'You're Buddhist. So can't you be Buddhist tourist? Maybe pilgrim? You'd like my photo with you?'
I smiled, covering my awkwardness. But however much I'd rather not say it,
she had found a label worth investigating: 'Buddhist tourist'. Surely pilgrimage
and tourism lie at either end of a spectrum? Tourism turns the world into
a backdrop of famous places and projected exotica, but does not really find
out much about it. The impulse to journey is ultimately subsumed into pleasure-seeking
and acquisition - it almost needn't matter where.
Movement itself can turn addictive; the urge to travel a compulsion. Moving
on offers a palpable sense of psychological as well as physical progression:
an outer journey compensating for a lack of inner progress. In this sense
journeys are fundamentally an entertainment, a continuing flirtation in which
the traveller is a victim of the inability to stay still and let deeper questions
rankle. Pilgrimage is different. As one travels one meets oneself.
maybe my own journey began as a habit. Long bus rides to school. Long summers,
too: six years, six weeks at a time across Europe, with a bias towards Renaissance
art. I would watch the old pilgrims cross St Peter's and pause at Michelangelo's
Pietà. Shorter than the boundary rope, I could slip beneath and watch
the procession from behind Christ's curved calf as it seemed to disappear
into the Virgin's breast. So many faces that seemed transfixed and uncomfortable
at the same moment. Why do they do it?
I liked hanging around this sculpture. Its sensitivity was hypnotic. It captured
me more than any other image I had seen, but otherwise I was full up with
the self-proclaimed triumph of Western civilisation, and intrigued by the
grown-ups' wry wit in quoting Gandhi's riposte when asked what he thought
of Western civilisation: 'I think it would be a very good idea'.