Of the many ways to travel on a Buddhist pilgrimage, walking is usually considered to be the most challenging, rewarding, and meritorious. It has the greatest potential to transform the pilgrim. In this chapter, I consider three accounts of long walking pilgrimages: two following Japan’s eighty-eight-temple Shikoku circuit and a foot journey to sites in Nepal and India associated with the Buddha’s life. In contrasting ways, the authors of these Western Buddhist travel narratives affirm the reality of personal transformation in the course of a demanding long-distance walk. At the same time, each author shows that striving for enlightenment continues and bad habits are still deeply entrenched. A common concern in these narratives is how walking leads to both unselfing and self-understanding, experiences that seem contradictory or incompatible yet are linked.

The most famous Buddhist pilgrimage is the 1,000-mile circular route around the Japanese island of Shikoku, which visits eighty-eight temples associated with Kobo Daishi (774–835), also known as Kukai. He traveled to China to study Tantric (sometimes called Esoteric) Buddhism and when he returned to Japan organized the Shingon school. One of its main centers is Koya-san (Mount Koya), not far from Osaka and Nara, which is considered the start of the Shikoku pilgrimage route. Kobo Daishi is often called the greatest figure in the history of Japanese religion. He was a priest, wandering holy man, poet, scholar, calligrapher, artist, and a civil engineer and social worker who benefited many people’s lives. Shikoku pilgrims have faith that this “great master” (Daishi) accompanies or may encounter them along their route.

In 1985, Oliver Statler published Japanese Pilgrimage, a book that combines his own experiences walking the Shikoku circuit with historical reconstruction of what is known about Kobo Daishi, interpretation of how the pilgrimage evolved over centuries, and impressions of contemporary Japanese religious life. Born in 1915, Statler began working in Japan in a civil service position with the US Army in 1947. He lived in Japan for most of the next three decades, eventually settling in Hawaii until his death in 2002. Japanese Pilgrimage grew out of Statler’s research for an earlier book, Japanese Inn, because the ways that travelers are housed and cared for originated in lodging for pilgrims. As explained in the postscript, Statler visited Shikoku many times beginning in 1961 and completed the entire pilgrimage in 1968. A second full circuit in 1971, accompanied by Nobuo Morikawa, was the source of most of the autobiographical incidents he recounts. Japanese Pilgrimage describes Statler’s encounters and acute observations along the route, but it is reticent about his own religious orientation. While it is evident that he understands and appreciates many aspects of Japanese religious life, it is not clear whether or to what extent he considers himself a Buddhist. Statler does not discuss the idea of no-self or portray dramatic moments when ordinary consciousness was altered. Nonetheless, in several ways his descriptions of the Shikoku pilgrimage in the past and the present revolve around the topic of personal transformation as a result of walking the path. As his personal engagement in the pilgrimage increases, Oliver Statler seems to be considering whether he, too, could be transformed.

Another kind of transformation that Statler traces involves the figure of Kobo Daishi. The first of the three sections of Japanese Pilgrimage, “Master,” distills what can be discerned about the historical Kobo Daishi in the many legends and stories about him: “Though such tales interest me I keep searching for the flesh-and-blood Daishi, the man who lived from 774 to 835” (35).Footnote ¹ Like the search for the historical Jesus, certainty about most of Kobo Daishi’s life is impossible. Ancient legends were grafted on to the figure of the Daishi, and stories were invented later to promote certain temples or political or religious interests. Tales about the Daishi and Shikoku locations reflect the heritage of Shinto, with its shamans and reverence for mountains and other sacred places. Legends about the Daishi’s services to the common people are influenced by his precursors and later holy men who organized villagers to build roads, bridges, dams, and dikes. Although Statler shares most Western readers’ interest in distinguishing the historical Kobo Daishi (his “true self”?) from myths about him, he makes it clear that this quest is probably futile and misses what is most important about the Master’s presence on the Shikoku pilgrimage trail.

The book’s second section, “Savior,” describes how Kobo Daishi took on a salvific role in Japanese popular religion. Stories about the holy man reflect the influence of other figures associated with Mount Koya who wandered freely through the countryside, independent of the court and priestly hierarchy. “The Daishi’s life was one of the greatest that any Japanese has ever lived but as it receded into the mists of time the great master that he had been was forgotten. In his place the holy men evoked a miracle worker, a deity, a savior” (159). The figure of Kobo Daishi fuses several different paths to salvation: austerity and asceticism, meditation, reliance on supernatural power, and service to the common people. Many stories about miraculous events attributed to the Daishi began as legends about other heroes, saints, and local deities such as Kokuzo. Like selves, stories mutate. Guidebook accounts, temple priests’ anecdotes, and local legends diverge, and multiple versions of key events arise, fade, or merge with other stories. The many tales about the holy man reflect the diverse ways in which the Japanese people have sought and found salvation from various forms of suffering. Like selves, stories mutate, and Kobo Daishi continues to be transformed.

Stories about various henro (pilgrims) also dramatize transformation. Emon Saburo, the archetypal first pilgrim, models the connection between walking and personal change. He was a rich and greedy man who refused to give alms to the Daishi. When his children died, he was stricken with remorse. Emon Saburo set out to find Kobo Daishi and beg for forgiveness. He circled Shikoku many times until, near death, he finally met the Daishi and was granted absolution. The most significant change in Saburo did not come when he was forgiven or faced death but when he set forth on his journey, humbled and repentant. His legend inspires a central theme in the Shikoku pilgrimage: seen or unseen, Kobo Daishi always accompanies the henro. He can encounter a pilgrim at any moment, in any guise. The Emon Saburo story stresses the importance of generosity for pilgrims and for residents of Shikoku, who often bless passing henro, ask for a blessing, and assist in material ways. At the heart of the Shikoku pilgrimage is the transformation of the human heart that accompanies a compassionate response to need or suffering.

In the final section of the book, “Pilgrims,” Statler recounts stories of henro who experienced transformation, most often in the form of healing. Local legends and temple attendants describe miraculous cures of disease. Passing henro explain their motivation in terms of a search for improved health, pregnancy, or better employment. Others walk to express gratitude for success or recovery, or they are escaping a meaningless job or empty relationship and trying to discern their future direction. An extract from a young woman’s diary describes a 1918 pilgrimage when she was suffering from depression. At the outset, she forms several resolves, including “to accept whatever happened, however unexpected, without anxiety” and “not to cling to life tenaciously” (273–274). She describes agonizing loneliness and concerted efforts to change herself into a stronger person. We do not learn whether this woman believed that she had been transformed, but her resolution and courage as she walks are a striking contrast with her past self. Her persistence in spite of suffering marks a turning point in her life; she later became a prominent writer. In various ways, then, henro seek and often experience a fundamental change in their lives.

All this detailed information about Kobo Daishi, Japanese religion, and the stories of individual henro is interwoven with Statler’s account of his own circuit of the eighty-eight temples, which synthesizes incidents from several walking tours and two years of residence on Shikoku. The personal religious dimensions of this travel narrative are a significant if understated dimension of Japanese Pilgrimage. There are several ways in which Statler explores the possibility of transformation in his own life, even though he tells us very little about himself before or after the pilgrimage. The most dramatic incident in his journey comes when he fails to heed a request to act as a healer. Having accepted an invitation to have tea in a woman’s home, he is asked to examine his host’s daughter, who suffers from a chest condition. When he thinks he is about to be asked to perform a prayer ritual, Statler becomes intensely uncomfortable with the role of faith healer or shaman:

Statler apologizes, tells the family to call a doctor, and flees. The doctor’s son who avoided his father’s profession refuses to act like his father, as if he were stuck in a conception of himself as “not like Dad.”

He soon regrets his hasty escape and learns what he should have done: pass over the girl’s body his copy of the album that pilgrims carry. When he did not perform this shamanic ritual, which might have helped the sick girl, he avoided the transformation that can come with becoming a henro. A change in one’s identity is symbolized outwardly when one dons a pilgrim’s white robe and carries a staff; a pilgrim’s inner change should include accepting that others may respond to one as Kobo Daishi and acting appropriately. When Statler refused to act as a healer who performs a ritualized role, he failed to act as Kobo Daishi to a faithful believer. He turned away from an opportunity for unselfing. Taking part in a ritual can alter one’s sense of self and lead to transformation. Statler had realized this earlier when he described how, when Kobo Daishi imitated the deity Kokuzo, he took on his virtues and powers: “Imitation, emulation, identification—these are steps we all take in one way or another as we are molded or mold ourselves” (64). That he fails to put in practice this understanding of performative action teaches as much about transformation as would a more willing and graceful adaptability to the role that he was asked to play.

In the same chapter as his encounter with the sick girl, Statler witnesses a fire ritual (goma) performed by the priest of a bangai, an unofficial temple off the main pilgrimage route. The goma ritual, practiced in various ways by different priests, involves mysterious rites of exorcism, healing, purification, and “making our wishes come true” (202). The priest prays that Statler and Morikawa will complete their pilgrimage safely and then, to Statler’s amazement, lifts and holds him outstretched over the fire. The priest answers questions from local people about their health, troubles, and future fortunes. Statler is disturbed by this ritual and wonders if the priest abuses people’s faith in him: “Is this priest exploiting superstition or do people need what he offers? I truly believe that faith can work miracles. I know that all religion has an element of magic. But how slippery is the line between seeking enlightenment in this world and seeking favors—the priest said ‘happiness’” (204). He asks several other priests about the place of faith and esoteric rituals in Shingon Buddhism and continues to be troubled. Near the end of the pilgrimage, he decides to return to the priest who did the goma ritual, to do so crossing the island on a train. Statler asks the priest a question that has haunted him: “If someone comes to you with a disease that a doctor could help, do you recommend that he or she see a doctor—as well as offering your help through prayer?” (206). The priest replies that he always asks first if they have been to a doctor, and if not he urges them to do so. This answer satisfies Statler. The priest values scientific medicine and also believes that there are things that cannot be explained by science. In this conversation and other ruminations, Statler emphasizes the important role of faith in personal transformations, including healing. He also points out the limits of faith and the necessity of human efforts in healing and in any serious quest for transformation.

Statler’s interest in faith is unusual among Western travel writers drawn to Buddhism, many of whom see that tradition as utterly different from monotheism’s demand for belief in God. Westerners tend to stress motifs such as the Buddha’s advice to verify his teachings in one’s own experience and his dismissals of otherworldly speculation. The appeal of meditation for many Western adherents is that one relies not on supernatural power to find peace of mind but rather on one’s own persistent practice. Statler, however, sees in the Shikoku pilgrimage and in the figure of Kobo Daishi a blending and synthesis of religious impulses that are often set against each other: faith in a power beyond the self and the importance of willed effort. Throughout Japanese Pilgrimage, he documents both the indispensable role of faith in Kobo Daishi and the need for a pilgrim’s deliberate striving.

Statler explores conflicting Japanese views of whether personal transformation comes about through human initiative or faith in divine action. Many pilgrims avow faith in the power of Amida Buddha, in keeping with a primary emphasis in Pure Land Buddhism but in contrast with certain of Kobo Daishi’s teachings. The hymns sung at many Shikoku temples express faith in Amida: “The words of almost all of them are deeply dyed not with Kobo Daishi’s assurance that man can attain Buddhahood in this existence, but with the holy men’s faith in Amida’s paradise of the next world” (156). Priests and holy men created myths about Kobo Daishi that portray his supernatural powers or represent him as a deity, such as Miroku, the future Buddha. Statler expresses reservations about the way these priests stress the importance of faith, and he even asserts that this is inconsistent with Kobo Daishi’s approach: “Their message was incompatible with the Daishi’s teaching. Dainichi, not Amida, was central in the Daishi’s thought; to the Daishi, Mount Koya was a place for intense meditation, not a gateway to paradise; the Daishi had not spoken of a paradise after death. These distinctions were beyond the holy men” (99). Even with these reservations, Statler’s appreciation of the central place of faith in Japanese pilgrimage is unusual among Western travelers, most of whom, in keeping with their own religious orientation, dismiss theology, the supernatural, and future worlds and instead describe Buddhism as a way of life that depends on one’s own efforts and perhaps a supportive community.

One can hardly ignore the necessity of human effort in the 1,000-mile Shikoku pilgrimage or the Shingon Buddhism established by Kobo Daishi. The essence of Shingon Buddhism is “the conviction that man can attain Buddhahood ‘in this very existence’—not after traditional Buddhism’s countless cycles of birth, rebirth, and misery, but, with faith and practice, in the here and now” (77). Although Statler points out the contrast between the Daishi’s example of struggle to attain enlightenment in this world and faith in a future rebirth in a Pure Land, he tries to reconcile these differing understandings of how transformation comes about. One temple priest emphasizes a “both/and” approach: “To intellectuals, religion seems strange. But the point of the religious life is mental and spiritual training, and that cannot be achieved by oneself. We need help from some source like Buddha or Kobo Daishi …. The point of the pilgrimage is to improve oneself by enduring and overcoming difficulties” (260). Statler eventually comes to a similar view. Having set forth a stark choice between reliance on faith or on human effort, Statler reconciles these two dimensions of religion not in thought or doctrine but in the act of pilgrimage. The lesson of Emon Saburo, the paradigm for later henro, is to put one’s faith in Kobo Daishi and keep walking:

Strenuous effort and reliance on powers beyond the self are for most people both necessary aspects of a quest for transformation.

Walking the Shikoku pilgrimage expresses this ideal unity of faith and human effort in search of transformation. Statler criticizes those who make the circuit by motorized vehicle. Riding is a travesty of the true meaning of pilgrimage, which is linked to asceticism: “The pilgrimage is ascetic exercise for the layman. Its essence lies in the physical, mental, and spiritual demands made on the henro, and the physical, mental, and spiritual rewards that accrue” (298). Although Statler respects the earnest devotion of henro on a bus pilgrimage he once took, he could not believe that Kobo Daishi was with them “on that sense-numbing, sleep-inducing, dyspepsia-causing bus” (298). He mentions several reasons why walking is helpful in the process of healing: “I know that there are diseases it can cure. Polio or a stroke, for example, if the victim can walk at all, then the hard physical exercise (some would call it therapy) and the getting out into nature (for nature has therapeutic powers), if accompanied by faith, can work miracles—but not without faith” (195).

We can speculate further as to why prolonged walking may bring transformation. An extended walk may be beneficial because fresh air, natural beauty, exercise, and simple food on the pilgrimage route remedy the effects of urban life. A simple change of scene and clear focus on getting to the next temple may alleviate mental strains, distraction, and anxiety. For some people, the sense of accomplishment involved in completing an arduous journey provides a boost of self-confidence. Encounters on the pilgrimage route with other people, both local residents and other henro, may bring a renewed sense of connection with strangers and the special bond among travelers that Victor Turner calls communitas. The relaxed sense of time on a walking pilgrimage is different from the tight schedule of an organized motor tour of temples. A meditative, contemplative mood needs time and space to develop. The mind works differently at three and at sixty miles per hour.Footnote ²

Toward the end of his journey, Statler meditates on the pilgrimage of a prominent Kabuki actor, Ichikawa Danzo, which culminated in his suicide. In 1966, at the age of eighty-four, Danzo retired from the stage and undertook the Shikoku pilgrimage. When he was finished, he spent a few days on Shodo Island, where there is a several-days-long condensed replica of the Shikoku pilgrimage. Then he boarded a midnight ferry and in the darkness entered the water. His body was never recovered. This enigmatic suicide fascinates Statler. He collects stories about Danzo on Shikoku, visits Shodo Island, and goes to Tokyo to conduct interviews about the Danzo, looking for clues as to why he committed suicide. He learns that the great actor dreaded “becoming unpresentable” like his father, also a Kabuki legend, who when he was elderly once dozed off during a performance. Danzo explained his retirement by saying that he wanted never to exhibit any sign of senility. Statler thinks that Danzo “must have thought about death often on his pilgrimage” (313). By all accounts, he was “convincing in the role of henro” (313), and when he died in his chosen way he fulfilled his desire never to have given a poor performance. “In that respect he was spared: he was never seen unpresentable. His was an act not of desperation but of resolution. He walked out of life as he had walked off the stage, with composure. He never became a burden” (318).

Statler does not explain why he devotes so much attention to Ichikawa Danzo. In the context of this study of unselfing, the Danzo’s enigmatic suicide raises the question of whether or not he went through a transformation on his pilgrimage. In order to make his decision about how to die, perhaps he had to go through a process of unselfing, letting go of his identity, success, and fame as a renowned Kabuki actor. Statler admires the resolution with which the Danzo foresaw his inevitable decline and chose to end life on his own terms. Yet that the Danzo was terrified of giving a bad performance and could not imagine a new identity after retirement suggests desperate clinging to his conception of himself as a superlative actor. He could not learn a new role, improvise another self, or allow himself to be transformed. Danzo’s performances as actor, henro, and suicide raise questions about how much he linked his conception of his identity to these roles. At the end of his life, did he experience a radical unselfing that was necessary to choose suicide, or did he cling desperately to the identity threatened by aging? This enigmatic story is a fitting conclusion to Statler’s study of pilgrimage, in that the question of whether or not a person has been transformed is finally unknown to an outside observer, however much we may want to know this. Did Danzo successfully perform the new role of henro and become other than his former self, or does his suicide show that he was unable to realize the pilgrim’s essential goal, self-transformation in a new life? Statler’s narrative suggests this question but does not answer it.

In the final chapter of Japanese Pilgrimage, as he approaches Temple Eighty-Eight, endings of several kind loom. Statler notices many henro graves and learns that at this point many pilgrims feel unable to complete the pilgrimage. He thinks about the conclusion of his pilgrimage and how the journey has affected him. He mentions the deep connection he feels with his companion, Morikawa: “a bond forged of shared delights and discomforts, of mutual dependency, of search and discovery, each into himself and together into a new landscape” (327). Statler refers vaguely to a process of reevaluating one’s life during a pilgrimage: “They say a henro carries the baggage of his life: true, and the pilgrimage gives him time to sort out some of it” (327). He does not reveal the nature of his own “baggage,” how he sorted it, or what he dropped or carried with him into the next phase of his life.

Shikoku’s circular route symbolizes the nature of spiritual life: “This Shikoku pilgrimage is the only pilgrimage I know of that is essentially a circle. It has no beginning and no end. Like the quest for enlightenment, it is unending” (320). Statler quotes Joseph Kitagawa on the importance of the Path in Buddhism: “The important thing in Buddhism is not dogma but practice, not the goal—the mysterious and unascertainable Nirvana— but the Path … The Path is not the means to an end: the Path is the goal itself.”Footnote ³ Given the nature of the Shikoku circuit, the transformation wrought by walking it cannot be a completed and final condition, for it is an initiation into an ongoing practice. In the book’s final paragraphs, Statler heads back to Temple Number One as if he is about to begin again. He remembers a priest’s final blessing: If he is earnest, he will “to some degree be transformed.” Using this partial and enigmatic phrase, Statler assesses his own pilgrimage:

Thus does he reconcile his sense of the genuine benefits of his walking pilgrimage and the unfinished character of his lifelong spiritual journey. He is “to some degree” transformed, most evidently in his commitment to further walking on Shikoku and continued striving on a nameless spiritual path.

*

Three decades after Oliver Statler, Robert Sibley walked the entire Shikoku pilgrimage circuit continuously in fifty-four days and published The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage (2013).Footnote ⁴ The Ottawa newspaper journalist had previously written about walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.Footnote ⁵ Although Sibley refers to himself as a skeptic with a secular orientation, he found a sense of peace and detachment on the Camino: “My mind emptied of the clatter and crush of everyday life, and I felt that some epiphany, some brief transcendence, was at hand” (25). He “awakened to the spiritual life” (31) and wanted more of it. He was haunted by memories of the Santiago walk, fleeting moments when a passing sight or incident suddenly seemed tremendously significant. In contrast to these events, the things that he had been pursuing – money, a career as a journalist, and reputation – seemed of little value. He sets out on Shikoku in search of more moments of illumination and greater understanding of their pattern and meaning. Sibley is not a Buddhist and initially thinks of his walk as “a secular journey to sacred places” (4). His journey changes, however, as he learns more about the pilgrimage route and its inspiration, Kobo Daishi: “I set out on one kind of journey but ended up on a very different one” (5). Along with the meaning of his walking, his sense of himself was transformed. When Sibley describes how he changed, he does not employ the concept of no-self or use the Japanese terms mu (nothing) or ku (emptiness). He remains firmly committed to the Western idea of a coherent self. Yet he portrays several experiences when his sense of selfhood was radically altered, and he interprets these moments of unselfing using both Western concepts and certain key Japanese ideas that reflect Buddhist influence and are closely related to no-self.

After several weeks of arduous walking, Sibley begins to develop a “pilgrim mind.” This orientation is partly a matter of learning that the physical challenges and psychological difficulties of walking will pass. He must accept what can’t be changed: “My ego, that fantasy of myself as the center of the universe, had to humble itself before a reality it couldn’t control … In short, I had to get over myself” (41). An inevitable part of a long trek is pain: blisters, aching joints and muscles, periods of boredom or discouragement. Yet one need not turn pain into suffering. In non-Buddhist language, this is basic Buddhist wisdom about the ways aversion and desire can change hardship into anguish and misery.

Pilgrim mind involves resilience, equanimity, and attentiveness to hidden meanings, coincidences, and beneficial occurrences. Sibley encounters many fortuitous events. A taxi driver gives him a ride when he is exhausted, a Buddhist nun provides timely religious instruction, a fellow pilgrim helps him find new shoes to replace his too-tight boots, and local residents of Shikoku give him offerings (settai) of food, salve for his feet, or other comforts. In like manner, Sibley provides crucial assistance and encouragement to fellow pilgrims. These encounters suggest that Kobo Daishi does indeed walk the trails of Shikoku in disguise, helping pilgrims to continue their outer and inner journeys.

Pilgrim mind means openness to seeing the ordinary as extraordinary. Although Sibley worries that he is “drifting close to the shoals of mysticism” (70), he notices how small events, passing encounters, and commonplace situations inspire him to continue. At certain moments he is completely immersed in seeing his surroundings:

Sibley is reading Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior along the way. The great Japanese poet models keen perception of the everyday world and concise, startling writing: “From this attention to the everyday world, he turned ordinary experience into poetry. Bashō attempted to capture the effervescent quality of that everydayness. And that, I thought, is what made his poems a kind of pilgrimage” (80–81). When Sibley pushes beyond tiredness, he sometimes finds moments of clear vision when he glimpses the radiance of everyday life overlooked because of habits, busyness, and distraction; or pain breaks through his dim awareness of bodily sensation. Basho teaches him how to travel with a pilgrim mind that appreciates the details of everyday life and their resonances in one’s inner being. This state of mind, so poignant, uncontrollable, and fleeting, seems to heighten or extend ordinary self-consciousness so that it becomes something else.

In epiphanic moments of vision, Sibley’s ordinary sense of the division between self and world is overcome. Alone in the rain on a hill overlooking the ocean, he has an overwhelming feeling of being fully present in that obscure spot: “I exulted in the sheer awareness of myself being in the place. It was as if I were merging osmosis-like with what I saw, heard, and smelled, as if there were no veil of self-consciousness to separate me from the experience, no gap between self and world” (86). Seeing the beauty of gnarled branches in ancient forests, Sibley thinks that he understands the Japanese belief in kami, spirits that take palpable form in the natural world. While his modern, scientific, and secular outlook disdains belief in kami, another part of his being moves through the forest watching for these spirits and those of Basho and Kobo Daishi.

In the middle of the two-month walk, absorbed in the landscape and his basic needs for food and rest, Sibley feels that his former life in Canada is unreal and he has become a different person. Referring to Victor Turner’s theory of the liminal condition of the pilgrim, Sibley describes his altered sense of selfhood:

Pilgrim mind involves a different sense of temporality: the henro learns to slow down, observe the natural world more closely, and be grateful for small comforts and gestures. As the journey approaches its finish, this present-moment awareness becomes harder to attain as Sibley begins to think about what he will do after the walk and as the clustering of temples at the end makes him inattentive to their subtle differences. The experience of walking changes as the goal of completing the pilgrimage displaces receptivity to whatever comes his way.

Sibley uses both Western and Asian frameworks to explore the meaning of his brief epiphanies. For instance, he has a momentary vision of his bento box lunch as a tiny landscape:

Sibley calls his bento box vision a moment of yoin, using a Japanese term for moments of intense awareness. This word can refer to the resonance or reverberation of a bell, to moments of deep feeling between loved ones, or to “situations where the ordinary turns extraordinary—where, as it seems, you are on the threshold of some degree of transcendence, modest or otherwise” (126). This kind of experience is rendered in Basho’s haiku when a grazing horse is surprised to pull up a mouthful of roses, and when Basho perceives the laces of his sandals as iris flowers. Basho’s poems record and transmit a moment of vivid apprehension when ordinary self-consciousness drops away: “a second or two when the gap between the perception of the object and the awareness of the experience disappeared, and we knew the essence of that thing” (126). When a bell sounds, a coincidence resonates, or omens and portents hum with significance, then attention is so focused on that event or image that the observer feels merged with the world.

Another way in which Sibley interprets his experiences of “the mysticism of the ordinary” (using a phrased coined by James Carse) is to see them in terms of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Sometimes a person feels that outer and inner events have a meaningful relationship even though there is no causal connection between them. Jung was keenly interested in these intuitions of an uncanny equivalence or relationship between physical and psychic events. For Sibley, beneficial coincidences and his sense of inner resonance with certain sights and images elicit a feeling that he is part of a hidden wholeness. During one such moment of intuited connectedness, he views himself walking as if from another place: “I seemed to float above myself, watching as my body did the hard work of climbing up a slope or scrambling over rocks while my mind wandered on its own” (135). Like the concept of yoin, Jung’s ideas about synchronicity are a possible lens for making sense of experiences of unselfing when a person senses the interdependence of all being and the resonance of an outer event and an intuition.

Another example of how Sibley interprets an experience of unselfing with contrasting intellectual frameworks concerns what happens in a bangai, an unnumbered temple off the official pilgrimage circuit, when Sibley tries an ascetic meditative technique. For Zen monks, standing under an ice-cold waterfall is supposed to shock one into greater awareness. Referring to Ian Reader’s study of Japanese religions, Sibley describes the goal of pushing the body to its limits as the “dropping off of body and mind” (137).Footnote ⁶ Three times he steps into the icy water. Stunned and woozy, he slowly recovers his wits; then, sitting alone in the twilight, he has a flashback memory of losing consciousness as a child: “slowly, through some alchemy of solitude, silence, and the day’s exertions, stillness settled on me. The world fell away, and the memory of an all-but-forgotten incident from my childhood took over my mind: the day I fell off a playground swing and knocked myself out” (140). Viewing himself as a boy and as a tired but exhilarated pilgrim, Sibley feels dislocated, at once a child, a man, and a distant observer of both. This perspective seems placed outside his usual self and is both intimately engaged in the world and curiously detached from it.

Interpreting this out-of-body, atemporal awareness, Sibley compares it to makyo, a Zen term for the point in meditation when hallucinations, buried memories, and strange mental phenomena arise. This is not enlightenment, but it is sometimes a stage on the way, for it suggests that the mind’s insistence on logic and rational consistency is breaking down. Sibley takes this unusual event as a sign that his pilgrimage, and perhaps he himself, is changing. When he began the Shikoku circuit, he saw his walk as “an adventure in cultural exoticism” (142). At this point, he realizes that the real purpose of his journey is self-transformation: “It seemed to me at that moment that if the real purpose of my pilgrimage, however inchoately acknowledged, had been to cross some liminal threshold within myself, then this okunoin [the waterfall as an inner sanctuary] had fulfilled it” (142). His new sense of self recovers boyhood’s wide-eyed curiosity and returns to the world with a deeper sense of connection and being at home: “as I gazed around the temple, I felt as though I’d returned to the world after a long absence. I didn’t hear ash falling, but there was the rustle of leaves on an overhanging branch, the grate of gravel beneath my shoes, and the slow thudding metronome of my heart. The boy was home” (142). Sibley uses both a Japanese term deriving from Zen practice (makyo) and a Western anthropologist’s theory (Turner’s concept of the “liminal” identity of a pilgrim) to interpret this experience of an uncanny alteration of consciousness.

As Sibley’s pilgrimage draws to a close, his appreciation of community and relationships with other people becomes emphatic. He connects this to Turner’s ideal of communitas and to a distinctive aspect of Buddhist thought: karma. When he began the Shikoku circuit, Sibley intended to enjoy the company of others but to remain independent and usually solitary. However, he grows intimate with fellow pilgrims Shuji and Jun, a father and son. Jun is an impulsive and often irresponsible young man who cannot find his place in the adult world. Shuji takes him on the Shikoku pilgrimage in the hope that it will give him confidence and nurture their fragile relationship. Sibley speculates that Shuji was making the pilgrimage “to exorcise whatever bad karma he and his family had inherited in the hope of changing his fate and Jun’s” (145). The notion of karma holds that the consequences of action reverberate in the world, including effects on a person’s later reincarnations. The idea that a person inherits and influences the karma of other people contrasts starkly with the modern Western belief in a discrete, independent self. Although Sibley wants to dismiss the idea of karma, he finds himself acting as if it were true as he tries to help Shuji and Jun, encouraging them to continue and reciting chants and prayers with them. He participates in ritual actions that nurture the bond among companions and shows increasing awareness of how much fellow henro care about and need each other. When Jun strikes his father and runs away, it is Sibley who insists that the son apologize to his father and to Sibley and another fellow traveler. Jun had disturbed wa, group harmony: “Wa privileges good relations with others over notions of individual self-assertion. It’s not that the Japanese deny individuality; rather, they recognize that individuality depends on relationships. Without others, there is no self. Wa is the glue that gives Japanese society its sense of cohesion” (149). Sibley challenges Jun to consider the consequences of his impulsive acts and make amends for selfish behavior. In this and other incidents, Sibley demonstrates that he has learned to care as much about the well-being of other people as about fulfilling his original intention to simply enjoy the scenery, learn about Japanese culture, and have a few pleasant encounters. These shifts in his orientation take place partly because of the conceptual framework he learns in Japan, which holds that there is no self apart from relationships. Sibley comes to understand interdependence and to practice compassion, both crucial Buddhist ideas connected with overcoming the illusory limits of the egoistic self. When his pilgrimage ends, Sibley affirms that one of its chief blessings was having as companions Shunji, Jun, and another pilgrim, a retired engineer named Tanaka-san. Deep friendships established on the road show the reality of communitas in pilgrimage. When vulnerable travelers depend on kindness and compassion, they make vivid the insights latent in the idea of karma. Actions have far-reaching consequences beyond what we understand, and our choices have long-term effects on our own well-being and that of others.

Sibley’s feeling of connectedness to fellow henro endures after their Shikoku circuit. He visits them in Tokyo and, when he is back in Canada, receives their letters, including thirty-three haiku that Shuji wrote during the pilgrimage that resonate with his own responses to the same places. The poems show that Shuji had been present and attentive as he walked, having his own epiphanies and finding words that take Sibley back in memory to Shikoku. This happy ending of Sibley’s travel narrative is shattered when, a few months after his return home, Sibley receives a letter from Shuji’s niece, informing him that Shuji had killed Jun and committed suicide. Like the eminent Kabuki actor Danzo, with whose story Oliver Statler ended Japanese Pilgrimage, Shuji had made the Shikoku pilgrimage as an act of expiation before he took his life. He hoped to purify himself before his horrific act of violence. So Sibley surmises, and he finds confirming details in the niece’s further account of Jun’s destructive acts after the pilgrimage.

Deeply saddened by this tragedy, Sibley wants to do something for Shuji and Jun. Working within their cultural worldview, which has come to be part of his own, he wants to “ease their karmic burden” (167), assisting in Shuji’s purpose on Shikoku. Sibley bears witness to his friendship with fellow pilgrims by participating in a ritual that would be meaningful to them. In the epilogue, he describes how, a few months after his return from Shikoku, he went to Point-No-Point, on the western coast of Vancouver Island, and gazed outward toward Japan. This journey took place within the period of seven weeks during which, many Japanese believe, a soul is judged to determine how it will be reborn. Family and friends of the deceased hold memorial services and beseech the deities to intervene in this rebirth. Way of the 88 Temples ends with Sibley on the Canadian beach by a pounding sea, reciting the Heart Sutra and reading Shuji’s haiku: “Then I bowed my head and prayed that the gods, if any existed, would give my friends a better fate in the next life” (171). Although he is not a Buddhist, Sibley’s sincere and heartfelt participation in this ritual shows how he has been changed by his pilgrimage. He is tied to his fellow pilgrims by their common endeavor, by compassion for their suffering, and by the knowledge that his being is connected to others in ways more mysterious than his secular worldview can explain. Without giving up the Western concepts and frameworks that make sense and are useful to him, he has learned to understand his experience from the perspective of Japanese cultural beliefs that bear the imprint of Buddhism. He uses a Buddhist lens to interpret many of his experiences: his increased sense of interdependence with others, moments of discerning the ordinary as extraordinary, his awareness that any particular sense of the self is variable and fleeting, and the striking incidents when awareness of mind and body simply drops away. Robert Sibley shows the validity and value of Buddhist ideas related to no-self as one way of making sense of the occasions of unselfing he experienced on his Shikoku pilgrimage.

*

A very different walking pilgrimage is depicted in Where are You Going: A Pilgrimage on Foot to the Buddhist Holy Places, which comprises two separate volumes. Rude Awakenings: Two Englishmen on Foot in Buddhism’s Holy Land (2006) recounts the first half of a six-month, 700-mile slog through Nepal and India that visits sites important in the Buddha’s life. In November and December of 1990, Ajahn Sucitto and Nick Scott flew to New Delhi and traveled by train to India’s border with Nepal. From there they walked to Lumbini, where Siddhattha Gotama was born, across the Ganges plain and through Kushinagar, where he died, to Vaishali, where he first set forth his teachings, and ended at Bodh Gaya, the setting of the Buddha’s awakening. Although the narrative concludes in the middle of their journey, Rude Awakening is presented as a self-contained travel narrative, with “all the difficulties and comedy of the pilgrimage plus a climax and resolution” (xv).Footnote ⁷

The alternating voices of the two authors express “the Buddhist understanding that realities depend on perspective” (xv). Ajahn (“revered teacher”) Sucitto is an English Theravada monk born in 1949 who later served for a decade as the abbot of Chithurst Buddhist Monastery and wrote and edited many publications on Buddhist teachings. Nick Scott, a plant ecologist and nature reserve warden of about the same age, had previously studied and practiced Buddhism as a layman. The two men had known each other for about ten years before their pilgrimage, and after it they worked together at Chithurst Monastery, running that institution and writing their travel narratives. Ajahn Sucitto characterizes their different temperaments: “I was more reticent, plodding, and tenacious by nature as befitted my birth sign of the Ox. Nick was definitely a Dragon—spontaneous, ebullient but erratic, but then, as he put it later, we made a ‘dangerous combination’—he would come up with crazy ideas, and I would resolve to stick to them, come what may” (9). Sucitto’s strong ascetic drive and strict regimen made their journey painful and difficult. He focuses relentlessly on spiritual goals and takes precautions “against being hypnotized by the spells of India” (9). He is not adept in practical situations and needs a lot of looking after. Scott, in contrast, is fascinated by sights, smells, and sensations along their route and keen to observe birds and wildlife. He handles the food and logistics, navigation, and financial transactions. While sometimes exasperated, he admires and is fond of Sucitto. The relationship between the two men demonstrates the respect and mutual dependence of monks and laity that is central in Theravada Buddhism, as well as Scott’s ideas about spiritual friendship.

A particular conception of their journey shapes the two men’s walk. “We were going on a pilgrimage, not a sightseeing tour; so the logic was to walk and be absorbed into India as much as absorbing it. A pilgrimage has to be about surrendering oneself, to allow a new centre of being to develop. To realize, rather than to travel, is a pilgrim’s aim and momentum” (5). Because they do not want to be separate from or protected from India, they make themselves vulnerable. Walking in intense heat through the rural poverty and destitution of Bihar, India’s most crowded and backward state, they endure many forms of suffering. They must deal with aversion, distress, and fear many times every day. Surrounded by curious Indians who try to engage them as they pass by, stop to eat, or camp, the two Englishmen long for privacy. Trying to protect a tiny personal space, even in the mind, creates tension and pain, and the only antidote is to let go of this craving.

As Sucitto and Scott walk across the endless fields and flat plains along the Ganges River, everywhere they go appears much the same and unremarkable. They try to focus on inner movements of heart and mind: “Progress was a matter of being undone and swallowed by the forces around me: the bantering inner and outer voices, the sweat and grime, the grit in the throat. The balance came through simply focusing on these things” (131). They are repeatedly asked: “Where are you going?” This question, which furnishes the title of the two volumes, cannot be answered in terms of spatial movement or a final spiritual goal. They try to focus on the going, not the goal, like Statler and Sibley on Shikoku. Yet much more than the pilgrims in Japan, they confront impediments, distractions, and hindrances to following their planned itinerary. They try not to resist what thwarts them but keep on keeping on. Unlike Shikoku’s well-established circuit, their route through India involves periods of wandering, getting lost, arriving at a dead end, backtracking, and reorienting their course to the next holy site.

One of the most difficult aspects of the journey is finding and consuming food according to monastic regulations. As a monk, Ajahn Sucitto does not handle money and made a vow not to request anything. He must wait for Scott or other people to offer him food, tea, or water. Scott, too, adopts the practice of not eating after midday. Sucitto wants to get all of his food in the traditional way, by receiving it on alms rounds. The strict rules for alms gathering and uncertainty about whether they will get enough to eat by noon make for many anxious and several hungry days. Unsanitary conditions mean that the two men are often weak or sick with intestinal illnesses. Tensions arise between them, for instance when Scott tries to get villagers to offer Sucitto milk mixed into their afternoon tea. Sucitto had wanted to eliminate milk as a food, but a monk may not refuse what he is offered. Suffering from dysentery and protein deficiency, the companions eventually give up their attempt to survive on alms food alone, and Scott purchases a few additional items.

Walking in India would be challenging in any case, given the searing heat, limited opportunities for washing, hazardous traffic, no reliable maps, and the threat of thieves and robbers. Making a pilgrimage while obeying monastic rules is an exhausting and debilitating ordeal. Incredibly, Sucitto vows not to lie down to sleep and spends much of every night trying to sit upright. He tries to follow all the Vinaya’s requirements, including meditating all night at the time of a full moon and half-night vigils every new moon. He plans to sleep under trees rather than under a roof and to perform lengthy chants three times a day. Seeing other monks playing volleyball and enjoying themselves, Scott comments wryly that “they seemed to be having a much easier time of being a monk than my companion … Why did it have to be so hard? Ajahn Sucitto seemed even to want it to be difficult” (216). Sucitto did become less demanding in the course of the journey, to Scott’s relief. He hints tactfully that “kindness to ourselves” is appropriate for Westerners driven by the need to accomplish something, including spiritual goals. Although neither author reflects much on this issue, their journey shows that the will asserts itself forcefully, if in disguise, in efforts at self-denial.

The pilgrimage depicted in Rude Awakenings reveals several connections to no-self and, at the end, a dramatic incident of unselfing. The contrasting temperaments of the two men sometimes grate on and irritate each other; each must overcome aversion – or better, notice and let it pass. After one grumpy moment, Sucitto consoles himself: “We were probably helping each other through all kinds of attachments if we could only realize it!” (111). The motif of developing patience recurs in the narrative, and the ideal of the Buddha as “Great Patient One” furnishes the title of the subsequent volume. In the context of this grueling ordeal, patience is a hard-won personal virtue that slowly becomes part of character. It requires overcoming one part of the self and strengthening another part; hence, it is related to both no-self and self-formation. Patience requires deliberate self-transformation as the travelers must let go of their resistance or aversion to many things encountered on the path.

Sucitto and Scott discern analogies between how Buddhism and other religions understand selflessness. For instance, Sucitto describes the origins of the Sikh religion as an attempt “to purify and point to the truths—and the false grasping—in current practices and ideas” (183). Like Buddhism, the vital spiritual impulse of the Sikh Gurus burst the bounds of Vedic Brahmanism, which had become static and inert. After an excursus on Sikh history and the hardening of identity linked to conflict with the Mughals, Sucitto laments continuing violence by and against Sikhs in India. He sees the source of violence as “the hypnosis of history fixing the future into the pattern of the past,” in contrast to the only sane alternative to fixation on brutal memories: “opening into the present” (191). A religious practice that invites such an opening is the langar, the communal Sikh meal that the travelers gratefully receive in “a Sangha of sorts” (191). Sucitto sees the heart of all religion as a yielding of the self to others, and he evaluates traditions by how well they foster this orientation and disposition.

In the chapter “Dark Angel,” Sucitto points out parallels to no-self in the history of religions, especially in relation to the Hindu goddess Kali. This fearsome figure, with her hideous fangs, garland of skulls, and bloody rituals, embodies Shiva’s relentless energy, which eventually destroys every form, including those taken by Shiva himself. “Call her Fate, Kamma, or all-devouring Time, she is the power that shapes and undoes lives that we long to call our own” (196). According to Sucitto, the “angels of transcendence” in every religious tradition have a terrifying dimension:

Buddhism’s formalized teachings about no-self are its distinctive way of conceptualizing the awareness of finitude that Sucitto discerns in other religious traditions. He asserts that a vision of the self’s annihilation can be liberating if it helps one to stop grasping at life. Let go, let go, he repeats like a mantra throughout his journey. “How you come out of the unknown, transfigured or destroyed, must depend on how you go into it. After all, dark angels always play fair. You can trust them to shatter your world” (218).

This understanding of the self’s dissolution and Sucitto’s resolution to be prepared to let it go are put to a dramatic test in the climax of the narrative, when the lives of the two travelers are threatened. They had left the Gangetic plain for forested uplands and were just three days from Bodh Gaya when they were attacked by dacoit (robbers). When bandits armed with axes and machetes try to steal their bags, Sucitto immediately offers his life:

Luckily, the assailants grab his bag and go into the forest. Meanwhile, Scott resists them and runs away, pursued by the bandits. After a struggle, he loses the bag containing their passports, money, relics given to them as offerings, and the diary and rolls of film documenting their journey that they intended as an offering to their English sangha. Scott is seriously injured when he falls down a ravine. Surviving this nearly fatal incident makes the travelers laugh with relief. Sucitto affirms that it is good to be alive and yet “when it comes down to it, nothing really matters—all you can do is die, which you’re going to do anyway” (242). Offering his head to a man with an axe, a startling example of letting go of self, brings an exhilarating feeling of lightness and appreciation of life.

This confrontation with imminent death may be the most dramatic instance of unselfing in Western Buddhist travel narratives. Sucitto’s instinctive reaction to the threat reveals how deeply he has internalized the meaning of taking refuge and is prepared to accept whatever comes:

Sucitto displays a remarkably undefended response to the possibility of being murdered and, so quickly, the inevitable arising of delicious self-approval. The incident depicts both the possibility of letting go by an act of unselfing and the inevitable “black hole” one falls into when, by determining to learn from a mistake and take control of future experience, one thereby sets up again the cycle of expectation and disappointment: “‘I’ll remember and do better next time,’ chirps the mind, assuming ownership and authority, and thereby paves the way for the next black hole when it can’t bring about the same process. The whole trap was set around ‘I am’: the need to get life under control by figuring it out or attaining something” (230).

Nick Scott asserts that Sucitto did the right thing in the forest when he stayed calm and gave the robbers what they wanted. In contrast, his resistance created a frenzy that could have gotten them both killed. When they survived the attack, he, too, felt jubilant. Having lost all their possessions, he felt released from care, floating free of this bond to ordinary selfhood. However, the travelers soon return from this moment of unselfing to the world of decisions, assertion, and ownership. When they report the crime to the police, a comedy of bureaucratic evasion and inefficiency turns tragic: the police jeep in which they are speeding strikes and kills a pedestrian. Sucitto and Scott believe that their own impatience and agitation goaded an unskilled police officer to drive the jeep. By their fierce desire to recover their stolen things, they created as much frenzied energy as the robbers. After the interlude of detached floating, says Sucitto, “I had landed in India” (250). He feels responsible for a brutal death.

Giving up on dealing with the police, the two men decide to resume their pilgrimage for at least a few more days to Bodh Gaya. They are given a few clothes by other Buddhists and walk to the place where the Buddha was enlightened. They try to take with them their new perspective, “to go back with kindness to the human realm: whatever happened, to connect to it; not to fight, not to complain, not to push” (254). Instead, they fall back into old patterns of aversion and attachment: “How quickly, how effortlessly, the world arises!” (256). The mind, ever moving like a stream, can no more rest in a moment of unselfing than in any other condition.

The final chapter of the book, “The Time of Gifts,” describes the arrival of the two Englishmen in Bodh Gaya at Christmas. The motif of gifts refers both to generous donations the two men receive and to the Buddha’s Awakening. Sucitto’s characterization of the enlightenment of Siddhattha Gotama stresses a dialectic of self and unselfing. At the root of the problem of life is “the creation of a self that is both alienated from life and besieged by it” (264). At Bodh Gaya, Siddhattha had “seen through the picture show of identity” and “the self-perpetuating road of damma” (269). The alternative is not to try to get off this road but to understand what is happening: “To reject the process, to think of getting off the road, is just another road, another becoming, another birth. Knowing there’s no person on the road, that is Awakening” (269–270). This knowledge makes a difference in life, interrupting one’s fixation on satisfying desires. Awakening came to Siddhattha unexpectedly, like a gift or grace, and his teaching passes the gift on to his followers. A second “time of gifts” is a Christmas gathering when a group of Westerners in Bodh Gaya exchange presents that replace all the things lost in the robbery. Sucitto and Scott are deeply moved by this kindness and generosity, which enables them to pursue their original plan for the pilgrimage.

Did their travels transform these two individuals? Sucitto thinks that “the robbery had made us more fragile and open, and hence more capable of living as a samana should” (272). As they resume their foot journey, he hopes he will be more open to the unexpected and less resistant to whatever confronts and challenges them. He realizes that, with all its maddening chaos, he loves India. “All that was certain was that it would now be a ‘who knows’ pilgrimage” (280). Yet he knows that his ability to live according to the Way of the Buddha is limited. The fallibility and fragmentation of his life seems mirrored in the many other Buddhists gathered at Bodh Gaya. Rude Awakenings ends with a glimpse of differing Buddhist groups who comment, argue, speculate, prove, and rebuff interpretations of the Dharma, all the while continuing to suffer: “Thousands of years later, after the suttas and the sutras and the Abhidhamma and the Great Vehicle and the Thunderbolt Vehicle and Zen and Salvation Buddhism and Western Buddhism and Buddhaless Buddhism, it is still raining. In all that splash and fragmentation we forget where Awakening comes into the world” (284–285). Sucitto seems resigned to an endless cycle of remembering and forgetting the Dharma, both on his own part and in the Buddhist sangha as a whole. This recognition qualifies any claim to have been permanently transformed by a moment of unselfing or the entire journey.

The epilogue indicates that the pilgrimage continued but shifts its focus to the authors’ later activities. Ajahn Sucitto became the abbot of Chithurst Monastery, in West Sussex, England. Nick Scott joined him there, managing building projects and the woodland. They worked on the manuscript of Rude Awakenings, which was published just as both men departed from Chithurst after ten years: “Perhaps all this book and the pilgrimage ever were, were the means by which we ended up working together to complete the establishment of this monastery so it can benefit others” (288). The authors turn away from the question of whether and how travel changed each of them, instead conveying their hope that their pilgrimage, the book about it, and Chithurst Monastery will spread the Dharma to others. Rather than focusing on changes in individual character, they emphasize the hope that their common work will have beneficial effects for others. This exemplifies a different meaning of selflessness: not a personal virtue but an orientation to how one’s life affects others. In common with several other Western Buddhist travel narratives, Sucitto and Scott suggest that the most important transformation and the deepest meaning of selflessness is turning away from pondering one’s own spiritual progress.

In a second volume, Great Patient One (2010), Sucitto and Scott trace the rest of their journey: to Calcutta to replace passports and travelers’ checks, back to Bodh Gaya, and on to Varanasi, Lumbini, Katmandu, and Nepal’s border with Tibet.Footnote ⁸ As they set forth, they raise the question of whether the rest of the journey will be any different: “Perhaps the next part of the pilgrimage, if we were allowed to do it, would be different— wiser, more compassionate—even the way a pilgrimage should be” (xiii). They may be a little more flexible and patient and a bit better at observing their environment, but the changes are not striking. At the end of the book, Scott reflects on the meaning of the whole journey. As he enjoys the natural beauty and solitude of a remote valley in the Himalayas, he realizes that he had spent most of the pilgrimage looking for experiences of the sublime. This orientation resembles the way he had participated in meditation retreats by seeking a particular state of mind and suffering if it did not come. Scott recognizes this conditioned pattern without remorse or fruitless second-guessing the past:

The hope that life will be different in the future depends partly on being able to see habits of past conditioning with this kind of equanimity.

The self is expressed even in unselfing. The differences between Scott and his companion are epitomized by the ways in which they each spend a free morning in the mountains. Sucitto sits meditating in a cave while Scott climbs a boulder and gazes in wonder at the valley below them:

Bounding down the trail to lower elevations, he has “no perception of anyone at all doing it” (341). Scott experiences unselfing as a joyful feeling of merging with the natural world. The contrasting ways in which each man finds release from self are as distinctive as their conscious identities. Unselfing comes in different ways to an ascetic and a sensualist. Sucitto tends toward absorption or abstraction, while Scott is drawn by sensual delights.

Although the monk and the naturalist often grated on each other, Scott affirms that his friend’s differences furthered his own spiritual development: “Had I done the pilgrimage with someone like me, I would have learnt little and let nothing go” (345). Their journey and joint writing project “turned out to be about two people struggling to do something together rather than about what we actually achieved” (346). The often-conflicted relationship between these spiritual friends generated a subtle transformation, as if friction slowly wore away or refined their rough edges and prickly irritability.

Like Christian conversion narratives, Western Buddhist travel narratives usually portray both transformation and continuity with the author’s previous character. At the end of the book, the writer resumes ordinary life, but a Christian conversion experience or a Buddhist moment of unselfing suggests a possibly different future without claiming it. The last incident in Great Patient One shows Scott’s middle way between asserting too little or too much personal change. He has just affirmed the Buddha’s conclusion that neither sensuality nor asceticism is the right way to live. Neither self-indulgence nor rejecting the world brings serenity but rather learning to enjoy pleasures and accept difficulties without desire or aversion. He seems to have thoroughly internalized this central component of the Buddhist dharma. On the airplane back to England, however, the entire twelve-hour flight occurs between dawn and noon, the period when the Buddhist monk and his precept-observing lay companion are permitted to eat. Famished from the long ordeal in India, Scott devours his own food, requests seconds, and repeatedly raids the passing food trolley, stuffing himself until he is nauseous. Thinking he never wants to eat again, he is greeted in the airport by a group of monks bearing gifts of food. Scott is not only physically ill but feels “that sensation so familiar from the pilgrimage, that sinking feeling of having blown it again” (350). He doubts that anything has changed as he returns to the cycle of birth and death created by greed, aversion, and delusion.

Yet the final paragraph of the book affirms otherwise:

Like Statler’s assertion that he was “to some degree transformed” by his long pilgrimage, Scott affirms limited but significant personal change. The crucial knowledge that he must return again and again to the present moment is with him, even if not always “at the front of my mind.” Even as he foresees that illusion will be part of his future life, he redirects his attention to the present moment and the knowledge that nirvana is here and now. Thus does Scott suggest both that travel transformed him and that the basic contours and habits of his character remain much the same, for instance a sensualist’s overindulgence in the pleasure of eating.

For Scott and Sucitto, as for Oliver Statler and Robert Sibley, a long walking pilgrimage provides a crucial opportunity to realize again and again the paradoxes involved in the self’s ceaseless arising and dissipation. The act of walking, with its rhythm of unselfing and return to self, becomes a metaphor and a vehicle for the continual practice of returning to the present moment. There one begins again, patiently persisting in the attempt to leave behind all that one has strived to attain.