Is there anything that motivates you to travel? Want to see something, some place? Pilgrimages have long been part of the human experience even though you might never have made one. Or have you? What’s this I hear about your going to a resort, a vacation spot, a scenic place? Tell me, now, what motivated you to go out of your way just to see something or be somewhere you deemed special and maybe still deem special? I think there’s a bit of pilgrimage in many trips.
We definitely have some obsession with special places, especially those we associate with individuals who have left their mark on humanity. Hyecho, for example, traveled in the eighth century the length and breadth of the Buddhist world from the Korean peninsula to Iran and back along the Silk Road to Wutaishan, the sacred mountain, keeping a journal about his experiences and Buddhism’s variations and “special places.”* His three-year pilgrimage is less well known than other famous jaunts, such as Marco Polo’s, but, is now available to us, and it relates something of the nature of pilgrimages: That they aren’t just visits to one place, that they stretch places.
We travel to a place because the place is special for various reasons: Historical, political, religious, academic, personal, recreational, social, etc. On the way we find that the going itself warps place, elongates it. The journey to and from is a stretched-out place along the route of which we discover new significance. Whereas it is true that some casual travelers never look out the window, that many people prefer an aisle seat, headphones, and IPads over views of the journey or stops between points A and B, many of us find the journey itself to be both a source of enlightenment and a new end-in-itself.
Regardless of the significance you find in a place, you eventually come to realize that no place exists outside a context. Here’s an example.
Ah! Westerner. You travel a road or fly to a place, say the Acropolis, noting that you are going there because you believe it represents the beginning of the way you, a Westerner, think. You know that you “think Greek,” that most of what you act on is the product of two influences: your biology and your cultural history. And although you realize that “thinking Greek” is a way of understanding wrought by many ancient philosophers, many who lived outside the ancient landscape of Greece itself, you make the Parthenon a pilgrimage site because it represents all those sundry components in your philosophical makeup. Or, you are a Roman Catholic headed to St. Peter’s or a Lutheran headed to Castle Church in Wittenberg. But even at either of those two places you realize that an intellectual road leads from Rome to Wittenberg and from Rome to the Parthenon. You see the entire western civilization rooted in one symbol, the Parthenon, a ruin that you envision in its ancient glory as it sat atop the Acropolis.
Your use of any place to represent all historical or intellectual roads that led to and from its symbolic significance is rooted in a desire for a center of some kind, a place for a tether of being, your being. You did not evolve in an emptiness. You carry with you the route back to your source—or to many sources. That route might even take you to a vacation spot or to a mountaintop for some exhilarating view or relaxation. You are what you are, and maybe what you are is rooted in beauty and leisure. Play, after all, is a significant part of your life, even if you have chosen to ignore or reject it under the pressure of adulthood. But make no mistake, whether for a simpler life or the fulfillment of a quest, you are on a pilgrimage; you are trying to find that special place that calls for your return or presence. Yet, you are much like Chaucer’s pilgrims in that the stories along the way are at least as significant as the place you strive to reach.
*Lopez, Jr. Donald S. with others. Hyecho’s Journey : The World of Buddhism . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017.
We definitely have some obsession with special places, especially those we associate with individuals who have left their mark on humanity. Hyecho, for example, traveled in the eighth century the length and breadth of the Buddhist world from the Korean peninsula to Iran and back along the Silk Road to Wutaishan, the sacred mountain, keeping a journal about his experiences and Buddhism’s variations and “special places.”* His three-year pilgrimage is less well known than other famous jaunts, such as Marco Polo’s, but, is now available to us, and it relates something of the nature of pilgrimages: That they aren’t just visits to one place, that they stretch places.
We travel to a place because the place is special for various reasons: Historical, political, religious, academic, personal, recreational, social, etc. On the way we find that the going itself warps place, elongates it. The journey to and from is a stretched-out place along the route of which we discover new significance. Whereas it is true that some casual travelers never look out the window, that many people prefer an aisle seat, headphones, and IPads over views of the journey or stops between points A and B, many of us find the journey itself to be both a source of enlightenment and a new end-in-itself.
Regardless of the significance you find in a place, you eventually come to realize that no place exists outside a context. Here’s an example.
Ah! Westerner. You travel a road or fly to a place, say the Acropolis, noting that you are going there because you believe it represents the beginning of the way you, a Westerner, think. You know that you “think Greek,” that most of what you act on is the product of two influences: your biology and your cultural history. And although you realize that “thinking Greek” is a way of understanding wrought by many ancient philosophers, many who lived outside the ancient landscape of Greece itself, you make the Parthenon a pilgrimage site because it represents all those sundry components in your philosophical makeup. Or, you are a Roman Catholic headed to St. Peter’s or a Lutheran headed to Castle Church in Wittenberg. But even at either of those two places you realize that an intellectual road leads from Rome to Wittenberg and from Rome to the Parthenon. You see the entire western civilization rooted in one symbol, the Parthenon, a ruin that you envision in its ancient glory as it sat atop the Acropolis.
Your use of any place to represent all historical or intellectual roads that led to and from its symbolic significance is rooted in a desire for a center of some kind, a place for a tether of being, your being. You did not evolve in an emptiness. You carry with you the route back to your source—or to many sources. That route might even take you to a vacation spot or to a mountaintop for some exhilarating view or relaxation. You are what you are, and maybe what you are is rooted in beauty and leisure. Play, after all, is a significant part of your life, even if you have chosen to ignore or reject it under the pressure of adulthood. But make no mistake, whether for a simpler life or the fulfillment of a quest, you are on a pilgrimage; you are trying to find that special place that calls for your return or presence. Yet, you are much like Chaucer’s pilgrims in that the stories along the way are at least as significant as the place you strive to reach.
*Lopez, Jr. Donald S. with others. Hyecho’s Journey : The World of Buddhism . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017.
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