Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions Paperbook)

Top positive review

There is an innocence, almost a naivete, to this book that helps convey the ineffable essence of the mystical experience

Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2018

A difficult but intriguing book, by a famously open minded explorer of Christianity and the Eastern way of finding "salvation" in the here and now, via Zen meditation. Thomas Merton's prose is tangled, so the book is harder to read than it needed to be, however, discussions of mysticism both East and West are notoriously hard to follow and understand.

What comes through most clearly is Thomas Merton himself: his sincerity, gentleness and genuine desire to understand, and to share that understanding, of the nature of this peculiar experience we call "life." There is an innocence, almost a naivete, to this book that helps convey the ineffable essence of the mystical experience, and its life consequences for those struck by its lightning.

9 people found this helpful

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inch worm

Courageous and insightful

Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2016

Thomas Merton here takes on the difficult task of finding common ground between the tenets of Zen Buddhism and the Christian monastic tradition. Speaking personally as a practising Zen Buddhist I found it more illuminating with regard the similarities of the Christian tradition. I
learnt a good deal about the ins and outs of what Merton would probably not see as mysticism but nevertheless the aspects of
Christian worship which is often kept from the lay people and is more profound fare for the consumption of the monks. This is an honest book and more of such searching for common ground between the religions can only be a good thing in my view.

I feel that the penetration of the depths of Zen Buddhism and in particular the purpose behind much of the deliberately illogical and obtuse aspects of it was only patchily understood but nevertheless it is a rewarding and interesting read if a little wordy and intellectual.

13 people found this helpful

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From the United States

James Kenney

There is an innocence, almost a naivete, to this book that helps convey the ineffable essence of the mystical experience

Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2018

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9 people found this helpful

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heypancho

Are Christianity and Zen Incompatible?

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2014

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If one is speaking of Christianity and Zen Buddhism at the core, Merton says, yes, they are incompatible. Buddhism would deny that there is value in the personality, that it must be deconstructed and absorbed into the One, while Christianity says the purpose of the Incarnation was to take down only what was false in man and give new life to his original design, his core being. Christian unity with God is not personal dissolution but the removal of all barriers between knowing and being known. (To be fair, not all Zen masters agree with the above classical Buddhist outlook-- D.T. Suzuki, for example.)

When separated from Buddhism and seen as a discipline and a way of perceiving, Zen can be extremely useful to anyone who is seeking to know God and the true soul/spirit beneath the false self or the "old man", whichever you prefer. The world we live in (and the self that perceives it) really is one of pretense and illusion-- even in religion-- and the more tools we have to remove the masks and facades, the better. Merton's book is very helpful in removing some common fears and misconceptions about using these tools, and in increasing communication between people and cultures who use different words to describe a common goal.

22 people found this helpful

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Benjamin Vineyard

How does Merton connect Zen (distinct from Buddhism) to the story of Jesus?

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2013

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Zen and the Birds of Appetite (Thomas Merton)
April 8, 2013
Book Reaction

Initial Question:
How does Merton connect Zen (distinct from Buddhism) to the story of Jesus? What's "broken" and how does Merton suggest redemption and repair?

Musings Influenced by the Book:
Zen is not a thing; it's more of an absence. Within the Christian experience, it is the absence of resistance to Christ living in us and through us. Zen is not an obedience, but an alive-ness to what is, an absence of the question - it simply is.

Stripped of its Buddhist story, Zen as a reality fits within the Christian experience. Zen is the experienced reality of St. Paul's phrase, "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." The ancient Christians referred to this as "union" with God - an expression of life that lived from the core of the human person and seen from within as an inability to discern the origin of action: was it God or me who did this? This blur, this lack of question, and this free expression of what is (without resistance) is living "Zen."

My favorite quote:
"...liberation from his inordinate self-consciousness, his monumental self-awareness, his obsession with self-affirmation, so that he may enjoy the freedom from concern that goes with being simply what he is and accepting things as they are in order to work with them as he can." *Zen and the Birds of Appetite* p. 31

The general take away:
Awakening is the goal. This is something Christians have always talked about. The Christian sense of awakening differs from the traditional Buddhist story with regards to what one awakens to.

For the Christian, awakening is coming to the sense of the Father's divine love and present care and seeing all things that would flounder that reality purge away. It is in the life of Christ living in us that we come to see this love and have it live through us.

For the Buddhist, the awakening is more of a coming to see that all things are life and that there is no individual "me" - I am the Life, you are the Life, and all things that exist are life in this moment.

23 people found this helpful

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inch worm

Courageous and insightful

Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2016

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13 people found this helpful

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Bro. John

An Important Collection

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2013

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This is a collection of essays published over the years dealing with Thomas Merton's great interest in Eastern Religion, especially Buddhism and more precisely Zen Buddhism. Merton had perhaps one of the clearest understanding of Zen, and in the ways which it came close to touching western mysticism in some of the Rhenish Mystics (Ekhart and Ruysbroek) and even St. John of the Cross. The final Essay is a dialogue between Merton and the great Japanese Zen Master D. T. Suzuki, a treasure of a document. Two of the greatest minds of the twentieth century coming together from totally different cultures and meeting in the harmonious atmosphere as two monks having tea together. A wonderful read.

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LuelCanyon

a soul in the form of art...

Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2002

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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.

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Frankie Vinny

No Zen meditations here! (But I liked it)

Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2013

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I was hoping for short, Zen-like stories or meditations from Thomas Merton. But this book was far from such genre. In fact, it is a profound theological work aligning or at least comparing Zen and Christian philosophical elements. The goal was to open a dialogue between East and West. Goal met. Father Merton's intellectual ability and dominion of language are needless to say mesmerizing. He taught me Zen and Christianity way beyond superficial, popular, and even incorrect generalizations. A good audience for this work might be college or graduate students with an understending of philosophy and theology. Merton's message is inclusive, refreshingly open-minded, positive, and in a way, "eclectically orthodox". This book is intellectually stimulating, but is no brain candy: be ready to think.

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