In The Footsteps of Thomas Merton... Dr. Jacques Soulié
2023 July 07
By Janaka Samarakoon - Nice, 12/13/2022
Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915. Despite choosing a life of prayer and contemplation as a Trappist monk, he engaged in remarkable exchanges with activists, artists, political leaders, and influential theologians of his time. Merton authored numerous works, articles, and essays covering diverse subjects such as spirituality, social justice, nonviolence, and the arts.
Despite his religious conviction, Merton possessed an incredibly eclectic spirit and transcended the boundaries of his own religion. In fact, he once described experiencing the "deepest feeling of beauty and spiritual strength" when he encountered a statue of the Buddha during a visit to Sri Lanka—an almost mythical journey, one of his penultimate travels as a globetrotter, now elevated to legendary status.
Dr. Jacques Soulié, born in France in 1939, hails from a small village near Montauban, the same region where Thomas Merton was born. Unbeknownst to him, Soulié attended Ecole Saint-Théodore in Montauban, which was close to the high school where Merton, 24 years his senior, completed his secondary education. During his adolescence, Soulié spent several years in the picturesque medieval village of Saint Antonin, where he often found himself wandering.
In fictionalised biographies of these two individuals, one can easily envision them sitting side by side on a bench along the banks of the Tarn River or in a quaint courtyard in Saint Antonin, engaging in passionate discussions about improbable topics such as Sri Lanka or the spirituality infused with Buddhism from that distant country. While reality may not have unfolded precisely in this manner, these two men from distinct eras embarked on a similar journey—a metaphysical path—that, decades later, became evident through certain common biographical traits.
Since 1995, the French physician has resided in Kandy, a place that had captivated Thomas Merton 27 years prior. Similar to the Trappist monk's transformative journey to the tropical island, Buddhism exerted a significant influence on Jacques Soulié's trajectory, prompting him to leave behind his adopted home on the Left Bank of Paris and settle in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Previously, he had lived in a high-rise apartment with a view of Notre-Dame, practicing his profession near the Pantheon. Now, his gaze is fixed upon the Hanthana mountain range. In the vicinity of the three prominent temples of the Gampola kingdom—Lankatilaka, Gadaladeniya, and Embekke—Jacques Soulié has established his own temple dedicated to the artistic culture and popular traditions of the country that embraced him, the Suriyakantha Centre.
In 1968, following his now legendary visit to Sri Lanka, Thomas Merton tragically passed away in Thailand. Fifty years later, the French physician had immersed himself in the majority of Merton's works, considering him an indispensable companion on his own life journey, even in the realm of imagination. Last autumn, on the anniversaries of the Ceylon visit and Thomas Merton's departure, Jacques Soulié paid tribute to him by sharing a series of excerpts from his memoirs on his personal blog.
These passages could easily be mistaken for excerpts from a fictionalised autobiography of the psychiatrist.. !
Dr. Jacques Soulié in Saint-Antonin - June 2023 [Photo © Christophe Soulié]
Polonnaruwa 2 December 1968
I visited Polonnaruwa on Monday.
Heavy rain in Kandy,
and on all the valleys and paddy land…
as we go down to the eastern plains.
Polonnaruwa under trees
The path dips down to Gal Vihara…
Barefoot and undisturbed,
My feet in wet grass, wet sand…
Then the SILENCE of the extraordinary faces
I was knocked over with a rush
of relief and thankfulness
at the obvious clarity of the figures
and the fluidity of shape and line…
I don’t know when in my life I have ever had
such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity
running together in one aesthetic
I have left my monastery to come here not just as a research scholar or even as an author.
I come as a pilgrim who is anxious to obtain not just information, not just “facts” about other monastic traditions, but to drink from ancient sources of monastic vision and experience.
I seek not only to learn more about religion and about monastic life, but to become a better and more enlightened monk myself.
