Zen and the Birds of Appetite

by Thomas Merton

Book Overview

"Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite--one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing, ' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081120104X
• ISBN13: 9780811201049
• Release Date: January 1968
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book. Highly recommended to everyone.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite is a book that should shared and reread throughout everyone’s life. Keep it on my nightstand. 5 Stars Thomas Merton was a genius.

A little book with lots of meaning.

There is something refreshing about this little book. The title will seem a bit misleading - if expecting to find an account of Zen per se - minus the Christian based reflections of the author. However, Merton is known well enough - and these essays show him at his best. The dialogue between D.T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton is fruitful. Christianity and Buddhism have often been presented as antithetical, working from bases too different - to afford dialogue. These essays challenge that perception, without falling into vague generalisations. If anything, recent years have seen a 'hardening of the orthodoxies' - a retreat into numbingly conservative attitudes. Happily, the essays in this book evoke a more open-ended perspective. There is something arrogant and unspiritual about the wish to deny the value of dialogue between spiritual traditions. Where the 'birds of appetite' wheel and prey, the truth has fallen from sight - be it Christian 'innocence' or the 'fundamental face' of Zen. We can't deny the merits of a Christian who endeavoured, with a whole heart, to take stock of what goes on in the other World religions. Similarly, we can't look badly upon a Buddhist, who was large-hearted enough to share the workings of the Christian mind and spirit. Merton's encounter with Buddhism exerted a seminal influence upon his whole life-thought. Suzuki's encounter with Christianity - chiefly, through Eckhart, exerted a similar influence (the Eckhartian equation 0=infinity -found its way into Suzuki's hand-written notes appended to the Mastsugaoka Zen Bunka ed of the Rinzai Roku). Let's hope that this new century of ours witnesses more dialogues in this vein.

Historically Significant

The most important part of this book is the debate between Merton and Suzuki. Merton falls short of establishing his theories in respect to the Desert Father's similarity to Zen Masters, Suzuki brilliantly counterpoints and illustrates the differences.Merton shows incredible integrity in publishing a debate he clearly loses.

a soul in the form of art...

Merton quotes D.T. Suzuki: "Zen always aims at grasping the central fact of life, which can never be brought to the dissecting table of the intellect"; and "Zen must be seized with bare hands, with no gloves on." No wonder Merton's reverence for Zen, for these are his own ideas of Christian monasticism. With his illuminating mind in full stride, and his interventions keen as crystal, if he went no deeper than to make an apparent synthesis, it would be enough. But Merton strives for farther fields, finds and feeds them, and not surprisingly leaves them flourishing. He leaps wholly into a personal embodiment of Zen and its spiritual complexities, and ends restoring his own monastic experience. The essay 'Zen in Japanese Art' pays loving homage to the classic spirit of Daisetz Suzuki's seminal 'Zen and Japanese Culture', but lives and breathes on its own. In its simple three and a half pages, Merton weaves the aesthetic ideas of Zen philosopher Kitaro Nishida, makes the case that Zen and Zen art are the exact opposite of Sartre's 'pessimistic nihilism,' and in a single amazing paragraph toward the end, beautifully finds in the formal "tea ceremony" a respect and harmony consistent with the simplicity of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture at Fontenay or Le Thoronet. But no idle intellectual excursions invade here; again and again Merton draws everything back to the Christ sought in the apophatic tradition with a faithfulness that exhudes an almost excruciating surfeit of spiritual understanding. Finding St Gregory's "No one gets so much of God as the man who is thoroughly dead" 'lying next' to Bunan Zenji's "While alive, be dead, thoroughly dead-- All is good then, whatever you may do", Merton turns a light on centuries of Christian ascetic experience with one true, bold stroke. Birds of Appetite is strewn with page after page not of ideas only, but wisdom. He responds to D.T. Suzuki's exquisite essay 'Innocence and Knowledge' (included in the book) with 'The Recovery of Paradise', arguing that the Desert Fathers sought the emptiness and innocence of Adam and Eve in Eden, invoking along the way John of the Cross, and making one of Dostoevsky's "saints," the Staretz Zosima, serve as antagonist throughout the essay. Merton notes "there is a dimension where the bottom drops out of the world of factuality and of the ordinary," an observation no doubt honed in the solitude of the hermitage, up the mountain above Gethsemane Abbey. He adds, "it might be good to open our eyes and see." I'm recommending a huge little book, meticulously published by New Directions with its customary attentiveness to shadow and light, inside and out. See for yourself.

Excellent introduction to Zen for the Western reader.

Thomas Merton, a trappist monk who specializes in eastern philosophy and religion, writes a cogent, understandable, and compelling work on the nature of Zen. Zen, of course, is a difficult concept to pin down, but Merton makes it accessible to the western reader. If you have a critical eye, a moderate grounding in the Western classical tradition, and an interest in Zen, this book is for you.