Thomas Merton and the Synergy of Christianity and Buddhism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I had a very interesting conversation with a good friend recently. My friend is a lifelong Catholic who has attracted more recently to evangelical faiths\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/thomas-merton-and-synergy-of.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thomas Merton and the Synergy of Christianity and Buddhism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I had a very interesting conversation with a good friend recently. 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{"id":260,"date":"2014-12-22T10:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T10:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/thomas-merton-and-the-synergy-of-christianity-and-buddhism.html"},"modified":"2015-04-29T20:03:57","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T01:03:57","slug":"thomas-merton-and-synergy-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/12\/thomas-merton-and-synergy-of.html","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Merton and the Synergy of Christianity and Buddhism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My friend is more on the fundamentalist spectrum of things, which is okay \u2013 unlike many progressive Christians, I don\u2019t think fundamentalism is completely out of bounds. I told my friend about the parallels between Buddhism<\/a> and Christianity, and he began to say he was \u201cworried\u201d that Merton was trying to equivocate the two faiths when Christianity is the \u201cultimate truth.\u201d As a whole, however, my friend was receptive and was very interested in the idea that Buddhism, founded in a much different part of the world at a much different time, formed very similar theological practices and outlooks.<\/p>\n

In Merton\u2019s last address, in Bangkok, Thailand, he said that as Western Christians who have an \u201copenness with Buddhism, with Hinduism and with great Asian traditions, we learn more about the potentiality of our own traditions because they have gone from the natural point of view so much deeper in to this than we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Merton met with the Dalai Lama in the late 1950s, His Holiness was the subject of vicious international bullying and harassment \u2013 as Merton put it in his last address, the Dalai Lama \u201cmade every effort to coexist with the Chinese government and he failed.\u201d He had been expelled from his own country, Tibet, and met with the most baseless forms of disrespect from Chinese politicians. Much of Western notions of Buddhism may have been shaped around that experience.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"