The Tao of Travel

13. It Is Solved by Walking

ALL SERIOUS PILGRIMS GO ON FOOT TO THEIR holy destination—Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims stand for so many others. Walking is a spiritual act; walking on one's own induces meditation. The Chinese characters for pilgrimage mean "paying one's respect to a mountain" (ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang). As I saw on my

Riding the Iron Rooster trip, many Taoists make a point of visiting the five holy mountains they regard as pillars of China, the cardinal compass points as well as the center, separating Heaven and Earth. And there are four other mountains, sacred to Buddhism and associated with a particular bodhisattva. "Paying respect" means climbing the mountains—though this often involves walking up stairs, since steps have been cut into most of the mountainsides. Ambrose Bierce defined a pilgrim as "a traveler that is taken seriously."

In his essay "Walking," in the posthumous collection Excursions (1863), Thoreau spoke of the word "saunter" as having been derived from the French expression "going to the Holy Land": "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going 'à la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,'

a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean." And later in this long paragraph he says, "For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."

The Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sen-dero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando ("it is solved by walking"), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. "Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook," Chatwin's biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.

Chatwin regarded walking in an almost mystical way. His predecessors, beginning with the great Japanese poet Bashö, felt the same. Walking inspired the poets Whitman and Wordsworth, and Rousseau based a series of philosophical essays on walks. Stanley walked across Africa twice. When David Livingstone wished to get into shape, and to invoke the traveling mood, he walked for weeks at a time in the African bush, "until my muscles were hard as boards."

Some walks are those of the flâneur, an almost untranslatable French word meaning stroller, saunterer, drifter—the essence of a traveler—but in this case usually one in a city, perhaps the very word to describe someone trying to solve a problem. Some walks by travelers border on stunts or bids for the record book—two obvious examples are Ewart Grogan tramping from Cape Town to Cairo in 1898, and more recently Ffyona Campbell, who in her way walked around the world (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").

But it is the committed walker, the thoughtful walker, who interests me the most.

Xuanzang (603–664): The Ultimate Pilgrim

A MONK AND a scholar, the young Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang in some renderings) felt that the Buddhist texts in China were badly translated, debased versions of the originals, so he decided to travel to India to verify them and to bring back as many texts as possible. He hoped also to see the holy places associated with Buddha's life and enlightenment. In some old illustrations he is shown accompanied by a pony—he certainly brought back the manuscripts on packhorses. But in his account of his seventeen years of travels he frequently refers to walking on narrow and difficult trails, and he appears to have traveled alone.

"At a time when the country was most prosperous, and equipped with unparalleled virtue, he started his journey to the remote lands carrying his pewter staff and whisked the dust with his robes," wrote Yu Zhining, Duke of Yanguo, in the original preface to The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. In a postscript to the book, Xuanzang is eulogized: "With the prestige of the emperor, he made his way, and under the protection of deities, he traveled in solitude."