At the Borobudur guesthouse, near the world's largest Buddhist monument in
central Java, I had reached a still point. After coming so far it was hard
to know how to take the final steps. With the travelling and interviews of
the previous week, my body clock had blurred night and day. My awareness was
like the 24-hour fluorescent airport lights: flattened into a watery presence.
How to approach such a fabled place and not be the prisoner of anticipation?
But I felt excitement stirring. Like the moment before meeting someone you've
long admired from afar, and suddenly their eyes and yours are absorbed in
reflected gaze.
Thin rain and thick cloud gathered towards darkness as I followed the smooth
curved path for the final walk up to the monument. The closing Indonesian
sky had washed visitors away. I didn't want to look up to the high terraces
until I felt equal to what might come. I had avoided seeing pictures beforehand,
knowing only that the complex was thought to be an interpretation of the Ratu
Boko inscription (792 ce):
'I pay homage to the Cosmic Mountain of the perfect Buddhas …
endowed with the awe-inspiring power of wisdom, whose profound
caves are knowledge, whose rock is excellent tradition, whose
brilliance is owing to its relic; the Good Word whose streams are
love, whose forests are meditation - truly the Mount of Few Desires
which is not shaken by the eight horrible winds: the worldly qualities.'
What form would this place take? Unlike meeting a person, when rapport opens
its own doors, pilgrimage is a reflexive appointment with our deeper selves
and our highest aspirations. The challenge of Borobudur is immediate. Its
sculpted friezes are conceived as a stupa-mandala. They map out a mythic route
through several levels, with stone narration of the Jataka tales and the Buddha's
life unfolded across four successively higher-walled galleries until reaching
the fifth level - the apex of the monument itself - and its gateway to the
transcendental. Circumambulating you literally climb up. Each level is a metaphor
for the successive factors of Enlightenment.
The warm rain on the first visit granted solitude. On my return the weekend
crush left me cornered and resentful of the vulgar games of young day-trippers
and tourists scrabbling up the ancient pagodas. A group of American pensioners
were encouraging each other to 'strike lucky'. They leaned through the diamond-shaped
gaps in the stone screens encasing a circle of meditating Buddha's to 'see
if you could touch his nose'. Their good-natured energy was infectious, however
misapplied, but I kept a distance.
borobudur is a buddhist pilgrimage point par excellence. The path through
its 1,500 friezes begins with the kamadhatu, the realm in which we are largely
governed by desire. In the middle galleries we reach the rupadhatu , the realm
of form, which is gradually attained through meditation practice. Here desire
weakens and withers but 'name and form' still bind the pilgrim. Borobudur
then opens out on to its upper section, where all bonds to the mundane world
are broken. Professor Soekomo, the key figure in Borobudur's recent restoration,
distils the route as 'starting with the law of karma at the base, the search
for perfection from the first to the fourth gallery terminates in the attainment
of the Ultimate Truth'.
The panels of bas-reliefs (left) describe scenes from the Buddhist sutras.
Their contours beckoned in the soft, almost lateral light of late afternoon.
Edges hewn from hard rock were made unexpectedly supple by the counterpoint.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, the celebrated art historian, described Borobudur 'like
a ripe fruit matured in breathless air'. But there was little space for this
to resonate. Parties of schoolgirls, quickly bored with the handsome sculpture
strayed across with curious delight. They giggled, took pictures until a 16-year-old
confidently asked:
'So you are tourist?'
'Not really. I'm Buddhist.'
'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'.
When teenage contemporaries swaggered with race-hate slogans - like 'Go Home!'
- I first thought they meant I was on the wrong bus. When my anger subsided,
I found myself smiling inwardly, realising that - yes - I was hungry for the
strange familiarity of Asia. I was grateful even that my brown skin was cultivating
an outsider's as well as an insider's eye.
As India materialised through the low cloud, I recognised that part of the
impulse was to reconnect the tributaries of my family that had been fractured
across Asia, Africa, Europe and America. To give form to the ideas of India
which were still caressed in the misty shadows of their collective memory
would mean successive journeys here. Ineluctably.
Arriving in India inverted inside and outside. What had been private and in
the home in London was suddenly public and on the streets, only writ larger
than I could have imagined. My first taste of Indian pilgrimage was in Varanasi,
aged 19. Benares is among the holiest Hindu sites. Here the Ganges is believed
to be a ford, a crossing point between the human and divine worlds. Watching
devotees bathe at dawn, pray, perform puja, annoint the body of a loved one
before cremation at the burning ghats, I had assumed, without knowing it,
that I, too, would step across the stone that broke from air to water and
immerse myself.
But I couldn't go more than part-way. I noticed myself stopping. Choosing
to watch the tiny flames held in clay saucers set adrift on the thick felt
of Ganga water. Waiting … but for what?
I got up. The stone's hardness unexpectedly yielding through a gossamer layer
of foot dust. Skin, oil, a blood-gold sun, and the occasional charred limb
bobbing on the far side of the bank. To copy the other pilgrims and immerse
myself would invite the pain of hollowness. A kind of betrayal of the sincerity
around me and a pantomime of a nascent understanding that had yet to find
its proper form.
Now I see that my interest was becoming anthropological: to watch the pull
of pilgrimage for others and see the dynamics of worship. It was a kind of
window-shopping in the spiritual supermarket, invigorated by the vitality
of others' devotion - staying outside while looking in. At the time I didn't
know. It was exciting just to be there, while invisible and at a safe distance.
A self-contained figure parted the liquid crowd. An old man undressed and
performed his brief puja before stepping into the heavy green water. His tears
dissolved on the Ganges's warm skin, hardly breaking the surface. Public and
private implode. Another intimate communion in the few square centimetres
he maintained against the excitement that was threatening to intrude.
Before long, my experience of being among pilgrims had become captivating.
Observation became a vocation and I spent 10 years writing and making documentary
films, particularly focusing on people grappling with personal and political
journeys. I started to notice a spiritual element to most stories I encountered.
At the Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City; at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall;
in the Black Baptist ministries of Washington DC; at the first full Easter
Day service in Kyrghyzstan at the end of Soviet rule; among the last survivors
of the Piscataway tribe on the Potomac, or the Inuit performing tribal rituals
in the Arctic. The urge to worship and seek answers through journeys was a
force to which I kept returning.
When the votes were safely cast in Cape Town in 1994, the sense of overwhelming
joy as new opportunity was born eventually gave way to an unsettling personal
undertow. It was time to leave, yet I couldn't say I knew how the next journey
would become fully meaningful.
you can't catch a train to the transcendental. Before the enigma of arrival
is the detail of departure. How do you leave? How much is Going Forth, how
much is running away? The urge to go may be inspired; we glimpse a vision
of devotion - perhaps our lips are brushed by the 'beating of angels' wings'.
Being on a journey means being true to the insight of dissatisfaction. Letting
this energy inform our search so that inner progression caresses the outer.
My teacher Sangharakshita's understanding embraces such apparently contradictory
impulses: 'It is a journey from the surface of things to the depths, from
the conscious to the unconscious mind, from brain cells to bloodstream (as
DH Lawrence might say), from the modern to the archaic, from the present to
the past, from the rational to the irrational. In order to go forward we have
to go back, or rather, we have to go forward and back at the same time.' (The
Journey to Il Convento)
I encountered my first Buddhist pilgrimage in the Sri Lankan hill station
of Kandy, at Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Here annual
homage is offered during the brief exposition of
the 'Buddha's tooth' during the Esala Perahera. One temple wing is
dedicated to murals depicting the Buddha's life, the chocolate-box pictures
including the local legend of how the tooth passed on its treacherous journey
across the sub-continent to its current home.
By midday, two hours before the first pilgrims were admitted into the temple
quarters, a festive crowd stretched around Sri Wickarama-singhe's stunning
lake for over a mile. The pilgrims' devotion was captivating, by turns excited
and trepidatious. At last we were ushered forth. After the anticipation, time
dissolved and the moment of tooth-communion was suddenly on us and then passed
so briefly that I was still preparing for the event when it had evaporated.
In frustration I broke from the line and moved to the back of the canopied
chamber to watch pilgrims file past. Offering their blessings, the stream
of faces became individuated. Hunched old women; young fathers pointing baby
faces at the Indian incisor. Reverence was met by the monks' expressions of
profound boredom. One chewed pan as he waved a fly whisk towards the tooth.
The tooth itself is a huge canine perhaps one and a half inches long. I couldn't
imagine how this vast chopper could be so unequivocally revered as a human
growth. (The temple priests reportedly refused to have the tooth carbon-dated.)
When I asked pilgrims and monks, they didn't seem bothered by my scepticism.
It clearly didn't matter what size the tooth was, 'because in those days men
were big and the Buddha even more so,' a layman added helpfully. Everyone
wanted to believe that the tooth was real and that was what counted.
No teaching was offered, but the wide brass trays poured cash, and flowers
flooded the shrine, soon to be swept up and tossed out. It was easy to see
how the Sinhala Buddhist establishment capitalised on the icon by propagating
the convenient belief that a Kandyan ruler would only thrive if the tooth
and its temple were protected.
spiritual progress is alakshana (unmarked). There are no pips on the shoulder,
no easy codes. Not even orange robes. The tooth today is an enamel cash register
and pilgrimage is big business, yet no one could explain how what felt like
bovine devotion was in the spirit of or added to an understanding of the Dharma.
Without this the essence is lost, leaving empty ritual. This wasn't pilgrimage,
it was Disney. Pilgrimage and its ritual journeys thus degenerate into a kind
of industry supporting a great network of bhikkhus of varying credibility.
The American poet Andrew Schelling of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics captures the process of pilgrimage like this:
'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 … 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 must be prepared to shed the husk
of personality, or even the body, like a worn-out coat.'
Pilgrimage is the antithesis of escapism. The key is the motivation for movements.
Henry Thoreau insists that for the true pilgrim the starting point marks an
irrevocable departure: '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 to walk.'
True pilgrims turn the outer on the inner, letting the inner inform the outer.
Moving to the sacred place is not only a metaphor but an outward manifestation
of an inner shift. My own journey seemed muddled and far off even as it whispered
with insistence. It was time to continue the search but this time in conditions
that could clarify a truer perspective.
There's no train to the transcendental, but there is a Rajdhani deluxe-super-fast
that sprints from Delhi to Bhopal in 10 hours. From there the roads wind across
to Sanchi, arguably the world's finest early Buddhist site. Here I started
to walk. The original route that connected the stupa complex with the ancient
city of Vidisha flickers up through Chikni Ghat. Occasional flagstones worn
smooth under centuries of pilgrim feet still shine white on the otherwise
craggy ochre hillside. A golden thread had unravelled towards this place.
The stupa one sees today encases a smaller and earlier one built by the great
Mauryan emperor Ashoka, two centuries after the Buddha. He was drawn to the
compassion of Buddhism and became the most effective patron of Buddhism in
Indian history, proclaiming its teachings across his vast empire. Ashoka's
edicts, pillars and stupas bear testimony to his zeal and during his reign
the Sanchi stupa was first laid out.
The simplicity of the central stupa contrasts with the exuberant
carving on all four toranas (gateways). Their sculptural detail, and its desire
to communicate the Dharma, crowd the front and rear faces of all four toranas
with narrative in homage and celebration. Sanchi bears witness to the realisation
of a new kind of consciousness that speaks ever-powerfully to pilgrims across
the millennia.
In the silence of the immaculately maintained site, tourists took their cue
from the pilgrims quietly circling the stupa railings. To watch the daily
play of light on the stone is a kind of perfection. Sunset in front of the
western gateway turned the surface of the Buddha figures into a kind of skin.
Not since I was a child of six looking at the Vatican's Pietà had sculpture
held me so fully. This time the toranas stood metaphorically as Dharma doors
- gateways with no gate.
Pilgrimage is a mythic journey that graduates with succeeding levels of insight.
Some will achieve it without leaving home. But most people who go forth will
also seek a literal expression. An inner journey will be paralleled by an
outer journey. Watching the sun drop between the architraves at Sanchi, I
knew I had travelled far but I had hardly begun.