Thoughts on Zen by the Reverend Thomas Merton (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

Believing in the equality of all religions, Thomas Merton became deeply interested Eastern traditions such as Zen Buddhism in the last years of his life. He also held lively discourses with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Today the Thomas Merton Center in Kentucky, the International Thomas Merton Society, and others continue to study the life and works of the wise Reverend. We now continue with excerpts from Thomas Merton’s chapter on Zen from his book “Thoughts on the East.” “Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, tans-religious, transformed consciousness. It is therefore in a sense ‘void.’ And in Zen enlightenment, the discovery of the ‘original face before you were born’ is the discovery not that one sees Buddha but that one is Buddha and that Buddha is not what the images in the temple had led one to expect: for there is no longer any image, and consequently nothing to see, no one to see it, and a Void in which no image is even conceivable.”