away, the hunter takes her to the palace of his own king, and there she falls in love with the crown prince. They marry in due course, and when he is sent off to war she is betrayed by a conniving minister, who convinces the king that she is a threat to him and must be put to death. The order is given to burn her alive, and as the flames rise around her she pleads to have her wings and tail returned. Her request is granted—what harm can there be in that?—and now, miraculously, she rises above the fire and ascends to the heavens. The prince’s triumphant return from war turns to tragedy when he learns that Manora has vanished, and so he sets out to find her, searching for seven years, seven months, and seven days, overcoming many obstacles, until he climbs to the summit of the Himalayas, home of the bird people, where no mortal has ever gone. There he is reunited with Manora, and they live happily ever after. In the last verse of the tale it is revealed that the prince is in fact a previous incarnation of the Buddha.
Manora is the most popular Buddha birth story performed in Southeast Asia, and for centuries all-male troupes played the roles of the bird-woman and the prince. But over time women were trained for the drama, and indeed Eh Chom’s second wife played Manora in his troupe, which for more than twenty years had performed for large crowds until PAS deemed the dance antithetical to orthodox Islamic teachings. Now she was embroidering headgear for the second of her two sons, who in two months’ time would be initiated into the troupe, carrying on his father’s work. Eh Chom’s soul would never rest if he died without passing on the tradition, said Eddin, who was documenting every aspect of manora—transcribing its repertoire, recording its catalogue of songs, plays, and music, detailing its rituals. Manora incorporates elements of Buddhist worship and Malay forms of storytelling and music making—a typical performance features both Thai and Malay dancers; the troupe of young men and women that Eh Chom was training, with Pusaka’s support, came from both sides of the border. The strange thing, Eddin added, is that Thais dominated on this side of the border, Malays on the other.
“Boundaries are ludicrous things,” he said.
Here the lines blurred between Buddhism and Islam, a mingling of discourses that might have intrigued the Trappist monk and contemplative writer Thomas Merton, whose dialogue with other religions was for me a model of spiritual inquiry ; his exploration of the mystical heart of faith fired my own thinking. On the day that I finished reading his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in graduate school, my mind was set aflame with questions of faith. I set out on foot for a nearby canyon in Salt Lake City, where I was living. One of my creative writing professors happened to drive by me, and slowed to say hello. He must have seen something in my expression, for he asked if I was all right. I replied that I was trying to sort out my feelings about a religious vocation, which drew a curious response from him: he advised me not to read the King James Bible, the translation being unfaithful to the original, then drove away. I walked on, resolving to change my life. I began to read more Merton.
His writings became central to me when I abandoned graduate school not long after my encounter with the professor and moved with my wife to New Mexico. It was a critical juncture in our lives: we were the caretakers of an estate at the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, with no money, health insurance, or prospects. Which is to say: we were free, even if we did not realize it at the time. I wrote in the morning, and in the afternoon I worked in the gardens, split firewood, and cleared the arroyo that irrigated the apple orchards in our canyon. At the end of the day I would hike among the junipers on the mesa rising above the estate, trying to figure out how to survive outside academia—to make a life in poetry, that is. In Merton’s versions of the sayings of the Desert Fathers I found a source of wisdom that seemed as fresh as the Zen koans dear to my Buddhist friends—parables and teachings illustrating the insight that poverty is integral to the spiritual life—and while it would be some time before I read Merton’s essays on Zen, and longer yet until I discovered his lectures on Sufism, his open-minded search for spiritual vitality convinced me that he was a reliable guide for what turned out to be a journey into the mystical ground of experience common to many religions.
He did not just strengthen the links between poetry and the contemplative life, building on the inheritance of mystical writers through the ages, but reached beyond the walls of his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, to the wider world, lending his voice to the civil rights movement, articulating protests against the war in Vietnam, drawing connections between Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. He likened the Zen experience of the Void to Christ emptying himself into human form for our salvation, Christian consciousness to Buddhist mindfulness; the “deep ontological awareness” that Buddhists cultivate in meditation was in his mind akin to the awakening that Christians experience in their obedience to God or what Sufis discover at le point vierge, the secret place in the soul where God reveals himself. Yet Merton was careful to distinguish between the central tenets of each religious tradition, refusing to blur the differences integral to their practice, and this added another layer of meaning to his work: he saw into the heart of things, which is by its nature multiple, world upon world, and what he kept finding were different versions of the truth, the gift, bestowed upon him by his Christian faith—a new nature. The perfect poverty of a Christian mystic was not so distant from the perfect freedom granted to an enlightened Buddhist or Sufi master. Merton considered Mahatma Gandhi to be the ideal thinker and man of action, someone who used the Bhagavad Gita to dedicate his life to the nonviolent resistance of British rule; the study of Taoism and Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, convinced the monk that East and West share “a unity of outlook and purpose, a common spiritual climate.”
This was the unity that he sought to explore when in December 1968 he traveled to Bangkok for a monastic conference, stopping en route to visit the exiled Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, in northern India; to see the giant statues of the Buddha in Sri Lanka; to listen to Vedic scholars chanting in Madras and Sufi music in Delhi. In Bangkok, he gave a lecture on Marxism and monasticism, concluding with a Zen saying: “Where do you go from the top of a thirty-foot pole?” Then he returned to his room, where some hours later his body was discovered in the bathtub—electrocuted, apparently, by the frayed cord of an electric fan. His death shocked a world still reeling from the assassinations earlier in the year of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, for now the spiritual voice of the civil rights and antiwar movements was also gone. Merton had written in his short life over a hundred books and pamphlets, a number of which I read sitting by the woodstove in the converted chicken coop that served as our caretaker’s residence, and when I climbed the mesa his words often seemed to guide my footsteps.
Which makes it all the more mysterious to me now that when I lived in New Mexico I did not visit the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, north of Abiquiu, a crucial place for Merton in the last years of his life. I knew that he had considered leaving his monastery to live in the Benedictine community tucked in a red rock canyon along the Chama River, which he had visited twice in 1968 (the second time at the outset of his fateful journey to Asia), and I imagined that traces of his restless spirit lingered in that spare landscape, which he credited with helping to clear his mind. Merton’s biographer reports that when he washed in the cold waters of the Chama he felt clean and awake; and when he met the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived nearby, he deemed her one of those rare people “who quietly does everything right”—an insight that governed the composite biography that I was assembling about O’Keeffe, collecting scholarly essays and reminiscences by those who had known or worked for her.
What began as a geographical convenience (a local symposium on O’Keeffe’s life and work had inspired an editor to commission the book) became for me an affair of the heart. Her paintings taught me to see flowers and canyons and bones in their essential strangeness; her letters opened new vistas on the nature of the artistic vocation; her physical beauty (preserved in photographs taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz) left me spinning. She was for me the embodiment of art as well as desire, living as authentically as she painted, and when I visited her house in the course of my research I convinced myself that I could not afford an extra hour to drive to the monastery in which Merton might have produced yet more enduring works if his life had not been cut short. In fact I had more time on my hands in those days than in any other period of
