The Tao of Travel

Xuanzang left from the Tang Dynasty capital, Changan—Xian today, site of the terracotta warriors, imperial tombs, and glorious pagodas—and kept going, through Qinghai and across Xingjiang to Bokhara, Samarkand, and into present-day Afghanistan. All the while he made notes on the state of Buddhism, the condition of monasteries, the number of monks. He was awestruck by the giant carved Buddha statues at Bamiyan (dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, to the cries of "Allah is great!"). He crossed Peshawar and Taxila in what is now Pakistan, describing the ruins of Gandhara, where "there were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted, and in desolate condition." He wandered all over India. The fastidiousness of the early manifestations of the caste system fascinated him: "Butchers, fishermen, harlots, actors, executioners, and scavengers mark their houses with banners and are not allowed to live inside the cities," he wrote of the walled towns of northern India.

Throughout, he chronicled the presence of dragons, some protective, others menacing. He succeeded in his mission to find copies of ancient Buddhist texts, to visit the sacred places associated with Buddha: Gaya, Sarnath, Lumpini Gardens, and at last Kushinagara, where Buddha died. He stayed for years at a time in monasteries, learned Sanskrit, kept traveling, and returned to China with 657 texts, carried by twenty packhorses. At the suggestion of the emperor, he dictated The Great Tang Dynasty Record, finishing it in 646. When it was translated into French and English in the nineteenth century, other travelers (Aurel Stein for one) were able to find the lost cities and forgotten ruins that Xuanzang had so meticulously described. A new edition of Xuanzang's travels appeared in 1996, translated by Li Rongxi.

Matsuo Bashö (1644–1694): Narrow Road to the Deep North

BASHÖ WAS A nickname—it means banana tree: one was planted at the hut of the poet by an admirer, and the poet adopted the name. Bashö is said to be one of the greatest writers of haiku, the highly distilled, rigorously syllabic, and allusive Japanese three-line poem.

A Zen practitioner, Bashö also wrote haibun, a compressed and sometimes staticky prose that resembles the starkness of haiku. An admirer of the mendicant monks, he spent his life alternating spells of meditative living, usually in a remote hut, with walks (occasionally resorting to horseback), some short, several of them quite lengthy, which he re-counted in books that combined prose with poems. He acknowledged Kamo-no-Chōmei (see [>]) as an inspiration in the writing of travel journals. His first, a quest for spiritual wisdom, was The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (1685). One passage is heart-rending:

On a road along the Fuji River we came upon an abandoned child, about two years of age and crying pathetically. Apparently his parents, finding the waves of this floating world as uncontrollable as the turbulent rapids of this river, had decided to leave him there until his life vanished like a dewdrop. He looked like a tiny bush-clover blossom that would fall any time tonight or tomorrow beneath the blow of an autumn gust. I tossed him some food from my sleeve pocket, and mused as I passed by:

Poets who sang of monkey's wailing:

How would they feel about this child forsaken

In the autumn wind?

(translated by Makoto Ueda,

Matsuo Bashö,

1977)

In 1689 Bashö took his most ambitious trip, nine months of walking that resulted in his best-known work, his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (or Back Roads to Far Towns), at the time a remote and forgotten part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. Bashö was accompanied by his friend Sora, and both dressed as pilgrims. On this long walk Bashö describes the enlightenment he seeks:

Spent night at Iizuka, bathed at hot-springs there, found lodgings but only thin mats over bare earth, ramshackle sort of place. No lamp, bedded down by shadowy light of fireplace and tried getting some rest. All night, thunder, pouring buckets, roof leaking, fleas, mosquitoes in droves: no sleep. To cap it off the usual trouble cropped up [illness], almost passed out. The short night sky at last broke, and again picked up and went on. But the night's traces dragged, mind balked. Hired horses, got to post town of Ko-ori. Future seemed farther off than ever, and recurring illness nagged, but what a pilgrimage to far places calls for: willingness to let world go, its momentariness to die on the road, human destiny, which lifted spirit a little, finding foot again here and there, crossing the Okido Barrier in Date.

—

Back Roads to Far Towns,

translated by

Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu (1968)

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