Radical Buddhism and the paradox of acceptance

[Edward theurj Berge]

See this article by the above title at this link. Here's an excerpt:

 

In other words, for Zizek, Buddhism, in the context of a Western consumer culture, allows the individual to believe he is transforming his mind without actually changing the conditions of suffering that shape the individual's society. This represents a dangerous type of inner peace - a peace not based on true insight into the interdependent nature of reality, but instead based on withdrawal into a mental cocoon, some personal oasis isolated from the turmoil of the world outside. In this cocoon, the whole world can go to hell, and the meditator can -- put simply -- be ok with that. In fact, the meditator can even be a willing actor in a system aiding great oppression, and still live at ease, because it's "all good" anyway. By practicing "acceptance," we simply become comfortable with the status quo.

 

 

[Balder]

I haven't found any of Merton's relevant material online yet, but here's a brief discussion of his notion of, and role as, a "marginal man."

~*~

"A Concern with ‘Irrelevancy’

This notion of marginality was very much a part of Merton’s thinking, and it was his pursuit of that ideal that, paradoxically enough, brought him from the margin to the center of people’s attention, In the same talk quoted above, Merton argued that it is the monk’s vocation (as it is the vocation of the poet, the hippie, the prisoner, the displaced or dying person) to be irrelevant. He is to be irrelevant (how odd to apply that badge to oneself in 1968!) because the monk needs to live close to the edge of death, for only in that way can one understand the limits of life.

This concern with the peculiar status of the monk is the leitmotif of the volume Contemplation in a World of Action (1973), which brought together a large number of Merton’s essays and conference papers on the monastic life done during the ’60s. In this volume his idea of "irrelevancy" is expressed in a somewhat different way: "The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. In a certain sense he is supposed to be ‘useless’ because his mission is not to do this or that job but to be a man of God" (p. 27). It is from this peculiar perspective that the monk should be able to get a sense of the deepest meaning of life itself; he also "will be in some sense critical of the world, of its routines, its confusions. and its sometimes tragic failures to provide other men with lives that are fully sane and human" (p. 28).

This sense of distance and marginality had to be lived in creative tension with the real world. Merton was anxious to erase the earlier conception of the Trappist that he himself had helped so create in Seven Storey Mountain: "The man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, John of the Cross in another, and holding the Bible open to the Apocalypse" (Contemplation in a World of Action, p. 159). In fact, Merton the solitary carried on a passionate, if critical, dialogue with the world. His writings and his addresses attest to a Catholic appetite for the problems and hopes of the modern world.

A Peculiar Angle of Vision

It could be argued that Merton as a monk solitary proved his relevance to modern Catholic life precisely in that peculiar angle of vision which his hermitage afforded him. Many of the issues that exercised Merton’s mind in the last decade or so of his life anticipated many of the topics that occupy us in the ‘70s but which seemed esoteric or trivial at any earlier time.

In the first place, Merton shared, from an early period in his life, a marked interest in cultures other than those of western Europe. He was a passionate student of the poetry and culture of Latin America and of Vietnam. One of his novices, Ernesto Cardenal, was himself to become a poet of stature in his native Nicaragua as well as one of his country’s most vociferous social critics. At this writing, Cardenal’s monastic experiment at Solentiname has been destroyed by the police, and Cardenal, the epitome now of the marginal man, is on the run.

Second, Merton had an early and an abiding interest in Eastern thought, especially in Zen Buddhism and, in his last years, Tibetan Buddhism. Such an interest among many today is a commonplace. What marked Merton’s interest in Eastern thought was his refusal to make facile and misleading appropriations of Eastern spirituality. His study of the East was serious, ongoing and thorough. He exemplified to a significant degree that journey which Notre Dame theologian John Dunne has called (in The Way of All the Earth. 1972) "crossing over."

Merton went to the East not as a teacher or a missionary but as a pilgrim and a student. He went to learn what the East had learned about the monastic life in particular and spirituality in general. His purpose -- as even, the somewhat fragmentary Asian Journal makes clear -- was to enhance the contemplative life of his own tradition. Merton was able to use Buddhist concepts to critique and clarify his own life. One example must suffice. It is quite evident that his own desire for more solitude was tempered considerably by the Buddhist concept of "compassion"; he began to see that his own life had to oscillate between the anonymity of eremetical silence and an openness to the needs of others on both an individual and a social level. It was seemingly because of this clarification that Merton opted for a life which was to balance deep solitude with ‘periods of availability."

(Excerpted from article by Lawrence Cunningham)