Two Encounters with Pilgrimmage

Straw sandals traditionally used by pilgrims in Japan hanging on a temple gate. 

The Ancients well knew that the combination of energies, both human and divine, required for pilgrimage prepare the path to insight like nothing else. This sacred, time out of time journey, must be a marvellous zone of space-time for close encounters with ten thousand halos! The demands on one's attention, enthusiasm, body and the mind are surely concentrating, and loosening, and shaking up of the you you thought you knew. New dimensions of what it means to be human and alive are, by all accounts, to be anticipated.

So I believe. I'm also encouraged to believe it is a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. I've done one memorably long walk on the Annapurna circuit  in the Himalayas, and I wonder if is it mere fantasy to dream that an added dimension exists on pilgrimage, drawing the heart to higher, deeper things? I felt myself raised by the experience of that long walk, but I have not put my mind to doing pilgrimage (yet?) despite my more or less regular practice of praying with my feet. I live a train ride away from a very well-known Japanese pilgrim trail and even nearer to parts of a lesser known walk dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon. Pilgrimage is, I think, a particular grace, a calling of a kind. And not, from all I have read, to be undertaken casually. Why on earth bother? It should be purposeful. Still, I suppose there are as many reasons for the journey as there are pilgrims.

In the past week I have been reflecting on a terrific interview with a pilgrim (Ailsa Piper) who completed the Santiago de Compostela in Spain and wrote a book about her experiences. The interview, done by the inimitable Rachel Kohn on the Australian Radio National show called The Spirit of Things, was, as usual, excellent. I highly recommend a listen. It runs about an hour.

There's something very fragile about describing a spiritual journey to a general audience for there are hazards aplenty in autobiographical writing. Not the least of them being the temptation of self-deception. I have recently finished a book whose author ran crashingly into many, if not all, of these hazards while recounting her pilgrimage (run) around the 88 temples on the island of Shikoku. The final straw came at temple 88, the final and symbolic point of Enlightenment, a point she used to regale us with the (humourous?) cat & mousing of television crews trying to get  footage of her approach to 'Enlightenment'. Certainly, and perhaps unconsciously on her part, we are left in no doubt about who the star of the show was meant to be: HER! The writer had made occasional reference to the dying necessarily involved in pilgrimage. But the most apparent form of dying that she shared occurred in her frequent references to blisters. The whole 'dying to self' appeared to have been a hastily swallowed but poorly digested insight.

I'm trying to work out why it felt cheap and disappointing, quite apart from its rather obvious self-aggrandising bent. I had high hopes. I suppose one reason could be that, when you read a book about pilgrimage you want to feel like you are traveling with the traveler/writer and sharing in some way in their experience of transformation. Being lifted somehow from your own daily cares and carried along. I did not connect with the folksy tone the writer adopted at times including interjections like "Whoa Nelly!" and "Shit! I forgot to pray for X-san", the constant name-dropping (nice for those involved, but with no context, actually meaningless for the reading public) and nor did I get the point of untranslated lines of prayer peppered in the narrative, particularly concentrated toward the end. (I suspect there was some kind of superstitious 'seasoning' going on here. If it was, the magic dust failed to transport me beyond the jejune character of the narrative.)

The end of the road in this book was one Great Relief.

Good autobiographical writing, like the painted icon, points beyond the writing itself to deeper truths that allow for the weaving of insight. There is something immensely powerful and positively transformative about a likable and trustworthy narrator who bears the heart and bears it humbly. This seems to me to be particularly important to the pilgrimage narrative. I don't know if this kind of writing can honestly be done in a secular way, or via an adopted practice (Esoteric Shingon Buddhism in this case). Anyway, I am looking forward to reading Ailsa Piper's book when I can get my hands on it.

I'm not going to mention the locally written book by name because it is hard work to write a book. However, if you are into a sort of Japanese da Vinci Code cracker set around the same areas in Japan and taking in a good bit of the 88 temple journey, I did enjoy Hidden Buddhas by Liza Dalby. She has written a couple of very enjoyable novels centered in Japan which I can heartily recommend.