Precursors to the Modern Monk
The “modern monk” then is a sincere and committed spiritual practitioner, one who bridges the techniques of the pre-modern spiritual traditions with the opportunities that come from living within the modern world. But this idea is in no way unique to me. The ways that I try to flesh out the idea, and filter it through my personal biases, experiences, and values will definitely give it a unique flavor, but in essence it’s an idea that has strong roots elsewhere. Many individuals and groups (even whole traditions) have encouraged a monastic to not only live their contemplative lives in solitude, but also to engage with and benefit others outside of the monastic community. Two examples come to mind, one a person and the other a tradition.
The person, who was himself a Trappist monk, is none other then the infamous Thomas Merton, whose writing about his monastic vocation and commitment to modern monkhood made a profound difference to many people through the middle part of the 20th century. The tradition is a movement within the larger Buddhist tradition and is often referred to as the Mahayana. Originating several hundred years after the death of the original Buddha, this movement shifted some of the beliefs and tendencies within the more orthodox Buddhist community in ways that opened the monastic community up on the larger world in huge ways. The two taken together are in many ways the grandparents of what I’m calling the modern monk.
Merton, who was a Trappist monk in the Catholic tradition, was deeply committed to the contemplative life and the solitude that came with it. The Trappists live a very strict life, where complete verbal silence is commonplace. Oddly enough, throughout his time as a monk, from 1941 – 1968, Merton was a prolific writer. He wrote on average some two books a year during the quarter-century that he was a monk, many of which became best sellers and touched hundreds of thousands of people. The fact he impacted some many people via his writing, and the content of the writing itself point to his commitment to what I am calling, and what he himself called, the modern monk. His writings, especially towards the end of his life, were deeply connected to the problems of the world. He wrote on subjects such as war, nuclear disarmament, racism, and other important issues during the 60s, taking a very leading edge position on all of these issues. His love for the world, and the people in it, was probably as profound as his passion for the contemplative life, and in many ways could be seen as its natural outgrowth. His biographer, William Shannon, explained Merton’s understanding of the relationship that a monk has to the world in this way:
The inner transformation that comes from the experience of “seeking God” helps to define the monk’s relationship to the world—a relationship that is at once negative (the monk renounces the world) and positive (the monk loves the world). He both separates himself from the world and at the same time enters into dialogue with the world. It is the separation that is the basis for the fruitfulness of the dialogue. This means that the monastic charism necessarily involves a dialectic between renouncing the world (which is by no means the same as “denouncing” it) and being open to the world. ((William Shannon, Silent Lamp (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 260.))
It’s this balance, between what I earlier referred to as ascending and descending, but which in this case are seen as renunciation from the world and engagement with it, that the modern monk works to balance. They balance these two impulses because they have a deep love of humanity and for all sentient life, and also because they know that freedom comes from going against the grain, not with it. Somehow the constant balancing of these two poles leads to the greatest possible freedom and impact.
In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, this balance is often understood in terms of the equipoise between the realization of Emptiness and the cultivation of Compassion. Emptiness and Compassion, it is said, are two wings of a bird that when developed in harmony lead to a truly capable vehicle. A vehicle to nothing less then the complete and utter liberation of self and other!
The Mahayana was a precursor to the modern monk, because it identified the impulse that moves the modern monk, and keeps them in conflict with the modern world. The conflict being that dichotomy I mentioned earlier and the resolution being the unification of ascending and descending, or the union of Emptiness and Compassion in theory and in fact.
