Polonnaruwa

Polonnaruwa is an ancient city in Sri Lanka, regarded as holy by Hindus and Buddhists and marked by the ruins of palaces and temples. In Thomas Merton’s account of his Asian journey, the site becomes more than a historical or religious destination: its colossal Buddha statues occasion an encounter that abruptly unsettles his ordinary way of seeing, yet remains impossible for him to explain fully.

Setting and approach

Merton described arriving in a sparsely populated place, reached by a dirt road, and finding a monastic complex among the ruins. The site’s stillness and the contrast between its monumental remains and the quiet landscape shape the account, though he does not present a systematic description of the city or its history.

He was accompanied by the vicar general of the local diocese, who was suspicious of paganism. The vicar general hung back, leaving Merton able to approach the statues barefoot and undisturbed on sand and wet grass. That separation matters to the scene: Merton’s encounter takes place through direct, unhurried attention to the images, rather than through an explanation supplied by his companion.

The Buddha figures

Merton was deeply moved by three colossal figures: a seated Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a large statue of one of the Buddha’s disciples standing beside the reclining figure’s head. He attended to the statues’ faces, their great smiles, and the way their scale could coexist with subtlety. The account presents these forms not as objects to be decoded through argument, but as images whose composure seemed to hold a breadth of possibility and peace.

His response was also sharply visual. He recalled the statues’ shape, line, and design as possessing an obvious clarity that suddenly, almost forcibly, carried him beyond his usual way of seeing. He described an inner clarity seeming to break out of the rocks, and a moment in which the usual sense of puzzle and problem fell away. Beauty and spiritual validity appeared together in what he understood as an aesthetic illumination.

An encounter beyond explanation

Merton wrote that he had found what he had obscurely been seeking, and that he had pierced through surface and disguise. Yet the experience did not become a doctrine or a clear account of what remained to be learned. He said he could not write about it: like mystical experiences more generally, this one resisted description even as he recorded its force.

A man at a Buddhist university told Merton that those who carved the statues were not ordinary men. The remark sits beside, rather than explains, Merton’s response. Polonnaruwa’s significance in the narrative lies in this tension: a concrete encounter with sculpted forms, remembered through precise visual features, opens onto an experience that Merton could recognize as decisive but could not translate into a complete verbal account.

Place in Merton’s journey

The visit was one episode in Merton’s wider Asian journey. From Polonnaruwa he continued to Singapore and then to Bangkok, where he attended the conference that had been the original purpose of the trip. The movement onward gives the encounter a defined place in the itinerary, but the account distinguishes it from ordinary travel: the statues remain a point at which his perception was suddenly altered and his search seemed, for a moment, to have reached something he had been seeking.