“In Zen we discover that there is no answer to be given. The only answer is to live the question.”
— Thomas Merton
On this day in 1968, Thomas Merton died suddenly in Bangkok while attending an international monastic conference devoted to dialogue between Christianity and Asian contemplative traditions. His passing came in the very midst of his life’s deeper work: listening across traditions and learning directly from Buddhist monastics in Asia.
Born in France to artist parents, Merton grew up between Europe and the United States after losing both his mother and father at a young age. A brilliant but restless seeker, he studied at Columbia University, wrestling with meaning, desire, ego, and suffering. During those years, his first real encounter with Eastern philosophy came through reading the Tao Te Ching, Hindu scriptures, and early Buddhist texts—seeds that quietly shaped his inner life long before he entered the monastery.
In 1941, after a profound conversion, he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky as a Trappist monk. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, brought him sudden fame—but what he sought was silence, prayer, and the dismantling of the false self.
Over time, his contemplative life opened naturally toward Zen and Buddhism. Through deep study and correspondence—especially with D.T. Suzuki—Merton found in Zen a directness that resonated with Christian mysticism: emptiness, freedom, and awakening beyond ideas. His book Zen and the Birds of Appetite became a landmark text in early East–West dialogue.
Shortly before his death, Merton finally traveled through Asia, meeting Buddhist teachers and practitioners. One of the most moving moments of that journey came before a massive reclining Buddha in Sri Lanka—an experience he described as luminous, intimate, and beyond religious boundary.
There is something profoundly symbolic in how his life ended: a Christian monk, on pilgrimage, devoted to interfaith understanding, dying in the midst of bridge-building.
Merton reminds us that true practice dissolves the walls between traditions—and that silence itself is the teacher.
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