Dharmakāya, Kénōsis and Agápē

Days Before He Died, Thomas Merton Gave Us a Shimmering Summary of Mystical Truth.

Six days before his untimely death in Bangkok, Thailand at the age of 53, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and American mystic who was touring Southeast Asia at the time, visited the Gil Vihara monastery, an ancient sacred site in Poḷonnaruwa, Sri Lanka (in Merton’s day, Ceylon). This 12th-century Buddhist temple is remarkable for several large statues of the Buddha and his disciples, carved directly into the face of the granite; the largest, a reclining Buddha, is nearly 15 meters (50 feet) long.

For the third time in his life (that we know of), Merton had a moment of profound mystical insight while visiting Gil Vihara (previously he had mystical experiences while attending Mass in Havana in 1940 and on a street corner in Louisville in 1958).

He writes, “Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious.” Thankfully, he goes on to describe what this “inner clearness” entailed:

The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya … everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.

The Sanskrit word dharmakāya literally means “truth body,” and refers to the traditional understanding that the Buddha’s body consists of three forms or dimensions: a physical body (like all incarnate bodies), a subtler, visionary body (how the Buddha appears in visions to his disciples), and the “truth body” or the matrix out of which the other bodies emerge. Keep in mind that Buddhism maintains that the nature of the Buddha is, potentially, the nature of all sentient beings, so the dharmakāya is not something special reserved for spiritual masters, but describes the ground of all being from which all sentient and incarnate life emerges. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to equate the dharmakāya with Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas — or even simply with the Holy Spirit.

There really is no mystery, for everything is filled with the shimmering presence of the Spirit. Because of this, everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.

On the surface, it almost sounds like Merton is quoting a Buddhist sutra; after all, śūnyatā (emptiness) and karuṇā (compassion) are both concepts central to the dharma. But let us remember that both emptiness and compassion are core New Testament principles as well: the Greek words kénōsis and agápē refer, respectively, to the self-emptying of Christ when he took on human form (Philippians 2:7), and the compassionate love that forms the heart of Jesus’s message (John 13:34). In the truth body of our graced being, everything is empty like Christ is empty, and everything shimmers with at least the potential for divine love, freely given to one another.

Friends, I believe that in fewer than fifty words Thomas Merton gave us not only the crowning insight of his life’s work, beautifully expressed in an interspiritual way, but also a brilliant summation of world mysticism, accessible to anyone of any tradition. May we all live into that place where mystery opens up to the divine matrix of humble emptiness and radiant love.

Quotation source: Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions Books, Kindle Edition), pp. 234-235.