In June 1964, a Trappist monk who rarely left his Kentucky monastery received his abbot’s permission and traveled to New York for a cup of tea.
Thomas Merton was forty-nine. The man he went to see, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, was ninety-three and staying at Butler Hall near Columbia University. Suzuki had done more than anyone to carry Zen to English-speaking readers, and the two men had been writing to each other since the late 1950s. Merton had read the books. He knew the arguments. He could have asked his questions by letter.
He went anyway. Suzuki’s secretary, Mihoko Okamura, prepared tea, and the two men talked. Merton later called them “a couple of all too short conversations” and the experience “unforgettable.” Two years later, Suzuki was dead. What Merton found in that small room, he wrote, “was like finally arriving at one’s own home.”
Merton already had the information. He traveled for the presence.
That difference, between knowing about someone and meeting them, is the best place to begin thinking about artificial intelligence (AI). Most public discussion treats AI as a technical achievement, an economic force, or a looming risk. Each is true, and none goes deep enough. The deeper question is Merton’s: what is happening to the human person? Before asking what machines can do, ask what kind of people we are becoming in their presence, and whether AI is shaping us toward wisdom, freedom, truthfulness, compassion, and a humane society.
What follows uses the See-Judge-Act method of Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers. First, look hard at what is happening. Then weigh it against what matters. Then decide what to do on Monday morning.
SEE
The pilgrim, not the collector
Merton took Zen and other Buddhist traditions seriously without blending them with Christianity into one generic spirituality. He sought a disciplined encounter, in which each tradition could illuminate the other while their real differences stayed intact. In October 1968, in a paper prepared for a gathering of religious leaders in Calcutta, he described himself this way:
“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.”
He went on to say he sought to become a better monk, not merely a better-informed one.
That split between knowing more and becoming better is the heart of the AI question. We know a great deal about model capabilities, benchmarks, market valuations, training data, regulations, and productivity gains. None of it tells us whether these systems are making us wiser, freer, more truthful, or more compassionate.
AI gives us more access to information. Merton asks whether it gives us more contact with reality.
A machine for the false self
Buddhist teaching examines craving, attachment, illusion, and the habit of building a solid, defensive self at the center of experience. Merton found a parallel in the Christian contemplative critique of the false self: the socially manufactured identity that seeks security in status, possession, control, approval, and performance.
For thirty-five years I helped build the systems I now ask questions about, so I will say this plainly. A recommendation engine is a machine for finding and feeding the false self. That is not a metaphor. It describes the product.
Generative AI adds power to the same machinery. It lets us project confidence without understanding, produce work without patient labor, manufacture images without encounter, and simulate intimacy without vulnerability. It offers instant answers when we most need a better question. It flatters our preferences, hardens our prejudices, and lets us feel in command because a system obeys our prompts.
The danger is not only that an AI system may be wrong. The greater danger is that we use it to avoid the work of becoming truthful, and that changes how we see ourselves and one another.
In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton wrote:
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own world.”
Nearly thirty years after his death, a Buddhist monk read that passage aloud at the Gethsemani Encounter, a meeting of Buddhist and Christian monastics held at Merton’s own abbey. It speaks across both traditions because it names a limit no system can cross. A person is more than a profile, a prediction, a behavioral trace, or a probability. No human being can be adequately understood as an optimization target.
JUDGE
Zen is judged by its acts.
Merton was drawn to Zen partly because it refuses to turn spiritual life into a set of propositions one owns. In Mystics and Zen Masters, he described it as:
“A concrete and lived ontology which explains itself not in theoretical propositions but in acts emerging out of a certain quality of consciousness and awareness. Only by these acts and by this quality of consciousness can Zen be judged.”
That corrects much of today’s AI debate. We tend to treat AI as a problem the right abstraction will solve: a policy framework, a safety checklist, a benchmark, a corporate principle, an alignment technique, a compliance regime—these matter. Merton would press further. What quality of consciousness builds and deploys these systems, and what kind of people are they forming?
A society driven by fear, rivalry, extraction, spectacle, and the desire to dominate will build AI in its own image. A society shaped by humility, truthfulness, solidarity, and reverence for persons could use the same technical capacity very differently.
So the question is larger than “Can this system be controlled?” It also includes these:
What human desires is this system automating?
Who defines success?
Who bears the cost of error, surveillance, displacement, or exclusion?
What kind of attention does it reward?
Does it deepen our contact with reality, or insulate us from it?
Does it serve compassion, justice, and the common good, or merely scale convenience and profit?
The stakes are highest in systems that rank, profile, surveil, hire, discipline, recommend, or deny services. When such a system reduces a person to what data can extract or predict, real people absorb the cost. Efficiency is not justice. Personalization is not understanding. Prediction is not wisdom.
Here is the essay’s central claim: judge AI not only by its performance or our control over it, but by the kind of people and society it helps form.
Suffering is not a bug.
Technology culture runs on the promise of frictionlessness: no waiting, no uncertainty, no discomfort, every task optimized. AI enlarges the promise. It offers instant summaries, polished prose, images on demand, continuous companionship, automated decisions, and apparently effortless productivity. The risk is that we learn to treat every discomfort as a defect to delete.
Some difficulties are not defects. Grief, uncertainty, moral conflict, patient learning, reconciliation, and responsibility cannot be responsibly settled with an instant answer. In Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Merton wrote:
“Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape.”
And: “Suffering is not a ‘problem’ as if it were something we could stand outside of and control.”
The opposing case deserves its full strength. AI helps clinicians find disease earlier. It translates across languages, opens doors for disabled users, lifts repetitive labor, speeds research, and widens access to useful knowledge for people who never had it. The contemplative critique can also sound like a luxury. At three in the morning, a lonely person with no counselor, no congregation, and no neighbor close by may find that a chatbot is the only thing that answers. Telling that person to wait for authentic presence is not wisdom. It is indifference in principled clothing.
That objection is serious, and it sharpens the point rather than defeating it. The moral test is whether we use technology to relieve unnecessary suffering while remaining willing to accompany one another in the suffering no machine can remove. The goal is relief and presence together. A system that comforts the lonely person at three in the morning should also help that person find someone who will still be there at noon.
A chatbot can generate comforting words for a grieving person. It cannot be a friend, a faith community, a counselor, or a neighbor who stays. It can help a student draft an essay. It cannot replace the struggle by which the student learns to think, judge, revise, and speak in their own voice. It can summarize a moral dilemma. It cannot assume responsibility for the decision.
AI becomes dehumanizing when it trains us to treat every difficulty as an inconvenience and every person as a task to optimize. That habit erodes our capacity to meet one another honestly.
ACT
Six disciplines before the prompt
For Merton, contemplation was not withdrawal from the world. It was a way of seeing the world without being captured by its illusions. In an AI-saturated culture, contemplation becomes a civic and educational discipline. Educators, writers, clergy, and public leaders need to teach people not only how to use AI, but how to pause before they do.
An index card for the desk
Silence before generation. Before asking for an answer, name what you already know, what you fear, what you want, and what human stake is involved.
Attention before automation. Ask whether the task is merely repetitive or carries judgment, relationship, accountability, or learning that should stay human.
Truth before fluency. AI-generated language can be elegant, persuasive, and wrong. Treat confidence as a prompt to verify, not a reason to trust.
Presence before substitution. Use AI to support human connection and care, not to replace them where mutual presence carries moral weight.
Compassion before efficiency. Ask whom a system’s errors, exclusions, labor practices, data extraction, or unequal access might harm.
Humility before mastery. Admit what neither the tool nor its user can know. Greater computing power does not remove the need for wisdom.
The classroom test
Education is where these disciplines matter most. The central question is not whether students should use AI. It is whether AI use strengthens or weakens the practices that make students attentive, discerning, responsible, and capable of real dialogue. A student who outsources every difficult sentence, every interpretation, and every act of synthesis may turn in better-looking work while losing the formation that education exists to provide.
The return
Merton did not treat Buddhism as a supply of exotic techniques or an escape from Christian discipleship. He treated it as a serious tradition that could teach him to see more deeply. Shortly before he died, he told Brother David Steindl-Rast:
“I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism.”
That is the right model for engaging AI. It is not a new religion, an oracle, or a neutral appliance, and condemning it from a distance will not do either. Meet it critically: learn enough to understand what it does, keep enough distance to recognize its illusions, and ground its use in moral commitments it cannot generate for us.
Merton’s contemplative life did not end in private enlightenment either. It led him toward peace, justice, nonviolence, social criticism, and friendship across religious lines. That wider horizon is essential now.
AI will keep growing more capable. The more urgent question is whether people, institutions, and communities will grow better at using intelligence without surrendering conscience. The answer begins with attention: to the desires driving the tool, the persons it touches, the suffering it can ease or deepen, and the reality no system can fully capture.
Merton could have stayed home in 1964. He had the letters, the books, and the facts. He boarded a plane for a cup of tea because some things happen only when two people share a room.
No prompt returns that.
Questions to ponder
See: Think of the last task you handed to an AI tool. Was it merely repetitive, or did it carry judgment, relationship, or learning you gave up without noticing?
See: Where in your own habits does technology feed the false self Merton described: the hunger for approval, performance, or control?
Judge: What in your life are you tempted to “solve” that you are really called to accompany or endure?
Judge: When a system that ranks or predicts people gets it wrong, who in your community bears the cost, and could they ever appeal?
Judge: Is a chatbot that comforts a lonely person a failure of community or an act of mercy? Can it be both?
Act: Merton traveled for presence when he already had the information. Who is waiting for your presence rather than your answer?
Act: Which of the six disciplines would change your work most if you practiced it for one week?
Sources
John A. Coleman, SJ, “Thomas Merton and Dialogue with Buddhism”, America, 13 July 2012.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966).
Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967).
Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968).
Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1973).
Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life: Journals, Volume Five, 1963–1965 (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).
“Deep Ecumenism in the Mystical Thought of D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton,” The Merton Seasonal 31, no. 3.
Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University.
Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.
The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.
So when I write essays, keynotes, and articles, I run the result through Grammarly. It fixes spelling and punctuation. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.