| Author Quoted | Marco Pallis |
| Title Quoted | Way and the Mountain |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1963/10/04 |
| Imprint | London : Owen. [1961, c1960] |
| Quotation | I want to thank you especially for the books you so kindly sent. First of all, your own The Way and the Mountain is a very solid and valuable collection. Your essay on the "Active Lif" belongs precisely to a tradition that I recognize and live in, and it is very well done. The one on Sikkim Buddhism is perhaps the one that moved me most. Can we hope for a revival of these values? As you say, it is really the cross of our time to see so much that is really valuable being destroyed or discarded in the most irresponsible sort of way. Even efforts to preserve the best things seem at times fated to be foolish and destructive. I wish the Church were more sensitive on this point. There is a glimmering beginning now, but perhaps too late, with the formation of a secretariat for relations with non-Christian religions, and with some beginning of understanding of primitive cultures on the part of people in the missions. Too few of them, I am afraid. It is a very sad thing that more Catholics were not the type of de Nobili, Xavier and Matthew Ricci "¦ The essay "The Way and the Mountain" is the one I liked best. It is very fine indeed, and as a matter of fact the night after I read it, I dreamed about a "way," high on a cliff yet somehow secure. The Chinese painting of the "way" reproduced in the book is magnificent. I will send you my little book on Direction [Spiritual Direction and Meditation], which has many points in common with your essay "¦ |
| Quotation Source | The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1985, p. 465 |
| Letter to | Marco Pallis |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
52284
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