The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

About this book

"This is quintessential Merton." The Catholic Review. "The moment of takeoff was ecstatic...joy. We left the ground I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering..." With these words dated October 15. 1968 the late Father Thomas Merton recorded the beginning of his fateful journey to the Orient. His travels led him from Bangkok through India to Ceylon and back again to Bangkok for his scheduled talk at a conference of Asian monastic orders. There he unequivocally reaffirmed his Christian vocation. His last journal entry was made on December 8 1968 two days before his untimely accidental death. Amply illustrated with photographs he himself took along the way and fully indexed the book also contains a glossary of Asian religious terms a preface by the Indian scholar Amiya Chakravarty a foreword and postscript by Brother Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani as well as several appendices among them the text of Mertons final address. Black-and-white photographs throughout