Thomas Merton's Appreciation of Bhagavad Gita

VIEWPOINT: Fight or Flight: Thomas Merton and the Bhagavad Gītā

Steven J. Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa) Editor, Journal of Vaishnava Studies

TWO commemorative events of landmark stature inspired the essay you are about to read: First, the year 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s abrupt departure from our material vision. Second, 2018 is also the semicentennial celebration of a consequential publication: It was in 1968 that His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedānta Swami Prabhupāda released his unprecedentedly influential Bhagavad-gītā As It Is. As we shall see, the trailblazing Western visionary, Merton, and this particular edition of the Gītā engaged in productive conversation with each other.I joined that prodigious conversation, too, if from a distance and a few years later, not only as a disciple of Śrīla Prabhupāda and as an avid reader of his Bhagavad-gītā, but as a fan of Thomas Merton (1915-1968). For the uninitiated, Merton was a well-known Trappist monk, social activist, and author of well over 70 books. His profound insights on nonviolence and nonsectarian spirituality were particularly alluring. But it was reading Merton’s bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), that transformed me from an admirer to an aficionado. From that time I knew that I would follow Merton’s writings as a fan for life.The famed Christian writer articulated something I intuitively knew: that there were untapped truths in the East, that there was something “out there” that could inform something “in here.” That is to say, we both felt that although we were children of the Occident, our fate lay in the Orient, and that our dialogue with sages of the East was indispensable to understanding ultimate reality. In the words of author Alan Altany: “The dialogue was not a luxury, but a necessity. For Merton, if the West were to continue to ignore ‘the spiritual heritage of the East,’ it would ‘hasten the tragedy that threatens man and his civilizations.’”Continue reading...