Thomas Merton

American Trappist monk, writer, and contemplative, 1915–1968. Born in France to two artists; orphaned by sixteen. He led a chaotic young life in Cambridge and at Columbia University, converted to Catholicism at twenty-three, and entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941. His 1948 autobiography *The Seven Storey Mountain* became an unexpected bestseller and drew thousands of men into monasteries in the postwar decade. He stayed in the monastery for the next twenty-seven years and wrote sixty-some books from his hermitage in the woods. He moved gradually from a narrow piety to something much larger: a fierce critic of the Vietnam War and racism, a friend and correspondent of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama, one of the first Christians to take Buddhist meditation seriously on its own terms. He died in Bangkok in 1968, at fifty-three, accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan, weeks after giving a talk to Buddhist and Christian monastics that ended: "I will disappear from view, and we can all have a Coke or something." Core teaching: the false self is everything we have built up to be admired; the true self is who we already are, in God, beneath all of it. Contemplation is not escape from the world. Done honestly, it returns you to the world more deeply implicated in everyone in it. Key works: *The Seven Storey Mountain*, *New Seeds of Contemplation*, *The Sign of Jonas*, *Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander*, *Thoughts in Solitude*, *Zen and the Birds of Appetite*, *The Asian Journal*.