[bksvol-discuss] Just submitted: Zen And The Birds Of Appetite by Thomas Merton
- From: Vivian Flores <vivian@xxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:00:04 -0800
Just submitted nonfiction, synopsis is below.
I have read through, spell checked, added page numbers and page breaks. I
have double checked the names, double checked errors caught by the spell
checker against the book. There are errors, however, they are in the book.
This should be very clean!
Thanks!
Vivian
Title:
Zen And The Birds Of Appetite
Author(s):
Thomas Merton
Long Synopsis:
"Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening
statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite--one of the last books to be
published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The
birds may come and circle for a while. . . but they soon go elsewhere. When
they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly
appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed
it, because it was not their kind of prey. " This gets at the humor,
paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the
last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of
essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially
through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki, the book
makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two
traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature
Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather
one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the
body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests,
with the eternal truth of Christ.
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