A Japanese pilgrim wearing a robe stamped with the symbols of Buddhist shrines he has visited. Introduction by Andrew Schelling " T he householder''s life," says old Buddha''s document The Digha Nikaya, "is full of dust and hindrance." And immediately you feel it, right in your shoes. From the start, Buddhism showed a sharp impatience for stay-at-home habits. It has spread out from India, traveled to China and Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and America, and in twenty-five hundred years hasn''t shaken that fine old skepticism. The impulse to ramble is as old as humankind. We have ample testimony of a close ancestral connection to migratory animals, and it appears that the earliest calendars were incised animal bone, small enough to slip in a pocket as the human clan arranged its year by traveling to seasonal food sources. Archaeologists are uncovering routes of migration our human forebears followed, keeping herds of reindeer and antelope, bison and sheep in sight.
For most human beings, for tens of thousands of years, home was quite literally "on the hoof." The hunter, the nomad, the rambler, and finally the pilgrim. Perhaps it is no more than the swift human intellect and our proud, strong legs following a primordial hunger to see what''s around the bend, over the next hill, or just upriver. Every child grows up in a landscape both seen and imagined. Parents, relatives, and friends bring home tales of marvelous places. The elderly revisit their childhood landscapes by turning them into further stories. These brilliant outward-looking eyes never quite catch up with that shimmering ability to see things and locations within. Poems, journals, hagiographies, the diaries of merchants and seekers, accounts of sailors and soldiers -- traditions of storytelling never disappear.
How many records do the libraries hold now of visits to India -- a continent known in its own treasury of tale and legend as Jambudvipa, the Rose-Apple Island? Tale and legend? Stations of pilgrimage, like stories, get more, not less rich as the generations roll past. The earliest human art -- cliff walls pecked with meaningful designs or pictographs -- caves delicately and inspirationally peopled with ocher and manganese animal forms -- were not undertaken at places of permanent residence. They were at locales to which people journeyed, passing by on migratory circuits, or at a later date making special efforts to visit: they were ceremonial centers, shrines, locations of brave human deeds and brilliant supernatural occurrences. Peerless art and innovative architecture arise to commemorate the old stories, and in their wake spring up field tents, or little guest lodges, to make the sites hospitable for visitors. Everyone hungers to visit and revisit the locales associated with legend. To some, this life of rambling and migration takes such hold of the imagination that it comes to seem the one life worth leading -- if only for some brief period. If only once in a lifetime. The early Buddhists were an order of "wandering alms-seekers.
" A ragtag bunch, they could be found at crossroads and river fords, along highways, camping in city parks, or sheltering in forest groves. India would scarcely offer such a range of destinations for the Buddhist pilgrim had Shakyamuni Buddha settled into a secluded ashram like a Brahman priest, or lived out his days as a philosopher king in his father''s palace. The model he took for himself and his followers -- that of philosophical rambler, beggar of food, tatter-robed paraclete, inveterate pilgrim -- was an old one. Others before him had gone to the forests and highways for centuries, tired of rigid social forms and a predictable religion of the kitchen and bedroom. India''s great casteless community of the homeless was already ancient in Buddha''s day. The pilgrim, the wanderer, the forest dweller, figures so familiar to the old epics, to poetry and legend, that the arts of India seem charged with them. The Buddha''s resolve as a young man to leave his father''s palace, what the annals call his Great Going-Forth, came after seeing the Four Signs. On successive days he encountered an old man, a sick man, a corpse and, lastly, a wandering mendicant on perpetual pilgrimage to the source of life.
You meet similar mendicants on every pilgrimage route in India today, at all the temples and riverbanks. You see them on trains, in taxis and rickshaws, traveling by private cars. But mostly they have gone and continue to go forth by foot. How can we separate the notion of pilgrimage from the primal instinct to set out on a walk, shake off the householder''s dust, and simply see something new? Our bones ache with it. The word pilgrim along with its Latin original, peregrine, simply means a person who wanders "across the land." The old Sanskrit words from India spring from the same irresistible source. A yatrika is a rambler, a thirthayatrika a wanderer who frequents crossroads and riverbanks. You may think the world of nation states, superhighways, and rigidly drawn borders no longer accommodates such folk, but in India they ramble as they have for millennia -- a tradition that traces itself back to a prehistoric pan-Asiatic shamanism.
It was near Taxila in 323 B.C., after fording the Indus River, that Alexander the Great''s army encountered a community of spiritual goers-forth. The fierce, ragged, skull-carrying mendicants they met were not Buddhists but sadhus -- on pilgrimage into the Himalayan foothills holy to Siva. But before the Greek soldiers were done with India they would bring back accounts of a Buddhist civilization that took for its principal emblem the shramana or homeless wanderer, who owned only a patchwork robe, begging bowl, and razor to tonsure the head. The Greeks coined their own term, gymnosophist -- naked philosopher -- to describe these figures. And ever since, homeless men and women of religion, perpetual pilgrims, have exerted the strongest fascination over foreign travelers to India -- probably because nowhere else has such a community so durably established itself. Buddhism picked the archaic tradition up from epic and wisdom book, and placed the wanderer at the core of its discipline.
Even the initial settling in of the bhikkhu and bhikkhuni (ordained monk and nun), which occurred during Buddha''s lifetime, did not spell an end to the wandering life. It arose as a provisional response to cycles of weather. July and August are India''s monsoon season. Every year torrential rains pour from the sky, rivers overflow, and water makes the roads nearly impassable. Sakyamuni Buddha counseled his students to sit out the periodic downfalls as specified "rain retreats." Certain of these shelters developed over time into permanent centers. Some received donations of land and used financial gifts to raise walls and spires, meditation halls, stupas, and libraries. With the blossoming of Buddhist civilization, the vast viharas of north India came into existence -- centers of meditation, art, learning, philosophical debate, and trade.
The one at Nalanda, founded in present-day Bihar state in the fourth century C.E., accommodated up to ten thousand resident yogins, scholars, and artists at a time. Yet for all the massive walls, the kitchens and libraries, the halls of worship, no concept of "staying put" ever fully caught on. Etymologically, the word vihara means "a place to wander about." To consider these way stations colleges or monasteries misses something crucial. You''ll see, if you visit the expansive courtyards and long, covered arcades of Nalanda, that its residents thought the best seeking and most subtly colored thinking was still to be done on foot. What is this thinking done on foot? Ask any pilgrim, you''ll get the same answer: You only find out by going.
It is an attitude toward life, not a catechism had from some book. Old Buddha ancestor of North America Henry David Thoreau gets as close as I''ve seen. In his essay "Walking" he tracks the word saunter to Old French Sainte Terre -- holy land. A saunterer is a holy-lander, a walker to sacred places and storied locations. "We should," he admonishes, "go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return -- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms." It''s here he gives a taste of that adventurous urge that forms the pilgrim''s resolve. "If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, -- if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk." Only the walker who sets out toward ultimate things is a pilgrim.
In this lies the terrible difference between tourist and pilgrim. The tourist travels just as far, sometimes with great zeal and courage, gathering up acquisitions (a string of adventures, a wondrous tale or two) and returns the same person as the one who departed. There is something inexpressibly sad in the clutter of belongings the tourist unpacks back at home. The pilgrim is different. The pilgrim resolves that the one who returns will not be the same person as the one who set out. Pilgrimage is a passage for the reckless and subtle. The pilgrim -- and the metaphor comes to us from distant times -- must be prepared to shed the husk of personality or even the body like a worn out coat. A Buddhist dictum has it that "the Way exists but not the traveler on it.
" And when you peruse the journals, books, and poems left behind by travelers of the Buddhist world -- to India, China, Japan, or Tibet -- you find a strange thing. For the pilgrim the road is home; reaching your destination seems nearly.