxes, pertaining to Merton's view of his own persona as contemplative monk, his prodigious writing, and his attitude toward action and non-action, can be observed in a series of Zen koans and mondos, riddles and playful dialogues, that were increasingly lived out in his life. Some Christians have found this rather erratic behavior in Merton very disturbing, an abberation in an otherwise devout and holy life. Others have sensationalized his examples of Zen playfulness, disconnecting them from his spirituality and portraying Merton as some sort of free-wheeling "Bohemian" monk, anxious to escape the strictures of, the cloister, Neither image is correct. His practice of Zen freedom cannot be separated from the larger context of his spirituality of the contemplative life.

What is most interesting about Thomas Merton was that the older he got, the more eccentric he became, "off center," not meeting all the expectations of people, and given to paradox. In 1962, he was told to stop practicing yoga in the monastery when he and Fr. Augustine were found one day meditating upside down, standing on their heads. What made the discovery of the two jokers even more disconcerting was that Fr. Augustine had taken off his artificial leg for the occasion.¹⁹

Jim Forest of the Catholic Worker hitch-hiked to Gethsemani with a friend of Merton's to meet the Trappist monk for the first time in the early 1960s. While he was waiting in the majestic silence of the Abbey chapel, he heard wild, uproarious laughter nearby. Investigating, he found it was Merton, talking with his friend in the guestroom laughing like mad, lying on the floor, his feet kicking in the air, black and white robes askew, clutching his belly like a fat Friar Tuck. Jim Forest had come to meet America's most celebrated monk, and he had found a madman.²⁰

In the Zen tradition, laughter is categorized according to six different stages-from the almost-imperceptible half smile of sita to the boisterous, unrestrained laughter of atihasita, involving the rolling or convulsions of the whole body. Merton's freely-expressed humor, therefore, is entirely consistent with the contemplative range of Buddhist spirituality.²¹

¹⁸Mystics and Zen Masters, p. 37, Cf. Joan Silver, "The Madman and Fool in Buddhism," The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies. New Series, No. 3 (Fall, 1987), pp. 46-52 and James H. Sanford, Zen-Man Ikkyû (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1981).

¹⁹Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984), p. 421.

²⁰Ibid., p. 391.

²¹ Hyers, Zen and the Comic Spirit, p. 34.

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One of Merton's novices remembered him in this way: "The first time I saw him he was bouncing down the cloister making all the signs we weren't supposed to make, and which he bawled us out for making. We were all going into the church and he was going in the opposite direction which I supposed was a part of the joke. He never wanted you to take him too seriously."²²

That was the point, of course. The playfulness of the Zen clown becomes an invitation to the abandonment of self-preoccupation, with all of its efforts to mirror the image of the "good monk."

Increasingly, Father Louis, as he was known in the cloister, came to describe himself as just another "old bat," like a lot of eccentric country people living there in the back hills of Kentucky. He wore overalls and a straw hat. He liked to say, "What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe."²³ Spirituality for him came to be expressed in what was simplest and most ordinary. He recalled St. Isaac the Wise, one of the early fathers, who said, "The bird flies, the fish swims, and the man [the human being] prays." Being alive in the presence of God is that natural, once one has relinquished the self-absorption that prevents the immediacy of experience. Merton knew, with Irenaeus, that "the glory of God is men and women fully alive!" Like a Zen clown, he tried to point people away from himself (as some devout spiritual teacher), so as to emphasize the presence of the holy in the place they might least have expected it. In this way, he became not so much a "saint," but a "sign of contradiction," inviting people to confront the paradoxes in their own lives.²⁴

None of this should be seen as a mere device for flaunting individual freedom. It was a means by which the false self, with all its pretensions, could be mortified and the true self given room freely to expand. Merton's practice of Zen foolishness grew directly out of his theology of the true and the false self, expressed most powerfully in his book New Seeds of Contemplation.²⁵ The false self consists in all of the efforts we make to nurture a reputation for ourselves in the mind of others. In our culture, we have a compulsive need to be validated by external sources. But the true self is one that is wholly separate from this fragile image that we try to construct in the imagination of others. It exists in Christ alone. The true self is one that is emptied of the need for authentication; in dying, it lives (Gal. 2:20). Hence, the Zen doctrine of Sunyata or

²²Monica Furlong, Merton: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 219.

²³A Thomas Merton Reader, p. 433.

²⁴This is Dorothy Day's preferred description of her own vocation, as quoted in By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1983), p. xviii. Elena Malits, in her book The Solitary Explorer (Harper & Row, 1980), notes that Merton similarly recognized a sign of genuine sanctity to be "the reconciliation of opposites," the embrace of paradox.

²⁵New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961), pp. 29-69. Cf. Bonnie Bowman Thurston, "Zen Influence on Thomas Merton's View of the Self," Japanese Religions 14:3 (December, 1986), pp. 28-47.

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emptiness, joined with a Pauline theology of kenosis, allowed Merton to abandon the image of the heralded monk that had grown out of his earlier publication of The Seven Storey Mountain. By 1966, he could say that:

Due to a book I wrote thirty years ago, I have myself become a sort of stereotype of the world-denying contemplative-the man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, St. John of the Cross in another, and holding the Bible open at the Apocalypse. This stereotype is probably my own fault, and it is something I have to try to demolish on occasion.²⁶

By the mid 1960s, Merton had embraced the paradox that the true self is set free to rejoice only as it laughs at the false self and its pathetic dependence on fabricated images.

IV

The second paradox in Merton's experience is that the one who writes so much begins to question the value of words. Merton had frequently loved writing, since his work under Mark Van Doren at Columbia, if not before. It was the one passion he could never escape. Yet he always approached it with a sense of ambivalence. Many times he tried to give it up, like an addiction. ²⁷

What his appreciation for Zen enabled him to do was gradually to place less confidence in language, to recognize that words are but a finger pointing at the moon. To focus on the finger instead of what it points to is to miss the whole reason for seeing. He came to realize that an economy of language-a joining of his words to silence--could improve his writing, even as it also embraced the charism of his own Trappist community. In his poetry, he began to discover this in a way that he was never able to express very well through prose. The poem "Stranger" indicates his abandonment of anxious description. Here he captures the Zen spirit with the simplicity of Basho's famous haiku of the frog and the pond. The ego, with its frantic attachment to concepts and desires, lies almost forgotten in a landscape of clean silence.

When no one listens
To the quiet trees
When no one notices
The sun in the pool.

Where no one feels
The first drop of rain
Or sees the last star

²⁶Thomas Merton, "Is the World a Problem" Commonweal LXXXIV: II (June 3, 1966), p. 305.

²⁷Monica Furlong, op. cit., p. 2 10.

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Or hails the first morning
Of a giant world
Where peace begins
And rages end:

One bird sits still
Watching the work of God:
One turning leaf,
Two falling blossoms,

Ten circles upon the pond .²⁸

In this minimalist Zen fashion, Merton learned to criticize his own tendency to put everything into words-to spin webs of meaning around reality, without grasping it directly and intuitively.

The language of Zen, as Merton learned, is in many respects an "anti-language." It uses language against itself, undermining the conceptual framework to which the ego so desperately clings. The sparse, broken language of Zen has as its goal the direct and immediate experience of reality.²⁹ It calls into question the tendency of language in our Western, Cartesian tradition to talk incessantly about reality, instead of simply being present to it. This was why the Zen masters sometimes had their disciples tear up the pages of their scriptures so as to free themselves from the illusion that the majesty of the holy could ever be fully contained in scratches of ink on sheets of parchment. Merton took paradoxical delight in the opening words of the Tao Te Ching: "the true meaning of life can never be put into words. At its deepest heart, life remains a wordless mystery."³⁰ For a monk who valued deeply the apophatic tradition in Western spirituality-from Gregory of Nyssa to Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross-this made perfect sense.³¹ What cannot be expressed is always what is most worth talking about.

An example of Merton's effort to push language to its edges is found in the so-called "anti-letters" that he exchanged with Bob Lax, an old classmate from Columbia. This "catch of non letters in invisible inks" reveals the comic spirit of Zen that Merton had absorbed so thoroughly.³² Using a kind of playful language that he called "macaronic," weaving bad grammar with Joycean twists of expression, he spoke, for instance, of his opportunity to leave the monastery so as to meet Suzuki in New York. He said that he:

Sneaked on the sly into French restaurant to drink benedictines and make like tourist. All this is sober truth: big secret: don't ever tell nobody or I end up in the calabozo.

²⁸The Collected Poems, p. 389. Cf. Bonnie Bowman Thurston, "Zen in the Eye of Thomas Merton's Poetry," Buddhist-Christian Studies 4 (1984), pp. 103-117.

²⁹Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 48.

³⁰Bennett B. Sims, trans., Lao-tsu and the Tao Te Ching (New York: Franklin Watts, Inc., 1971).

³¹Cf. John F. Teahan, "A Dark and Empty Way: Thomas Merton and the Apophatic Tradition," The Journal of Religion 58 (1978), pp. 263-287.

³²Thomas Merton and Robert Lax, A Catch of Anti-Letters (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1978).

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At another time, describing life in his hermitage, he wrote:

Well now I got to take Rex for a run round the clock, and fire off the steam engines, and lay open the thermostats to dry out in the weather, and fly a kite and put out the cat and bathe the canary and punish the children and sell the estate and wheel Uncle Ray back into his closet.³³

This was his way of talking about all the little details of living alone and loving it.

It was also his way of stretching language so as to point up the absurdity that lies hidden within it. Common discourse is inevitably subject to brokenness, and discontinuity is even more prevalent in one's effort to talk about God. Shankara, the ninth-century Hindu master, once prayed, "O Thou, before whom all words recoil." Merton, with his many gifts of language, knew the force of that prayer. His lapsing into macaronic playfulness served as a reminder that words are never fully adequate as containers of experience.

Perhaps even more indicative of his growing Zen critique of language was his attraction to photography in the later years of his life. Capturing an instant of experience on film became for him a celluloid version of Japanese haiku-suggesting a moment of pure experience without depending upon the complexity of language. John Howard Griffin described Merton's joy in taking a camera to wander the familiar fields of Gethsemani, noticing-as if for the first time-"the peeling paint on window facings, plants, weeds, the arrangement of a stack of wood chips.³⁴ Merton reluctantly concluded that often "what is best is what is not said."³⁵ With Lao-tzu, he came to suspect that "he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not know."

V

The third paradox in Merton's vocation as Zen clown is the fact that the one who did so little was able to accomplish so much. If he began to learn to speak without words, perhaps he also was invited to learn to move without action.

In the early 1960's, Merton spent more and more time at the hermitage, doing "nothing" more than ever before. He was aware that it often takes great concentration to do nothing well. In fact, he once said that the monk is the real prophet in American society because he is the only one who is free to do nothing and not feel guilty about it. In our culture, he said, people are valued not for what they are but for what

³³Letters from Thomas Merton to Robert Lax, July 10, 1964 and April 2, 196 5, Thomas Merton Studies Center. Conrad Hyers makes note of the profusion of puns, idiomatic turns upon words, paradoxes, and enigmatic sayings that appear continually in Zen literature. Zen and the Comic Spirit, p. 144.

³⁴John Howard Griffin, A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970), p. 92. Cf. Deba P. Patnaik, ed., Geography of Holiness: The Photography of Thomas Merton (New York: Pilgrim's Press, 1980) and Patrick Hart's "Photography and Prayer in Thomas Merton," The Merton Seasonal of Bellarmine College 7:2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 2-5.

³⁵Sidi Abdeslam, quoted in The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, p. 468.

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they do, for their usefulness. Hence, an insistence on the importance of "uselessness" becomes part of the monk's wider spirit of nonacquiescence in the world. Merton argues that "we have not yet rediscovered the primary usefulness of the useless."³⁶ Here, again, Merton's theology of the monastic vocation is colored by his appreciation of Eastern thought.

There is a certain "deliberate irrelevance," Merton said, about a monk's whole life. Or at least there ought to be. It stands as a sign of contradiction to those whose lives are so exhaustingly relevant to everything. He was aware, of course, that life in a monastery never guarantees this freedom from being driven by purposes and ends. To his chagrin, he observed that the production of Trappist cheese could become in some people's minds not merely a means of support but, indeed, a justification of monastic life. Increasingly, Merton sensed the importance of not living for ends, for causes, for the results of his work. He embraced the principle of anasakti that Gandhi stressed so much that ability to disconnect oneself from the fruit of one's labor, to abandon the temptation we all have to engineer the consequences of our actions. As a result, he found ironically that the quality of his work improved according to the distance he gained from its results.

In a letter to Jim Forest, reflecting on the difficulties that confront the Christian social activist in the 1960's, he wrote:

Do not depend on the hope of- results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value of the work itself. ³⁷

There is a danger, he added, in trying to establish one's identity through work. It can become a shield used to protect oneself from nothingness and annihilation. When this happens, work takes on the impossible task of bolstering the false self and all of its illusions. The laughter of the true self, found only in the void left by the abandonment of ego-centric desires, is thus stifled by frenetic activity.

Merton came to appreciate what the ancient Chinese Taoists had said about the effectiveness of non-action (wu-wei). Lao-tzu had argued that if people lived according to the way of the Tao, the way of a flowing stream, they would discover how much they could accomplish by doing so little. Water exerts no effort. It never has time to practice falling. It simply flows. Yet a river is able to carry great and small things along on its surface. Rivers have even formed entire civilizations by doing nothing! The Tao Te Ching expresses it best, when it says:

³⁶Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 282.

³⁷"Letter to a Young Activist" (a letter to James H. Forest, February 21, 1966), published in Catholic Agitator 8 (December, 1978), p. 4.

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Acting in the Way of Nature
...often means not acting--
Not doing anything.
Indeed an empire can often be won
By doing nothing at the right time.
Indeed a life can often be lost
By trying to do too much .³⁸

This is the great paradox that was expressed at the very beginning of the Zen tradition. When the Buddha Sakyamuni concluded his lengthy teachings at the Mount of the Holy Vulture, he raised a lotus blossom as a way of summarizing all that he had been teaching. None of his disciples understood his meaning, except for the old, venerable Mahâkâs-yapa. This first of the Zen patriarchs said nothing and did nothing. He only smiled. But in so doing, he indicated-in the most appropriate manner possible-that the transmission of truth had occurred. To do nothing at the right time can be the finest form of action.

VI

In concluding this reflection on Merton as Zen clown, we have to give him the last laugh. We have been speaking here as if these paradoxes were things fully lived out in his experience. Yet one would have to imagine his laughter even now at such a thought. In truth, the reason he spoke of them so much was not because he had mastered their truth in his experience, but because he realized how far away they still were from him. The Talmud says one teaches best what one most needs to learn. Elena Malits observes that "there is a hint of the ludicrous in Merton's constant writing and talking about silence."³⁹ There is an intense restlessness about this man who celebrated a vocation of staying in one place and remaining still. Our best teachers, perhaps, are always those who struggle so much to learn the truth themselves.

Merton found that the best way to express any of these paradoxes was finally through the unexpected surprise of metaphor. He frequently retold the strange tales of Chuang Tzu and Hui Néng. One of his favorite narratives, the one which began and ended his book, The Way of Chuang Tzu, was the story of the "useless tree." Told by Chuang Tzu in the fourth century B.C.E., it expresses the subtlety of Chinese humor, even as it summarizes Merton's perception of the monastic vocation. The version given here is one adapted from several translations of the traditional Chinese text.

One spring, as peach blossoms filled the valley below with a spray of white fragrance, an ancient sage wandered the Heights of Shang. There on a hillside stripped of everything else, he saw a large and extraordinary tree. So huge it was, the horses that drew a hundred chariots could be sheltered under its shade. "What a tree this is!" he thought. Imagining the amount of timber it must contain, he marveled that the tree had never been cut down.

³⁸Bennett Sims, trans., Lao-tsu and the Tao Te Ching, XLVIII.

³⁹Elena Malits, op. cit., pp. 142, 147.

268 - Merton as Zen Clown

But as he sat beneath it and looked up into the tree's branches, he saw how twisted and crooked they were. Turning in every direction, none of them were large enough to be made into rafters or beams. He reached up and broke off a twig, tasting the sap. It was sharp and bitter. "This tree would be useless for tapping," he concluded, "producing no syrup of any worth." The leaves, too, gave off an offensive odor as he broke them. They were too fragile to be woven into mats or braided into baskets. They would not even make good mulch! Even the roots, as he studied them, were so gnarled and knotty that one could never carve a bowl or fashion a fine decorative box out of them.

The sage said at last; "This, indeed, is a tree good for nothing! That is why it has reached so great an age. The cinnamon tree can be eaten; so it is cut down. The varnish tree is useful, and therefore incisions are made in it. We all know the advantage of being useful, but only this tree knows the advantage of being useless!" The wise man sat in the shade of that great tree for the rest of the day, as a light wind drifted up from the valley below. He breathed the scent of distant peach blossoms and sat in studied silence, happily contemplating his own uselessness.⁴⁰

Similarly, Merton was increasingly drawn to the contemplation of his own uselessness. "All your teaching is centered on what has no use," a Chinese scholar once said to Chuang Tzu. Merton would have considered it a compliment had the same been said of his own work. In a society where everything of consequence was reduced to function, Merton came seriously to question the "usefulness" of a reputation for sanctity, the "usefulness" of words, the "usefulness" of one's frantic activity in the world. Like a Zen clown, he began to express these paradoxes in his own experience. He learned that laughter can be the herald of the Tao and the grandmother of hope. The ancient Chinese had suggested that laughing is often one's most appropriate response to truth. "If one did not laugh," they said, "it would not be the Tao." Merton laughed; and his laughter gave expression to a spirituality that joined Christian and Eastern themes in a common celebration of playfulness.

⁴⁰Adapted from a poem by Chuang Tzu in David R. Brower's Of All Things Most Yielding (Friends of the Earth, n.d.). Cf. James Legge, trans., The Texts of Taoism (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), II, pp. 27-33.