Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is presented through two journeys that give the island a distinctive place in the book’s account of spiritual encounter. In 1935 it was the first stop on Howard Thurman’s pilgrimage of friendship, and the setting for a searching challenge about Christianity’s relationship to slavery and racial oppression. Decades later, during Thomas Merton’s Asian journey, Sri Lanka became the setting for his visit to Polonnaruwa, where the Buddha statues moved him beyond his habitual way of seeing. One encounter unfolds through argument; the other through silence and visual attention.

First Stop on Thurman’s Pilgrimage

In 1935, the World Christian Student Federation asked Thurman to lead a delegation of African Americans on a friendship pilgrimage as guests of the Student Christian Movements of India, Burma, and Ceylon. The party consisted of Thurman, his wife, and the minister Edward Carroll and Carroll’s wife, Phenola. Before the journey, obtaining visas from Great Britain proved difficult. A British government representative objected that four African Americans traveling and speaking across the region would create difficulties for British rule. The visas were eventually issued, and the delegation set out on a journey intended to create opportunities for serious religious and theological conversation.

Sri Lanka was their first stop. There, after Thurman delivered a lecture at the Law College, the college principal invited him to his office for coffee. The hospitality led into a direct confrontation with the history Thurman’s Christian identity carried. The principal reminded him that Thurman’s forebears had been taken from the west coast of Africa as slaves, and that Christians had participated in the slave trade, bought enslaved people, and invoked Paul to sanction slavery. He also pointed to segregation, lynching, and burning in the United States, including segregation within churches. He challenged Thurman to explain how he could remain a Christian and, in the principal’s view, betray the darker-skinned peoples of the world. Their conversation lasted more than five hours.

Christianity Under Challenge

Thurman did not answer by defending Christianity as it had been practiced by slaveholders or under racial segregation. Instead, he distinguished Christianity from what he called the religion of Jesus. The distinction allowed him to condemn slavery and racial prejudice without treating them as faithful expressions of Jesus’s teaching. The account emphasizes that his critique of those injustices was itself forceful; he did not dismiss the principal’s indictment or reduce it to a misunderstanding.

Thurman also described a minority in the United States who found in the spirit of Jesus a vision of freedom, liberty, and justice for all people. This response made the conversation more than a defense of personal belief: it turned the encounter toward the difference between a religion’s historical institutions and the ethical possibilities Thurman located in Jesus. The exchange was tense, and Thurman was anxious to continue the journey. The book does not present the meeting as a neat resolution. Its importance lies in the questions it pressed into the open: what Christian belief means when Christians have helped sustain oppression, and whether the faith’s moral claims can be separated from those failures.

Merton at Polonnaruwa

During his Asian journey in 1968, Merton visited Sri Lanka as part of a much wider itinerary. He had hoped to meet religious teachers across Asia, and the journey included stops in several cities and regions before its planned gathering of Asian monks in Bangkok. In Sri Lanka he went to Polonnaruwa, an ancient city regarded as holy by Hindus and Buddhists. The account describes a monastic complex among ruins of palaces and temples, with few people present.

Merton 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. He contemplated three colossal figures: a seated Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a large statue of one of the reclining figure’s disciples standing by its head. The book records Merton’s attention to the faces—their smiles, scale, subtlety, and stillness—and to the statues’ form and design. His response was not framed as a theological debate or as an assessment of Buddhist practice. It centered on the encounter with the images and the clarity he felt in looking at them.

A Place of Encounter and Inexpressibility

Merton wrote that the statues abruptly displaced his usual way of seeing. He described an illumination in which beauty and spiritual validity seemed to come together, and said that for a moment there was no puzzle or problem. He also expressed the sense that he had found what he had been obscurely seeking, while acknowledging that he did not know what remained after that discovery. The book treats the experience as difficult to communicate: Merton said he could not write about it. A man at a Buddhist university told him that the people who carved the statues were not ordinary men.

These two episodes make Sri Lanka more than a point on a travel itinerary. For Thurman, the island was where hospitality opened into a demanding examination of Christian history and moral responsibility. For Merton, Polonnaruwa offered an encounter in which attention to monumental Buddhist art became a moment of spiritual recognition that resisted explanation. The contrast is central to the book’s presentation: religious understanding may emerge through contested words, as it did in Thurman’s long conversation, or through an experience whose force exceeds what words can convey, as it did for Merton among the ruins.