31 Mirza Husayn Ali Nuri, known as Baha’u’llah (“the Spendor of God”), was the founder of the Baha’i religion. He became leader of the sect in 1863 by absorbing what remained of the Babist movement (a religious sect founded in Persia in 1844 by Mirza Ali Mohammed ibn-Radhik, who took the name Bab-ud-Din, or “Gate of Faith”). The Baha’i faith teaches the spiritual unity of all persons, is dedicated to universal peace, and contains certain elements of Oriental mysticism.
32 The book Menon was reading about him is His Majesty King Rama the Fourth Mongkut, edited by Phra Sasanasobhon, published in Bangkok in 1968 in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the holy monarch’s death.
33 Raj. in Hindi, means “reign,” “role,” or “kingdom.” It is used here to refer to the “British Raj,” the period of British imperial role in India.
34 Humayun (1508–56) was one of the great Mogul emperors of India. He reigned from 1530 and made his capital at Delhi.
35 Lhasa is the chief city of Tibet and a sacred Buddhist site because the Potala palace, located there, was the residence of the Dalai Lamas. It is near the Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River at an altitude of 11,800 feet.
36 Jama (sometimes Jami) Masjid, begun in 1644 and completed in 1658, is one of the most important Mogul mosques of Delhi. Built of red sandstone and white marble, it is architecturally notable for its two tall minarets.
37 Anthony Quainton, at the time of Merton’s visit, was a specialist in the affairs of the kingdom of Bhutan, which is bounded by Sikkim, Tibet, Assam, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), at the American Consulate in Calcutta.
38 Padma Sambhava, known as the “Great Guru,” was invited to Tibet about A.D. 747 by King Thi-Strong-Detsan and is considered the founder of the Tibetan school of Nyingmapa Buddhism.
39 Dom Henri Le Saux was known also by his Hindu name, Swami Abhishiktananda. Merton had hoped to visit him while in India, but was unable to make connections. Le Saux has since that time died. Merton had in his library a copy of Ermites du Succidananda[Hermites of Succidananda] by Henri Le Saux and Jules Monchanin.
40 E. Gene Smith, one of the leading Tibetanists among Western scholars, is an American who studied at Leiden University in Holland and under Lama Deshung Rinpoche at Seattle University. He had first corresponded with Merton when Smith was living in Seattle.
41 Sonam T. Kazi, born into one of Sikkim’s leading feudal families, had lived in Tibet for many years prior to the Chinese takeover. As a young man, he attended the Scottish Mission College in Kalimpong and St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, but his most extended study was under several of the Nyingmapa Buddhist masters in Tibet, from whom he received advanced meditational and spiritual instruction qualifying him to become himself a teacher of Tanrric Buddhism.
42 Theravada monks do not eat after noon.
43 Nagarjuna, a South Indian who lived probably in the second or third century A.D., was converted to Buddhism and became one of the founders of the Madhyamika, or “Middle Path,” sect of Buddhism.
44 Santi Deva (691–743), the son of a king, renounced his inheritance to become a Buddhist monk. After Nagarjuna, he was probably the most important philosopher of the Madhyamika school of Mahayana Buddhism.
45 In Hindu mythology Hanuman is a monkey god, the son of the wind and a monkey nymph. In the Rilmayana he leads the monkey hosts that assist Rama, the hero.
46 From Marco Pallis, “Considerations on Tantric Spirituality,” in The Bulletin of Tibetology (Gangtok, Sikkim: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology), vol. 2, no. 2 (August 1965).
47 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) was one of the great intercultural scholars of our time who, in his many books and lectures, inrerpreted Zen Buddhism to the West and Christianity to the East. Merton went to New York to meet Suzuki when he was at Columbia in 1964, and they corresponded frequently before and after.
48 Vaccha(gotta) was a wandering ascetic who recognized the uniqueness of the Buddha and whose discussions with him, as recorded in several of the earliest texts, present some of the most important points of the Buddha’s doctrine.
49 Radha, in Hindu mythology, was leader of the gopis, cowherdesses of Vrindavana, and was the god Krishna’s favorite love. As such, over the centuries she and their relationship became the subject of countless songs, poems, and paintings.
50 Edward C. Dimock, Jr., and Denise Levertov, In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (London: Cape, [968).
51 Mara is the tempter, a spirit of evil who tried to divert the Buddha from his meditation on the path of truth.
52 For this and the following quotes see Marco Pallis, “Is There Room for ‘Grace’ in Buddhism?” in Studies in Comparative Religion, August 1968, Pates Manor, Bedfont, Middlesex, England.
53 “Temps vierge,” French, literally, “virginal time.” See Merton’s Conjectures of” Guilty Bysumder (p. 17 of the original Doubleday edition) for his use of the phrase point vierge to describe “the first chirps of the waking birds” at dawn.
54 Credited with the authorship of a number of treatises that fonn the basis for the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism, Maitreya, whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for “friendly,” is the bodhisattva expected to appear as another Buddha five thousand years after the death of Gautama, the historical Buddha.
55 Before the Chinese takeover of Tibet and his flight to India, this lama had been the medium for a spirit in a temple at Gadong, a small town west of Lhasa, and was frequently consulted by the leaders of the theocratic government of Tibet.
56 The Buddha, as quoted in the Dalai Lama’s pamphlet An Introduction to Buddhism (New Delhi: Tibet House, 1965), 8.
57 A free translation by Sonam Kazi of the poem by Chobgye Thicchen Rinpoche dedicated to Thomas Merton during his visit in Dharamsala.
58 St. Cyprian, De Mortalitate, Reading V; Second Nocturne, Octave of All Saints (November 8) in the Autumn Cistercian Breviary, which Merton had with him on his Asian journey; he stopped at various times during the day and night to pray the (canonical) Office.
59 A follower of the “messiah” Jagad-Bondhu, M. B. Bramachari was a monk from Calcutta whom Merton’s Columbia classmate Seymour Freedgood had befriended when Bramachari came to the United States in the early 1930s. Merton wrote a personal tribute to Bramachari for a festschrift honoring him in October 1964, which was probably published in India. A typescript of the tribute is in the Merton archives at Bellarmine College, Louisville, Kentucky.
60 Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron is a French university professor and influential political journalist.
61 Merton is playing here on Windermere, largest of the lakes in the Lake District of England, where Wordsworth spent nearly sixty years of his life and which so many other notable English poets celebrated in their poetry.
62 Fr. Richard Sherburne, SJ., was at this time preparing a doctoral dissertation on an eleventh-century Indian source of later Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) meditational practice at Seattle University. When he met Merton in Darjeeling, he was studying Sanskrit and Tibetan in preparation for his work in Buddhist studies.
63 Fr. Maurice Stanford, SJ., a Canadian who had been an educator for many years in the Darjeeling district, at the time of Merton’s visit was headmaster of St. Joseph’s College in North Point.
64 Fr. Vincent Curmi, SJ., a French-Canadian Jesuit, pastor of Our Lady of Snows Church near North Point at the time of Merton’s visit, had made a Nepali-language liturgy for his parishioners.
65 Sangay is Tibetan for “Buddha.” Dorje is the Tibetan equivalent of the Sanskrit vajra-“adamantine” or “diamond,” hence, “pure and indestructible.” Thus, the tenn is an honorific accorded only to the most saintly or learned lamas.
66 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”
67 From Anaïs Nin’s “The All-Seeing,” in Under a Glass Bell (New York: Dutton, 1948).
> 68 Sensation Time at the Home was a small collection of Merton’s last shorter poems, which were not published separately, but were included as a section of The Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1977).
69 Actually, the chapter (chap. 6) in Conze’s Buddhist Thought in [ndill is entitled “The Cultivation of the Social Emotions.” The discussion of maitri (“friendliness”) begins near the top of p. 82 in the Ann Arbor paperback edition.
70 See D. H. Lawrence’s Twiligt in Italy (New York: Viking, Compass Book.s. 1962),6.
71 Anzacs is an acronym for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the colloquial name for the soldiers from these countries who served in World War II.
72 From Pierre Emmanuel’s “La. Loi d’exode,” preface to De l’esthetique à la mystique by Jules Monchanin (Paris: Casterman, 1967), 7–8.
73 The Time-Lift Bible did not materialize, but Merton’s contribution to it, a long essay, was published as a book called Opening the Bible (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970).
74 While some of the Naxalites may have been “Maoist Communists,” as someone evidently characterized them to Merton, it does not appear certain that all of them were Communist organized.
75 Dr. V. Raghavan, professor emeritus of Sanskrit at the University of Madras, is one of the world’s most eminent Sanskritists. Perhaps his most useful contribution for the general public was his The Indian Heritage: An Anthology of Sankrit Literature (Bangalore: Indian Institute of Culture, 1956).
76 See Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Men,” in Dialectics of Nature, translated by Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers. 1940), 279, 282.
77 Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) is one of the great Hindu saints and teachers of modern times in India. He has been accorded the title of “Bhagavan” by popular devotion, i.e., one of the supreme sages who are recognized as being “one with God.”
78 Source not yet identified.
79 From Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of Zeilon (London, 1681; reissued, Colombo, 1958).
80 Merion had had a letter of introduction to Victor Stier from their mutual friend, W. H. Ferry.
81 Dambulla is one of the most important archaeological sites in Ceylon, about forty-five miles north of Kandy; it is an enonnous black rock in which are five cave-temples with magnificent carvings dating to about the first century B.C. Polonnaruwa is an ancient ruined city in central Ceylon. It became a royal residence for the Sinhalese kings from the eighth to the twelfth centuries.
82 Ananda was the Buddha’s favorite disciple. He was a cousin of the Buddha’s and his personal attendant for the last twenty-five years of his life. Ananda is credited with having persuaded the Buddha to permit the admission of women into his order.
83 This article by Merton was included in Thomas Merton on Peace, with a foreword by Gordon C. Zahn, later revised and titled The Nonviolmt Alternative (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), 234–47.
84 Novalis, as quoted with approval by Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
85 Nathanael West. Miss Lonelyhearths (New York: New Directions. 1969).26.
86 Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (New York: Bantam, 1969), 69.
87 Fr. Leduc was a priest of the French Foreign Mission Society of Paris, bursar of the organization at the time of the Bangkok meeting, and later superior of the society’s residence in Bangkok. Fr. P. Verdier, a Belgian priest, was the superior of a small, recently organized monastic community in Bangkok at the time of this meeting. Abbot de Floris was secretary general of the A.I.M. (Aide à I’Implantation Monastique) of Vanves, France, the organization that sponsored the Bangkok conference Merton attended. And Fr. Paul Gordan was a monk of the Benedictine abbey of Beuron in Germany and secretary general of the Benedictine Confederation at St. Anselm’s College in Rome.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 45