ENLIGHTENMENT/SATORI

Song for Nobody

A yellow flower

(Light and spirit)

Sings by itself

For nobody.

A golden spirit

(Light and emptiness)

Sings without a word

By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun

In whose dark eye

Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color

And no thought:

O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven

Sings by itself

A song to nobody.

(CP 337–38)

From the moment a man is immersed in confusion and carried away by the passions and eccentricities of a bewildered and not always upright society, he has little hope of finding himself merely by shutting his eyes and following the Tao. The Tao may be within him, but he is completely out of touch with it, just as he is out of touch with his own inmost self. Recovery of the Tao is impossible without a complete transformation, a change of heart, which Christianity would call metanoia. Zen . . . envisaged this problem, and studied at how to arrive at satori, or the explosive rediscovery of the hidden and lost reality within us.

(MZM 50)

Buddhism does not seek primarily to understand or to “believe in” the enlightenment of Buddha as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that enlightenment experience.

(ZBA 36)

If you are attached to worldly things you are not a religious man.

If you are attached to appearances you cannot meditate.

If you are attached to your own soul you cannot have bodhicitta.

If you are attached to doctrines you cannot reach the highest attainment.

(AJ 120–21)

When we are empty we become capable of fullness (which has never been absent from us).

(ZBA 137)

In Buddhism . . . the highest development of consciousness is that by which the individual ego is completely emptied and becomes identified with the enlightened Buddha, or rather finds itself to be in reality the enlightened Buddha mind. Nirvana is not the consciousness of an ego that is aware of itself as having crossed over to “the other shore” . . . but the Absolute Ground–Consciousness of the Void, in which there are no shores. Thus the Buddhist enters into the self-emptying and enlightenment of Buddha as the Christian enters into the self-emptying (crucifixion) and glorification (resurrection and ascension) of Christ. The chief difference between the two is that the former is existential and ontological, the latter is theological and personal. But “person” here must be distinguished from “the individual empirical ego.”

(ZBA 76)

Zen is not our awareness, but Being’s awareness of itself in us.

(MZM 17, italics Merton’s)

Personally I do not think satori is impossible for a Christian any more than it is for a Buddhist. In either case, one goes in a certain sense beyond all categories, religious or otherwise.

(HGL 443)

The Zen insight is the awareness of full spiritual reality, and therefore the realization of the emptiness of all limited or particularized realities.

(MZM 17)

As the Buddhists say, Nirvana is found in the midst of the world around us, and truth is not somewhere else. To be here and now where we are in our “suchness” is to be in Nirvana.

(ZBA 87, italics Merton’s)

Nirvana is beyond experience. Yet it is also the “highest experience” if we see it as a liberation from merely psychological limitations. The words “experience of love” must not be understood in terms of emotional fulfillment . . . but of full realization, total awakening — a complete realization of love not merely as the emotion of a feeling subject but as the wide openness of Being itself, the realization that Pure Being is Infinite Giving, or that Absolute Emptiness is Absolute Compassion.

(ZBA 86, italics Merton’s)

Nirvana: perfect awareness and perfect compassion. Nirvana is the wisdom of perfect love grounded in itself and shining through everything, meeting with no opposition.

(ZBA 84, italics Merton’s)

If you once penetrate by detachment and purity of heart to the inner secret of the ground of your ordinary experience, you attain to a liberty that nobody can touch.

(AJ 342)

Once we live in awareness of the cosmic dance and move in time with the Dancer, our life attains its true dimension.

(AJ 350)