The Other Side of the Mountain

  Thomas Merton

  The Other Side of the Mountain

  The End of the Journey

  Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O.

  There is another side of Kanchenjunga and of every mountain-the side that has never been photographed and turned into postcards. That is the only side worth seeing.

  November 19, 1968

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: The Election of a New Abbot

  October 1967-May 1968

  Part II: Woods, Shore, Desert

  A Notebook, May 1968

  Part III: Preparing for Asia

  May 1968-September 1968

  Part IV: New Mexico, Alaska, California

  September 1968-October 1968

  Part V: The Far East: The Last Days

  October 1968-December 1968

  A Glossary of Asian Terms

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Thomas Merton

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  In many ways “the mountain” has come to be identified with Thomas Merton, following The Seven Storey Mountain, his autobiography, which appeared fifty years ago. In none of Merton’s writings have there been so many references to mountains as in this last volume of the journals, which we are calling The Other Side of the Mountain. Merton reflects on their extraordinary beauty and symbolism when in Alaska, but his most sustained writing on the subject occurs about a week after his meetings with the Dalai Lama, while making a retreat at the Mim Tea Plantation near Dharamsala. He recounts a dream he had on November 19, 1968: “Last night I had a curious dream about Kanchenjunga. I was looking at the mountain and it was pure white, absolutely pure, especially the peaks that lie to the west. And I saw the pure beauty of their shape and outline, all in white. And I heard a voice saying—or got the idea of: ‘There is another side to the mountain.’” Merton continues to reflect on this phenomenon in the same journal entry, realizing that he is seeing the mountain from the other side. He then takes more photographs of the mountain in the afternoon and concludes his thoughts with these memorable lines: “The full beauty of the mountain is not seen until you too consent to the impossible paradox: it is and is not. When nothing more needs to be said, the smoke of ideas clears, the mountain is SEEN.”

  The seventh volume of Thomas Merton’s journals has at least this much in common with the first volume, which I also edited-both were written from a variety of locations. Merton was traveling in his premonastic days (1939–1941), from New York to Cuba and back again to New York, then to St. Bonaventure’s at Olean, New York, with brief visits to the Trappist monasteries of Gethsemani and the Our Lady of the Valley in Rhode Island. During the period covered by this last volume, Merton had received permission to do some traveling. The five other volumes were written for the most part at Gethsemani and the journal was kept in a single ledger. When traveling, Merton used several notebooks and ledgers in keeping his journal. These in turn had to be checked against one another and the entries arranged in chronological order.

  The first section, which we have titled “The Election of a New Abbot,” prepares the stage for what follows. During the last months of 1967 and the early weeks of 1968, Father Louis, as Merton was known in the monastery, was deeply concerned about the prospect of a new abbot after the resignation of Abbot James Fox. He feared the worst, and lest some should vote for him, he wrote a statement declaring his incompetence for the job and reminding the community that he had taken a private vow never to accept the abbatial office. He made it clear to all who consulted him that he was supporting Father Flavian Burns, who he felt would be sympathetic to his eremitical desires. Perhaps he also hoped that, as abbot, Father Flavian might be more open to some traveling, in contrast to the former abbot, who insisted that monks, and above all hermits, should not travel. Merton does not conceal his jubilation with the election of Abbot Flavian Bums.

  It becomes apparent rather soon after the election of the new abbot that Merton is seriously thinking of some travel. Following a number of invitations, permission was given to visit two monasteries in May. He kept a special notebook for his journal entries during the few weeks he spent at these two monasteries, the first a rather primitive Benedictine monastery, the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico, not far from the studio of Georgia O’Keeffe, and the second a newly founded Cistercian (Trappistine) monastery, Our Lady of the Redwoods, in northern California. Merton later transcribed parts of this journal and had it typed up with the idea of publishing a small book on the experience. Although this was not published until after his death, it did appear under the title he had chosen: Woods, Shore, Desert.

  Even before his time away from Gethsemani visiting New Mexico and California in May 1968, he had received a pressing invitation to attend a meeting of monastic superiors of the Far East in Bangkok, Thailand, in December. He presented the invitation to the abbot, who spent some time in consultation and discernment before responding. After several months of waiting and additional letters from people like Dom Jean Leclercq urging Merton to come, the abbot finally gave Father Louis permission to spend six months in the Far East, not only attending the meeting in Bangkok, but giving retreats at a couple of Cistercian monasteries in Indonesia and Hong Kong. Above all Merton was very interested in making contact with various Buddhist monasteries in India, especially the Tibetan Buddhists in exile at Dharamsala. He felt this would be an ideal time to learn from the wisdom of the East by actually meeting the monks in their own monasteries.

  Not having any recent experience in preparing for travel, Merton had much to learn about obtaining a passport, securing visas, getting vaccinations, and shopping for proper clothing for travel. He especially wanted a jacket with many pockets for his notebooks, address books, and film for his camera. He found it all challenging, and it seemed to revive his youthful spirits. He was like a child going to the circus. During his time of preparation for the trip to the Far East, he sought out contacts from various persons he knew. Dom Aelred Graham, for example, put Merton in touch with Harold Talbott, who in turn arranged for some meetings with the Dalai Lama. His Friend Amiya Chakravarty introduced him to some of his lama Friends in India and was actually present in India during Merton’s pilgrimage.

  Several weeks before his departure for Asia, he made a brief trip to Washington to meet with the people at the Indonesian embassy, where they discussed Java, mysticism, and what awaited him in the Far East. After Ron and Sally Seitz met his plane on the return flight, there was another dinner, this time at the Embassy Club; Merton then returned with Fr. John Loftus to St. Bonaventure Hall at Bellarmine College, where he spent the night with the Franciscan friars.

  His entry of August 26 about that evening is classic in his enthusiasm for one American ritual-football. The Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys and, as Merton comments, it was “damn good football.” Merton then waxes exuberant: “Football is one of the really valid and deep American rituals. It has a religious seriousness which American religion can never achieve. A comic, contemplative dynamism, a gratuity, a movement From play to play, a definitiveness that responds to some deep need, a religious need, a sense of meaning that is at once final and provisional: a substratum of dependable regularity, continuity, and an ever renewed variety, openness to new possibilities, new chances. It happens. It is done.” I was completely surprised by Merton’s eloquence on America’s favorite sport.

  As the days drew closer to the time of his departure, he was busy cleaning his hermitage, discarding old letters and papers, and sending books and manuscripts to the Merton Center at Bellarmine College for safekeeping. Fr.
Daniel Walsh, who taught philosophy at both Gethsemani and Bellarmine, was usually the one who delivered the books to the Merton Center. Before leaving he also gave Fr. Walsh a copy of an unpublished manuscript he had been revising, “The Inner Experience” it was eventually published in Cistercian Studies serially over a period of two years (1983–1984). He asked Fr. Walsh to read the manuscript while he was in the Far East and report back to him on his return as to the feasibility of its publication. In 1967 he had made it clear in his Trust document that it should not be published as a book, but could be shown to scholars. Although the manuscript was never published as a book, it is available in offprints from Cistercian Studies.

  September 9, Merton’s last full day at Gethsemani, began with the Eucharist in his hermitage chapel, with a couple of us monks and Philip Stark, who had helped out with the typing and layout of Merton’s poetry magazine, Monks Pond. He invited us to celebrate the Mass with him and join him in breakfast afterwards. It was a truly memorable occasion, made more so by the fact that he got his camera from the hermitage and began taking photographs of us in the woods in front of the hermitage. He was going to the East with great expectations, open to whatever he could learn as he visited the various monasteries.

  Before actually departing for Asia, however, he had some stops to make both in the States and in Alaska. He wanted to visit the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico again, and after a short visit to the Poor Clares in Chicago, he was on a flight to Alaska, where he had agreed to give a retreat to the priests and religious sisters in the Anchorage area. This was partly to help defray expenses of his trip, a factor he was always conscious of throughout his Asian trip. He wanted to act responsibly as a monk with a vow of poverty.

  As the journal moves back to the California coast following his time in Alaska, one senses his impatience to get moving to Asia, the real point of his journey. In his October 15 entry, Merton comments with poetic imagination as the plane lifts off the ground in San Francisco: “The moment of take-off was ecstatic. The dewy wing was suddenly covered with rivers of cold sweat running backward. The window wept jagged shining courses of tears. Joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way…” He then adds seriously: “May I not come hack without having settled the great affair. And found also the great compassion…” And finally: “I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body, where I have never been in this washable suit…” These passages poignantly show the intense excitement and sense of destiny that Merton experienced at this so-longed-for moment.

  After a brief stop in Honolulu, Merton was off for Bangkok, Thailand, finishing Hesse’s Siddhartha. October 17 and 18 were spent in Bangkok; October 19 he departed for a week in Calcutta. The monk from America found Calcutta shocking in its poverty, its beggars heart-rending, yet its people so beautiful. He met his friend Amiya Chakravarty on October 21 and together they visited the painter Jamini Roy. Merton was full of appreciation for the artist and his work. However, he was not totally without criticism of what he saw elsewhere; after witnessing a swami who reminded him of Groucho Marx’s manifest contempt for his competitors, Merton comments, not without irony: “Even his Kleenex is saffron!”

  The next stop for Merton was New Delhi (October 28–31), where he read Tucci and met Harold Talbott, who knew the Dalai Lama, made contacts for Merton, and was very helpful in preparing the American monk for what would be the high point of his time in Asia, his three audiences with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Harold Talbott accompanied Merton to Dharamsala, where he met more Tibetan Buddhists, especially Sonam Kazi and his wife and daughter. On November 4, Merton had his first audience with the Dalai Lama, which was a great experience for both of them. Merton returned on November 6 for a second audience, and on November 8 a third, which Merton says was in many ways the best. By then, Merton felt they knew one another better and were able to speak from the heart as friends. The Dalai Lama felt the same way.

  Madras was next on Merton’s itinerary (November 26–28); then Ceylon from November 29 to December 6, and finally Bangkok again on December 7. He spent that night in a hotel, but the next day went out to Red Cross headquarters on Silom Road, where the conference would be held for religious superiors of the Far East. There he met Dom Jean Leclercq, an old friend, who had been instrumental in arranging the invitation for Merton. Other Benedictines and Cistercians were already there awaiting the opening of the conference.

  On the day of his last entry in this journal, December 8, only two days before his death in a small cottage room on the outskirts of Bangkok, Merton wrote me what was his last letter, which concludes: “I think of you all on this Feast Day and with Christmas approaching I feel homesick for Gethsemani. But I hope to be at least in a monastery-Rawa Seneng (in Indonesia). Also I look forward to being at our monastery at Hong Kong, and may be seeing our three volunteers there (or is it two?). No more for the moment. Best love to all. Louie.”

  He wrote these lines in his room at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, just a few minutes before leaving for Red Cross headquarters on the outskirts of the city. By Chrisnnas he was, after all, back at Gethsemani, lying buried alongside the abbey church overlooking the woodland knobs that had become so familiar to him during his twenty-seven years of monastic life at Gethsemani.

  At about ten o’clock on the morning of December 10, we received an incredible cable from the American embassy in Bangkok. It said little more than that Thomas Merton had died. But how? And where? These agonizing questions remained unanswered for some hours. The abbot called me into his office at once, where I stayed for the next two hours, which seemed to us an eternity. Two hours of waiting and consoling one another and hoping against hope that it was all a terrible mistake. While we desperately tried to telephone the American embassy in Bangkok and the State Department in Washington for further clarification, the American embassy in Bangkok was trying to reach us by phone. About noon the call finally got through to us, and the tragic news was confirmed.

  We learned that death was caused by accidental electrocution at about two in the afternoon (Bangkok time) on December 10. He had delivered a paper entitled “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives” at ten o’clock that morning. It was received with considerable enthusiasm by the members of the conference, and all of them were looking forward to a discussion of the paper, with questions and answers, in the late afternoon. A group of the participants had lunch with Merton, after which they went to their respective rooms. He had told one of his companions that he felt rather tired and was looking forward to the siesta.

  Having read the medical and police reports as well as several eyewitness accounts that were sent to us from Bangkok, I have attempted to reconstruct the scenario of his death as follows: Merton returned to his cottage about one-thirty and proceeded to take a shower before retiring for a rest. While barefoot on the terrazzo floor, he apparently had reached for the large standing fan (to either turn it on or pull it closer to the bed) when he received the full 220 volts of direct current. (This is normal voltage for Bangkok.) He collapsed, and the large fan tumbled over on top of him. When he was discovered about an hour later by two of the monks who shared his cottage, the fan, still running, lay across his body. They could not get into the room at first because the door was bolted from the inside. One of them ran for help, and two of the abbots came immediately. They broke through the upper panel of the door, opened it, and entered. One of the abbots tried to remove the fan at once from the body, but though he wore shoes, he also received a slight electrical shock. Fortunately, someone rushed over to the outlet and pulled the cord from the socket. Later examination revealed defective wiring in the fan. A Korean prioress who was a distinguished medical doctor came to the scene. After examining the body, she pronounced him dead by electric shock.

  Almost a week later, after an attempt to have an autopsy performed that proved unsuccessful due to international red tape, his body was flown back to California (
ironically, by a U.S. Air Force jet from Vietnam). From there it was transferred to a commercial plane in Oakland and flown to Louisville, where it was met by the abbot and a group of monks with the local undertaker. The casket was opened at the funeral parlor in New Haven, where several of the monks identified the body. The casket was then sealed, never to be opened again.

  The body arrived at the abbey early on the afternoon of December 17. Services in the church began almost immediately with the chanting of the funeral liturgy by the monks and the many friends who came to pay their last respects to our Father Louis and the world’s Thomas Merton. At dusk under a light snowfall, his body was laid to rest in the monastic cemetery beneath a solitary cedar tree. A simple white cross marks his grave, no different from those of the rest of the monks who have been buried there during the past 150 years. May his ever searching spirit now rest in (God’s peace.

  PART I

  The Election of a New Abbot

  October 1967–May 1968

  October 18, 1967

  There was an eclipse of the moon about 4 to 5 this morning. The clouds cleared a little and I was able to see it begin. Then after I said Mass I went out and the eclipse was closer to full, the clouds had almost completely gone. The moon was beautiful, dimly red, like a globe of almost transparent amber, with a shapeless foetus of darkness curled in the midst of it. It hung there between two tall pines, silent, unexplained, small, with a modest suggestion of bloodiness, an omen without fierceness and without comment, pure.