In late November 1968, Thomas Merton rode in a car near Madras, heading to see the ancient stone temples at Mahabalipuram. Spotting hills in the distance, he asked his Catholic driver if those were the mountains where Ramana Maharshi had lived. The driver smiled and said yes.
The driver was wrong. Arunachala, the sacred hill where Maharshi spent decades in silence, was actually about a hundred miles farther southwest. Merton, who had studied Maharshi’s teachings for years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, just made a note in his journal. He didn’t correct the driver or ask to change direction, and as far as we know, he let the thought go as the car continued.
Two weeks later, on December 10, 1968, Merton died unexpectedly because of a faulty electric fan in a Bangkok conference center, just hours after speaking to Christian and Buddhist monks. He never visited the mountain or met the Hindu sage whose words had influenced him for years. The closest he came to Ramana Maharshi was the driver’s mistaken answer.
Some might see that missed meeting as a quiet tragedy—a monk nearly reaching the source of an idea he valued, only to miss it because of a mistake. But maybe it was not a loss. Merton did not need to climb the mountain. By 1968, he had already spent years exploring the same question that was central to Ramana Maharshi’s spiritual path, though he did so from a different tradition.
Two Ways of Turning Inward
During the 1960s, Merton read many Hindu and Buddhist texts, not just out of curiosity but as someone searching for deeper understanding. His journals from that time, later published as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, show him comparing his Christian contemplative practice with what he learned from these traditions. He also wrote two long essays on Gandhi: “Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary” (1964) and the introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence (1965).
In these essays, Merton said that Gandhi did something rare for his time: he put the teachings of the Gospel into political life so fully that his faith and politics could not be separated. Merton was not saying Gandhi was secretly Christian. Instead, he showed that a Hindu had lived out something Christian social ethics often only talk about—a spirituality that is not just private.
Merton was also interested in Gandhi’s idea of svadharma, which means one’s own duty, found through conscience rather than forced from outside. He saw Gandhi’s nonviolent politics (satyagraha, or “truth-force”) as coming from this idea. For Gandhi, political action was about showing the truth, not just trying to win. Being true to one’s values mattered more than success.
Ramana Maharshi, the sage on the mountain Merton never visited, taught a path focused on one question: “Who am I?”This practice is not about finding a simple answer, but about letting the question break down the illusions of body, mind, and social identity that hide the Atman. Merton found this approach powerful for contemplation, and it shaped how he saw Hindu spirituality.
Gandhi had a very different personality, but shared the same deep commitment. While Ramana’s path led to silence and a quiet ashram, Gandhi’s led to public marches, hunger strikes, and publishing. Both refused to let anything but their true selves shape them, making that choice a matter of conscience. Merton, who had taken vows of silence and stability, saw himself in both men.
A Principle That Needs a Reason to Care
Catholic Social Teaching connects human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. Pope Benedict XVI explained this in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate. He said solidarity and subsidiarity must stay linked: subsidiarity without solidarity leads to social indifference, leaving local communities on their own, while solidarity without subsidiarity creates a welfare system that takes away people’s agency. Both principles, he said, come from the same source: the dignity of each person as a subject, not just an object of policy.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, offered a similar summary in a 2025 address, describing CST’s core as “human dignity, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, and care for creation”, principles he framed as a moral compass for addressing contemporary global crises rather than a fixed rulebook.
Hindu ethics, shown in ideas like Atman, Dharma, and Seva, can add to this vision without simply repeating it. If ultimate reality is found deep within each person, not in their status or role, then dignity is more than just a slogan—it is a real claim about what a person is. And if dharma means a right order that includes all of nature, not just human society, then subsidiarity’s respect for local communities and Catholic Social Teaching’s focus on caring for creation find support in a tradition that has long seen rivers, forests, and animals as having their own rights.
A Test Case Neither Tradition Saw Coming
All of this may sound like distant history, but both traditions are now facing these same questions because of new technology.
Both traditions agree that artificial intelligence (AI) should not decide what a person is worth. This is where Atman and imago Dei become practical ideas. The Vatican’s January 2025 document on AI, Antiqua et Nova, warns against seeing human worth only in terms of productivity or skills and says a person’s value comes from inherent dignity, not ability. This is the same danger that Atman warns about: if AI can out-write, out-calculate, and out-produce people, and society measures worth by what someone does, then AI could be used to say people are no longer needed. Modern Hindu writers on AI make a similar point using the idea of samskaras, or mental impressions, compared to Atman: AI can copy patterns of thought and memory, but copying a pattern is not the same as having the conscious self that makes those patterns belong to someone. It is the difference between a good imitation of a person and a real person.
The idea of structural sin also applies to how AI affects society. Antiqua et Nova points out a real problem at work: AI often makes workers adjust to the machine’s speed and demands, rather than making the machine help people, which goes against the principle of subsidiarity. This problem happens by default, not because of one person’s bad choices. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) makes this link clear, using the main ideas of Catholic Social Teaching—the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice—to address “the era of artificial intelligence.”
Merton’s warning about noise and speed fits today’s world of algorithmic feeds. He said that real freedom and nonviolence are impossible for anyone who gives in to a society focused on constant stimulation and distraction. Although he wrote this in the 1960s about mass media, his words now seem more like a diagnosis than a metaphor. In this setting, Ramana Maharshi’s question, “Who am I?” becomes a practical tool—not a rejection of technology, but a way to stay connected to what AI cannot copy, even as the world pulls our attention into endless scrolling.
Both traditions agree on moral agency. The Church says clearly that only humans—not machines—are self-aware enough to listen to conscience, use good judgment, and seek what is right. Hindu writers who use dharmic reasoning about AI, drawing from the Mahabharata’s ideas about duty, reach a similar point differently: a self-driving car can act to save lives, but what makes an action truly dharmic is that a conscious person stands behind it and takes responsibility. Neither tradition is willing to let responsibility shift from people to systems.
Voices Worth Sitting With
Gandhi, on the foundation of his whole ethical project: “There is no God higher than truth.”
Merton, on what made Gandhi’s witness distinctive: he found Gandhi’s political action “inseparably religious and political at the same time.”
Ramana Maharshi’s method, compressed into two words: “Who am I?”
Cardinal Parolin, naming what CST insists on protecting: policies that prioritize the vulnerable, the refugee, older people, the unborn, over profit or power.
Questions for discussion
Merton, a Trappist monk under vows of stability and silence, found in Gandhi’s public, political nonviolence something that deepened his own contemplative life rather than distracting from it. What does that suggest about the relationship between silence and public action: are they in tension, or do they need each other?
Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry and Gandhi’s nonviolent activism look like opposite lifestyles, one withdrawn, the other public. In what sense might they represent the same underlying discipline, and can we practice one without ever practicing the other?
If both traditions insist that only a human being can bear moral responsibility, what does that imply about decisions we are currently comfortable letting AI systems make on our behalf, hiring, medical triage, content moderation, lending, where a human “signs off” but the AI effectively decides?
What to Carry Out of the Car
Taken together, this suggests a fairly concrete ethic for the present moment:
Judge AI by whether it serves human flourishing (seva, integral human development), not merely by whether it is efficient or profitable.
Treat structural harm as seriously as individual misuse. Problems like algorithmic bias, job loss, and the digital divide deserve the same moral attention as a single person’s bad actions, because both traditions already recognize injustice that no one person meant to cause.
See contemplative practice, silence, self-inquiry, and choosing to unplug as necessary steps for using technology responsibly, not as ways to avoid it.
Merton never visited Arunachala. He died two weeks after asking about it, in a country he was just starting to explore, in an unexpected way. But the mountain was never really the goal. Ramana Maharshi spent his life asking “Who am I?” from one quiet place, while Gandhi asked the same question while marching, fasting, and writing, always on the move. Merton, a monk committed to silence but also interested in the world’s activity, felt at home in both approaches.
He got close enough to the mountain he had thought about for years to ask a stranger about it, smiled at the wrong answer, and kept going.
Sources: Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1973), per the excerpted text at archive.arunachala.org; Thomas Merton, “Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary” (Ramparts, 1964) and the introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence (New Directions, 1965); Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (2009); Cardinal Pietro Parolin, remarks reported by Vatican News (2025); Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence (28 January 2025); Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026); Merton’s death per contemporaneous and Merton Society accounts.