Thomas Merton and Confucian Rites: 'The Fig Leaf for the Paradise Condition'

As it has been well-documented, in the last decade of his life, Thomas Merton tirelessly pointed directly to the hidden potential of ancient asian traditions. The christian monk had ~ abiding love affair with Asia and saw in the Asian a repository of an older wisdom which he felt the West lacked. Yet, however optimistically he may have felt about Asia and her hallowed past, Merton was never blind to her contemporary problems nor the role that he felt a revitalized Christianity might play in future cultural revivals in the East as the following passage from a letter to a chinese priest in California would clearly indicate: ... I fully realize the complexity of the problem today. The Asians have renounced Asia. They want to be western, sometimes they are frantic about being western . . . They feel that there have been centuries of inertia and stagnation, and there is a reaction against the humiliations and misunderstandings of colonialism, calling for a defeat of the west at its own technological game. All this is dangerous but inevitable. Christianity of course has a crucial part to play in saving all that is valuable in the east as well as in the west. (Road to Joy, 323)