Today is the 40th anniversary of the day a famous Christian monk told a Thai audience that Eastern religion might be better. He was dead within hours.

Forty years ago today, a visiting monk from America who has since been described as the most famous Christian monastic since St Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century, died by a quirk of fate in Samut Prakhan.

Thomas Merton, who had formulated theology and theories of peace and justice in discussion and correspondence with the Dalai Lama, DT Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez and many others, had just given a morning talk about melding Eastern and Western religions.

The setting was Sawankaniwas in Tambon Tai Baan, a shady retreat with flower gardens and an aquarium, five kilometres south of downtown Samut Prakhan. It’s owned by the Thai Red Cross Society.

Merton, known as Father Louis, had emerged from 27 years of solitude at a Trappist monastery in Kentucky for two reasons. The first was to meet the Dalai Lama, which he did over the course of three days in Dharamsala, before flying on to Thailand. In earlier correspondence, the Tibetan leader had advised Merton to read about the Vajrayana school of metaphysics, which the American embraced enthusiastically.

In turn, His Holiness would later credit Merton with showing him that Tibetan Buddhism did not have a monopoly on spiritual truth. “As a result of meeting with him,” the Dalai Lama wrote, “my attitude toward Christianity was much changed.” He described Merton as a highly advanced lama.

Merton spent two months in India, also visiting New Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, in the last city seeing Little Mount and St Thomas Mount, where Indian Christians believe the apostle Thomas brought the gospel in 52 AD, and where he was martyred 20 years later.

Then he had a stopover in Sri Lanka, where he viewed the three reclining Buddhas in Polonnaruwa. “This was,” he wrote in his journal, “the greatest aesthetic experience I’ve ever had in my life. All things become clear.”

Preparing for his journey to the Orient, Merton “was like a kid getting ready to go to the circus”, his secretary at the monastery, Brother Patrick Hart, told Knight Ridder Newspapers in 1998.

“It was a dream come true. He never thought he would get to Asia. He was going with the idea of learning from the wisdom of the East.”

Sawankaniwas, I’m reasonably sure, as seen on Google Earth.

In response to Vatican II, the Catholic Church’s sweeping policy realignment initiated by Pope Paul VI, the Confederation of Benedictine Abbots organised an inaugural Asian East-West Intermonastic Conference in Samut Prakhan. Merton’s second mission was to attend this gathering and, in his talk, compare Marxism to monasticism.

Simply put, the linkage is that Marxists believe change is impossible, and dangerous to attempt, without a thorough understanding of economic sub-structures, while monastics, both Buddhist and Christian, require the same level of understanding of the consciousness. Our inbred prejudices skew our comprehension, always placing our own ego at the centre of things.

It was a year of revolution, 1968, and Merton held forth on Marcuse (”a kind of monastic thinker”), the Sorbonne students (who told him, “We are monks also,” challenging the world’s claims) and Marx’s desire for a progression from individual greed to the good of the community.

Buddhist and Christian monasticism alike, he said, teach that social, political and economic structures cannot be counted on for support because of their inherent vulnerability. Only in detachment and purity of heart can be found freedom and transcendence.

Merton concluded his talk by saying that Buddhism and Hinduism could show Westerners how to achieve that freedom in spite of perceived external limitations.

Any questions for him would await the evening session, so he said simply, “I will disappear from view, and maybe we can all have a coke or something.” It was December 10, 1968, the the 27th anniversary of his entry into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Merton returned to the bungalow assigned to him and, around 3pm, had a shower in preparation for a nap. He crossed the floor, still wet, and reached up to switch on a tall floor fan. He was flattened by the current, and the fan fell on top of him, with the power still live. When his body was found soon after, there was a severe electrical burn across his chest. Merton was not quite 54.

It was an accident bizarre enough to generate multiple mystical notions, beginning with the fact that his 1948 autobiography had concluded with the words “to know the Christ of the burnt men”.

Some saw his death as a kind of “suicide”, in the sense that he brought about his own demise to avoid the schism of faith that had gradually overtaken him. In “The Death of Thomas Merton, A Novel”, Paul Hourihan suggested that the monk had reached a conflict with Christianity but arrived “too late and unsuccessfully” at the gate of Eastern mysticism.

John Howard Griffin, the journalist and author of “Black Like Me” who’d been his friend since college, wrote a 1993 biography, “Follow the Ecstasy: the Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton”. He claimed that another American monk attending the conference in Thailand saw four alligators come out of a canal the next day and snatch up a dog. It reminded him of an Indian parable in which the god of death takes an alligator’s form.

Some Buddhists, Griffin wrote, believe that the reincarnated Buddha cannot be recognised until his next worldly death — when alligators will be seen eating a dog.

The New York Times, reporting Merton’s death on its front page, made no mention of alligators, but in Kentucky his friend and confessor Rev Matthew Kelty heard the news and instantly remembered his premonition. Just after Father Louis set off for Asia, Kelty had asked another monk, an artist, to draw a hand holding a diamond in the palm.

Kelty showed the drawing around, saying, “Merton is our diamond. He’s the best we’ve got. We’re going to lose him. God’s going to take him. We’re never going to see him again.”

Merton’s remains were buried in a simple grave at the monastery, having been flown home via Vietnam, aboard a military plane carrying body bags with American soldiers from a war against which Merton had loudly protested.

Thomas Merton was born in the French Pyrenees on January 31, 1915, to expatriate artists, his American mother a Quaker, his father a New Zealander and also a pacifist. Both died when he was still quite young, by which time he’d lived in the United States, Bermuda and England, as well as France. He attended Cambridge University briefly before enrolling at Columbia University in New York to pursue a doctorate in English literature.

Millions of people, devout and doubters alike, have read Merton’s writings on spirituality, monasticism, literature, politics, war and peace and racism, as well as his poetry and his autobiography.

He listened to jazz, smoked heavily, drank and had had girlfriends in the past, even fathered an illegitimate child, but as a monk he was anguished by his behaviour, and in 1948 he wrote about his torment in the confessional “The Seven Storey Mountain”. It became a bestseller praised by prominent Catholics like Clare Booth Luce and Evelyn Waugh, and brought novices flooding into Gethsemani. It’s shown in a low-res aerial image here.

Ironically, Merton didn’t like the crowding, and he considered moving somewhere more remote, possibly California or Alaska or even Latin America, where his friend the poet-monk Ernesto Cardenal would later join Nicaragua’s Sandinista uprising. Merton, however, had long railed against pacifists who advocated armed revolution in the Third World.

He spoke out against the Vietnam War and bemoaned the “totalitarian” persecution of his friends Daniel and Philip Berrigan. “If I have written about interracial justice, or thermonuclear weapons,” he said in 1963, “it is because these issues are terribly relevant to one great truth: that man is called to live as a child of God. Man must respond to this call to live in peace with all his brothers and sisters in the One Christ.”

One of his readers was a student nurse who helped him during a hospital stay. Romance blossomed, and despite their covertness, his superior at the monastery discovered the affair and tried to quash it. Merton never had the chance to live down his indiscretion, and when he was given permission to travel to Asia, it was on the condition that he do so quietly, so as not to stir up more rumours.

While attending Columbia he had encountered a Hindu ascetic named Bramachari who got him reading not just about Asian philosophy but “The Imitation of Christ” and “The Confessions of St Augustine”. Augustine became famous because of his public admissions, as Merton would too.

Hurried along by a dramatic conversion experience, and joining the Catholic Church in 1938, Merton was on his way to becoming a theologian. His master’s thesis was “On Nature and Art in William Blake”.

The Dali Lama visited Merton’s grave in Kentucky in 1997.

Some admirers regard Thomas Merton as a Blakeian mystic, and many detractors have derided him as a “plastic saint”. There are, nevertheless, some seemingly otherworldly aspects to his life.

He died in an era of suspicion, if not outright paranoia. Some wished to believe that the US government actually had Merton murdered, a notion girded by the fact that his death came just after the fifth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination.

In a January 1962 letter about the possibility of a nuclear war, Merton said he had “little confidence in Kennedy”.

“I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed … What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole; a deeper kind of dedication.

“Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

“There has been a lot of gossip about this, whether he was killed accidentally, or by an enemy,” the late journalist Edward Rice, another of Merton’s friends, is quoted as saying on the website TheRealMerton.com. Rice was the author of 1970’s “The Man in the Sycamore Tree: the Good Times and Hard Life of Thomas Merton”.

“He had many enemies. The CIA feared he had connections in religious circles in Asia that might have an adverse effect on the US war effort in Vietnam. The FBI felt the same kind of fear over his role in the peace movement in America. Neither side in Vietnam liked him. The communists, both Russian and Chinese, were suspicious of him …

“And of course, there were enemies, some of them powerful, within his own Church, even within his own Order. And the latter probably felt even more justified in their opposition during Merton’s Asian trip.

“It could have been assassination by some unrevealed force,” Rice said, “or it could have been what it was said to have been, just an accident. Having lived on and off in Asia for some 16 years, I am always a little sceptical of anything I hear. And I do know, there are lots of defective electrical appliances lying around.”

Events commemorating the anniversary of Merton’s death are being held in cities across the US and in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Britain, Italy and Canada.

Established in 1848 by exiled French monks, the Abbey of Gethsemani is the oldest Trappist monastery in North America. Trappists are a reform branch of the Cistercian order.

The monastery is on Monks Road, in a village called Trappist, near the town of Bardstown, Kentucky. The monastery actually managed to secure the domain Monks.org.

The Thomas Merton Center and International Thomas Merton Society are based at Bellarmine University just outside Louisville. From there you drive past Martin Luther King Jr Expressway and take the I-65 into downtown Louisville, turn off at Muhammad Ali Boulevard and head for Fourth Street.

There, just outside Assumption Cathedral, you find Thomas Merton Square, designated posthumously because this is where he had a revelation in 1958, inscribed on a plaque.

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all these people … They were walking around shining like the sun.”

FURTHER READING:

The International Thomas Merton Society
The Real Morton.com
A biography on the Australian Broadcasting Corp’s Radio National
The Knight Ridder story
A detailed commentary on Merton’s talk in Thailand can be downloaded from Florida-based theologian and educator Sheila T Harty’s website.