Word: merton
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...What was missing is what American actors are known for: interior work, subtext work." But with the advent of Director Mel Shapiro, Moriarty found a mentor whose approach to acting meshed with his own, and he soon was playing increasingly important roles in everything from Mourning Becomes Electra to Merton of the Movies...
...record of that final, searching trip has just been published as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions; $12.50). Painstakingly edited by a team of scholarly admirers, but still tantalizingly unfinished, the journal is a collage of Asian images, sacred and profane. Merton talks at length of Buddhist mandalas, the mystical cosmograms that often represent the diversity and unity of the universe. And the book itself is a kind of mandala, drawing the reader deep into a philosophical analysis, then abruptly forcing him out into the physical world: Ceylonese girls bathing in country streams, Indians in Darjeeling with "English...
...Merton's sensitive social conscience made it difficult for him to confront the immense poverty he saw. Shortly after he arrived in Calcutta, a small beggar girl appeared at his taxi window before he could buy any Indian money. Merton was helpless. He recalled "the utterly lovely smile with which she stretched out her hand, and then the extinguishing of the light when she drew it back empty. She fell away from the taxi window as if she were sinking in water and drowning. I wanted...
...many spiritual encounters in his travels included three talks with the Dalai Lama. But Merton seemed most at home with a master of the ancient Tibetan Buddhist way of Dzogchen, a mystical method that like Zen stresses the ability to achieve sudden illumination. "The parting note was a kind of compact that we would both do our best to make it [to complete Buddhahood] in this life." Yet what Merton found most striking in his exploration of Buddhism was the realization that the contemplative ways of the East were for him only an analogue of his own methods. Though...
Just a few days after meeting the Dzogchen master, Merton was in solitary retreat near Darjeeling. "I have a definite feeling," he wrote then, that the Asian trip "was something I didn't need to do," that there was "too much movement. Too much 'looking for' something." Yet even to learn that, he felt, the journey had been worth it. Later in the day he seemed profoundly content. "The sun is high, at the zenith. Clear soft sound of a temple bell, far down in the valley. Voices of children near the cottages above...