Thomas Merton’s Asian Journey

Thomas Merton’s Asian journey in 1968 brought his Christian monastic life into sustained conversation with religious traditions he had long wanted to understand. It was at once a search for teachers, a reconsideration of his own vocation, and an encounter with Buddhist art that he described as a decisive spiritual illumination. The journey ended abruptly in Bangkok with Merton’s accidental death, leaving his Asian Journal as a record of both the questions he carried and the encounters that changed their shape.

Permission, itinerary, and purpose

Merton regularly received invitations to speak or attend conferences, but his abbot had generally refused permission. A new abbot approved his attendance at a meeting of Asian monks in Thailand in December 1968, opening the way to a much wider journey. Merton planned to visit Calcutta, New Delhi, the Himalayas, Madras, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Bangkok. Had he lived, he would also have gone to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Burma, Nepal, and Japan. He hoped to meet a broad range of religious teachers: scholars, lamas, Buddhist spiritual masters, Zen masters, monks, sages, gurus, and rōshis. The journey was therefore more than travel to a single conference; it gave him a chance to encounter religious life directly and to examine what he was seeking in it.

The Asian Journal, which includes journal entries as well as relevant letters and essays, opens with Merton taking off from San Francisco in a Pan American plane. He described himself as finally setting out on his true way after years of waiting and uncertainty. He also wrote that he hoped not to return without having settled what he called the great affair. The journal does not make that phrase fully explicit. Instead, as the trip unfolds, its account of conversations, meditation, and Merton’s reflections on monastic life offers clues to the inquiry without reducing it to a single answer.

Conversations with the Dalai Lama

Merton’s first audience with the Dalai Lama took place on the afternoon of November 4, 1968. Reaching the palace required a long Jeep journey up a mountain, and an Indian official checked Merton’s passport there. He was struck by the Dalai Lama’s presence, describing him as strong, alert, energetic, generous, and warm. Their conversation concerned religion, philosophy, and meditation. Merton spoke about personal concerns and Tibetan mysticism; the Dalai Lama recommended philosophical subjects and books for him to study, and urged him to establish a firm grounding in metaphysics. They agreed to meet again two days later.

Between the first two audiences, Merton reconsidered what his life at the Abbey of Gethsemani offered him. Its hermitage could provide the solitude needed for study and meditation, yet he also wondered whether a hermitage in Alaska might bring fewer interruptions. Some Buddhist teachers he consulted questioned absolute solitude, advising a rhythm of extended retreat followed by periods spent among others. Merton considered these suggestions alongside his continuing affection for Gethsemani and his sense that he had needed to leave for a time. Frustrations with the monastery and the Cistercian Order had made a different setting valuable: the journey gave him room to sort through questions that his familiar surroundings could not resolve for him.

At the second audience, on November 6, philosophical discussion gave way again to meditation. Merton noted that the Dalai Lama demonstrated a sitting posture he considered essential and discussed concentration of the mind with him. Their exchange was lively, even when Merton had difficulty making a philosophical point understood. He was particularly interested in the Dalai Lama’s view that detachment and an unworldly life could lead not away from worldly problems but toward a fuller understanding of, and participation in, them. The Dalai Lama invited him to return for a conversation about Western monasticism.

Merton regarded their third interview as the best. The Dalai Lama asked whether Western monastic vows were connected to spiritual transmission and whether monks advanced through them toward illumination. He was more interested in the mystical life than in outward observances, and asked about ascetic discipline, food, alcohol, and movies. Merton left feeling that the two had become close friends. In a letter to his monastery, he expressed the hope that he might bring something of the Asian wisdom he had encountered back to Gethsemani. The exchange thus linked comparative religious inquiry to a question about what that inquiry could contribute to his own community.

Polonnaruwa and an experience of recognition

A visit to the ruins of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon became one of the journey’s most searching episodes. The ancient city was sacred to Hindus and Buddhists, and the site included the remains of palaces and temples. Merton went with the vicar general of the local diocese, who was suspicious of paganism; the cleric hung back, leaving Merton able to approach the statues barefoot and undisturbed. There he encountered three colossal figures: a seated Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a standing disciple beside the reclining figure’s head.

Merton’s response joined visual attention to spiritual recognition. He was moved by the statues’ faces and their composure, and wrote of being abruptly drawn out of his habitual way of seeing. The forms, lines, and design seemed to disclose an inner clarity; beauty and spiritual validity came together in what he understood as an illumination. He felt he had found what he had been obscurely looking for, though the experience resisted explanation. He said he could not write about it. The journal’s difficulty in making the moment communicable is itself significant: the episode appears not as a conclusion to a philosophical argument but as an encounter Merton could register more readily than define.

Bangkok, death, and the unfinished return

After Polonnaruwa, Merton went to Singapore for a brief visit with a philosophy professor and his wife, then travelled to Bangkok for the meeting that had originally prompted the journey. A Dutch abbot took him from his hotel to the Red Cross conference centre, about thirty kilometres outside the city. The journal’s last entry refers to the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Merton planned to say Mass at St. Louis Church and then go to the conference centre; he also wrote to his secretary, Brother Patrick Hart, that he felt homesick for Gethsemani as Christmas approached. At the conference, he spoke on Marxism and monastic perspectives.

On December 10, Gethsemani received a cable from the American Embassy in Bangkok reporting Merton’s death. The precise circumstances were not known. The account says that he apparently returned to his room to shower and rest, and that his death was officially attributed to accidental electrocution from a short-circuited electric fan. His death brought the journey to an abrupt end and left its anticipated onward visits unrealized. The contrast is stark: the journal had set out with Merton’s hope of settling a great affair, but the record closes not with a declared resolution or return to Gethsemani, but with a final entry, a letter home, and a death far from the monastery.

Significance of the journey

Merton’s Asian journey made his interest in religious traditions outside Christianity a lived inquiry rather than a subject confined to reading. The meetings with the Dalai Lama tested ideas about detachment, meditation, vows, and the relation between spiritual discipline and engagement with the world. The Polonnaruwa encounter, by contrast, showed the limits of explanation: Merton could describe the statues and the force of his response, yet insisted that he could not adequately write about the experience itself. Together, the conversations and the moment of illumination place comparative study and personal spiritual experience alongside one another, without making them interchangeable.

The journey also sharpened Merton’s understanding of his own monastic setting. His reflections did not simply reject Gethsemani: he valued its solitude and said he would remain a monk of the place, even as distance helped him address frustrations and consider other forms of retreat. His hope of carrying Asian wisdom back to the monastery gives the journey a return-oriented purpose, although his death prevented that return. The Asian Journal consequently preserves both an unfinished exchange between traditions and a record of a search whose lasting influence outlived the traveller. Merton’s writings continue to be read, and his work on mysticism, racism, peace, and nuclear war remains part of the legacy associated with his life.