Buddhism and Catholicism - the Ongoing Dialogue with Thomas Merton
This is a talk I gave at the House of Lords last week.
best wishes
Peter
Buddhist Responses to Nostra Aetate, House of Lords, October 2026
Prof. Peter Tyler
Do we live in a new Buddhist age? Has the era of the Buddha returned? I ask this as we witness the rise of Buddhist retreats and the successful ‘spreading of the Dharma’ by high profile and charismatic figures such as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese Peace Activist and sage Thich Nhat Hahn. And that’s before we get on to mindfulness, originally derived from Buddhism by the American psychologist Jon Kabat Zinn, it has now spread to almost universal acclaim as a panacea to so many medical, social and psychological ills.
There is no doubt that ‘something is afoot’ and that, as the Gospels say ‘we must watch the signs of the times’. One of the foremost Christian figures of our times who did just that was the American Cistercian monk and author Thomas Merton who wrote in 1968: ‘It is quite possible that the language and metaphysical assumptions of the classic view are out of reach of many modern people. It is quite plausible to assert that the old Hellenic categories are indeed worn out, and that Platonizing thought, even revivified with shots in the arm from Yoga and Zen, will not quite serve in the modern world’ (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p.30, hereafter ZBA). Radical revolutionary though he was Merton was not alone in recognising the challenge of Eastern systems of religion such as Buddhism to Western categories which had been so important to the rise of Christianity. There is no doubt that early Christianity was shaped by the cradle and early schooling it received in the surrounding Hellenic culture – may it be then that in ‘our own times’, the opening words of Nostra Aetate (hereafter NA), a new challenge is therefore facing Christianity? This important declaration, as we have seen, is one of the first attempts by the Catholic Church (and indeed one of the first attempts by Christianity) to face this new ‘sign of the times’ head-on as it tries to offer an initial pointer as to how Christianity responds to this new situation.
We are guests of the Dialogue Society this evening and there is no doubt that Dialogue is central to what we doing here tonight in this venerable palace. However, in respect to those ways of life that are called ‘Buddhist’ I think we are talking about something perhaps deeper than ‘dialogue’. The great Oxford scholar of religions R C Zaehner, whose own 50th anniversary we recently celebrated, makes a distinction between what he called the three ‘prophetic’ religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (what are sometimes nowadays called the ‘Abrahamic’ religions) and the religions of Eastern origin such as Buddhism and Hinduism (again, what are sometimes called Dharmic or Wisdom religions). He also points out that the engagement of, say, Christianity with each will be of a different order, nature, or perhaps better ‘flavour’. Groundbreaking though it undoubtably is, one of the weaknesses of NA is that it tends to gloss over the essential differences of approach between these different schools of faith. Of the three great insights of Buddhism - duḥkha/dukkha, the nature of suffering, anitya/anicca, the nature of impermanence and anātman/anattā the nature of ‘non-self’, NA acknowledges and comments on the first two but, strangely, makes no mention of the third. By emphasising the importance of ‘the moral, spiritual, social and cultural values’ of the other religions NA, perhaps rightly, does not dwell on the differences that divide the religions, especially that expressed by anattā, the instability and unknowing that lies at the heart of our selves. I say ‘perhaps rightly’ as must there by necessity be a limit to the extent of the dialogue possible between faiths? – we shall return to that question shortly.
In this respect I rely on the teachings and writings of one of my mentors the Indian Carmelite Thomas Kochumuttom CMI. A Christian scholar very much imbued with the spirit of NA and the post-Conciliar movement in the Catholic Church. He argues for the distinctive nature of the religions, and that dialogue arises from difference:
Genuine dialogue does not mean that one does not have anything to state in disagreement with the partners. Inter-religious dialogue basically being a sharing of faith, it should be taken for granted that the partners’ faith-convictions can be different or even opposed to one another, which then are made to interact in a spirit of openness and respect in the hope of arriving at a better understanding and deeper appreciation of one another. (Christian Life Amidst Many Religions, p. 25)
In this respect Fr Thomas accords with the 2001 notification issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the essence of interfaith dialogue:
It is consistent with Catholic doctrine to hold that the seeds of truth and goodness that exist in other religions are a certain participation in truths contained in the revelation of or in Jesus Christ. (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 2001:2.4)
The dialogue of religions thus becomes a manifestation of ‘the depth of the Divine Mystery itself’ (CL: 34/5) and how humans have responded to that mystery for thousands of years. This then is the spirit with which Fr Thomas approaches the dialogue (one where ‘religious pluralism needs to be welcomed, with thankfulness’) and it is the spirit which I hope will prevail in this evening’s conversations.
So, to finish these reflections I say with Thomas Merton:
‘What then? Is there some new possibility, some other opening for the Christian consciousness today?' (ZBA, p. 30)
Merton in his response to his own question suggested that Christians today can learn three essential points about their own Christianity from their engagement with Buddhists:
1. First, what the Buddhists call ‘the saṅgha/saṃgha’, the ‘need for community, for a genuine relationship of authentic love with our fellow human beings… this will also imply a deep, in fact completely radical, seriousness in approaching those critical problems which threaten our very survival as a species on earth -war, conflict, hunger, economic and political injustice’ (ZBA 30) to which we can also add another cause close to Merton’s heart – environmental desecration and injustice. This was written half a century ago but it is as true and relevant then as it is today. By engaging with other faiths – Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Muslim, we live from our simple ‘common humanity’. As NA rightly stresses, this must surely first and foremost, our dealings with ‘the other’.
In Dialogue and Mission of 1984 and Dialogue and Proclamation of 1991 the Vatican opened up the dialogue of NA to stress four levels of dialogue with which we engage with other religions: as well as the dialogue of theological exchange, with which we are engaged here it also emphasises the dialogue of life and the dialogue of action which would include searching for common goals for the common good and working towards reaching those common goals. By pledging tonight, here and now, to work together to alleviate the suffering of our fellow people and living creatures through joint climate, environmental, social and peace action we are then indeed fulfilling the promises of NA.
2. The second area that Merton stresses that arises from the dialogue with Buddhism is what he calls ‘the need for an adequate understanding of our everyday self in ordinary life’. As I pointed out at the beginning it is as though the contemporary seeker needs a new way to structure their engagement with the source of meaning that is not couched in the transcendent life-denying metaphysics of an earlier age. Christianity has indeed always had that deeply rooted sense of being in the here and now. But by listening to our Buddhist friends we can listen most carefully to the murmur of the stream of life within which we are all immersed on a day-to-day basis – whether it is commuting to work, cooking a meal or spending time with loved ones (or the sweeping of leaves mentioned by Professor Barnes just now). Merton stressed that ‘we need to find ultimate sense here and now in the ordinary humble tasks and human problems of every day’. In this respect I have taken in recent talks to quoting Pope Leo’s Magnificent encyclical Magnificans Humanitas where he quotes with approval the words of J.R.R. Tolkein:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. (Magnificans Humanitas, 213)
3. The final area that Merton emphasises, and here I shall end, is the need ‘for a whole and integral experience of our own self on all its levels, bodily as well as imaginative, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. There is no place for the cultivation of one part of human consciousness, one aspect of human experience, at the expense of others’. Here again I refer back to Magnificans Humanitas where Pope Leo, in some of the most penetrating analysis of recent times lays bear our ‘cognitive’ and ‘computational’ culture that emphasises this one small element of our humanity at the expense of all the others. Again, in terms of the Dialogue of Religious Experience as outlined by ‘Dialogue and Mission’, the Buddhist experience of the instability of self allows them to see the differing layers that go to make human personality. Not focussed on one, e.g. the cognitive, at the expense of others. Our dialogue of experience must therefore be one that takes the whole self into account – body, heart, mind and spirit as we emphasise the cultural, aesthetic and artistic dialogue that unites us in our mutual searches.
So perhaps NA is right after all – like the Buddha himself it does not enumerate in detail the theological differences that lie between our faiths but it emphasises the enormous possibilities for dialogue that occur when we take each other ‘in the here and now’ in our common humanity. As the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales said in their beautiful 2010 document, we live together ‘with friends and strangers’ as we work towards attaining both a deeper understanding of our fellow humans and a deeper respect for the beautiful planet on which we reside.
Thank you very much for your attention.
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