| Author Quoted | Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki |
| Title Quoted | Zen and Japanese Buddhism |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/06/11 |
| Imprint | Tokyo : Japan Travel Bureau. [1961] |
| Quotation | Two packages of books have arrived and I am most grateful to you for them and for the kind inscriptions. I have begun immediately with Zen and Japanese Buddhism, which is very clear and has some fine things in it. I am especially struck with the idea of the purposeless life, "filling the well with snow." I suppose all life is just that anyway, but we are obsessed with purpose. I think of this because there was a very purposeful meeting of abbots and novice masters here last week, and we mightily filled all the wells in the country with snow, except that we thought we were doing something else. It is surprising how tired one can get of doing nothing, and how tireless the real "doing" always is. |
| 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. 569 |
| Letter to | D.T. Suzuki |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
52504
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