In his essay "Walking," in the posthumous collection Excursions (1863), Thoreau spoke of the word "saunter" as having been derived from the French expression "going to the Holy Land": "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going 'à la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean." And later in this long paragraph he says, "For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."
The Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sen-dero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando ("it is solved by walking"), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. "Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook," Chatwin's biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.
Chatwin regarded walking in an almost mystical way. His predecessors, beginning with the great Japanese poet Bashö, felt the same. Walking inspired the poets Whitman and Wordsworth, and Rousseau based a series of philosophical essays on walks. Stanley walked across Africa twice. When David Livingstone wished to get into shape, and to invoke the traveling mood, he walked for weeks at a time in the African bush, "until my muscles were hard as boards."
Some walks are those of the flâneur, an almost untranslatable French word meaning stroller, saunterer, drifter — the essence of a traveler — but in this case usually one in a city, perhaps the very word to describe someone trying to solve a problem. Some walks by travelers border on stunts or bids for the record book — two obvious examples are Ewart Grogan tramping from Cape Town to Cairo in 1898, and more recently Ffyona Campbell, who in her way walked around the world (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").
But it is the committed walker, the thoughtful walker, who interests me the most.
Xuanzang (603–664): The Ultimate Pilgrim
A MONK AND a scholar, the young Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang in some renderings) felt that the Buddhist texts in China were badly translated, debased versions of the originals, so he decided to travel to India to verify them and to bring back as many texts as possible. He hoped also to see the holy places associated with Buddha's life and enlightenment. In some old illustrations he is shown accompanied by a pony — he certainly brought back the manuscripts on packhorses. But in his account of his seventeen years of travels he frequently refers to walking on narrow and difficult trails, and he appears to have traveled alone.
"At a time when the country was most prosperous, and equipped with unparalleled virtue, he started his journey to the remote lands carrying his pewter staff and whisked the dust with his robes," wrote Yu Zhining, Duke of Yanguo, in the original preface to The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. In a postscript to the book, Xuanzang is eulogized: "With the prestige of the emperor, he made his way, and under the protection of deities, he traveled in solitude."
Xuanzang left from the Tang Dynasty capital, Changan — Xian today, site of the terracotta warriors, imperial tombs, and glorious pagodas — and kept going, through Qinghai and across Xingjiang to Bokhara, Samarkand, and into present-day Afghanistan. All the while he made notes on the state of Buddhism, the condition of monasteries, the number of monks. He was awestruck by the giant carved Buddha statues at Bamiyan (dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, to the cries of "Allah is great!"). He crossed Peshawar and Taxila in what is now Pakistan, describing the ruins of Gandhara, where "there were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted, and in desolate condition." He wandered all over India. The fastidiousness of the early manifestations of the caste system fascinated him: "Butchers, fishermen, harlots, actors, executioners, and scavengers mark their houses with banners and are not allowed to live inside the cities," he wrote of the walled towns of northern India.
Throughout, he chronicled the presence of dragons, some protective, others menacing. He succeeded in his mission to find copies of ancient Buddhist texts, to visit the sacred places associated with Buddha: Gaya, Sarnath, Lumpini Gardens, and at last Kushinagara, where Buddha died. He stayed for years at a time in monasteries, learned Sanskrit, kept traveling, and returned to China with 657 texts, carried by twenty packhorses. At the suggestion of the emperor, he dictated The Great Tang Dynasty Record, finishing it in 646. When it was translated into French and English in the nineteenth century, other travelers (Aurel Stein for one) were able to find the lost cities and forgotten ruins that Xuanzang had so meticulously described. A new edition of Xuanzang's travels appeared in 1996, translated by Li Rongxi.
Matsuo Bashö (1644–1694): Narrow Road to the Deep North
BASHÖ WAS A nickname — it means banana tree: one was planted at the hut of the poet by an admirer, and the poet adopted the name. Bashö is said to be one of the greatest writers of haiku, the highly distilled, rigorously syllabic, and allusive Japanese three-line poem.
A Zen practitioner, Bashö also wrote haibun, a compressed and sometimes staticky prose that resembles the starkness of haiku. An admirer of the mendicant monks, he spent his life alternating spells of meditative living, usually in a remote hut, with walks (occasionally resorting to horseback), some short, several of them quite lengthy, which he re-counted in books that combined prose with poems. He acknowledged Kamo-no-Chōmei (see [>]) as an inspiration in the writing of travel journals. His first, a quest for spiritual wisdom, was The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (1685). One passage is heart-rending:
On a road along the Fuji River we came upon an abandoned child, about two years of age and crying pathetically. Apparently his parents, finding the waves of this floating world as uncontrollable as the turbulent rapids of this river, had decided to leave him there until his life vanished like a dewdrop. He looked like a tiny bush-clover blossom that would fall any time tonight or tomorrow beneath the blow of an autumn gust. I tossed him some food from my sleeve pocket, and mused as I passed by:
Poets who sang of monkey's wailing:
How would they feel about this child forsaken
In the autumn wind?
(translated by Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashö, 1977)
In 1689 Bashö took his most ambitious trip, nine months of walking that resulted in his best-known work, his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (or Back Roads to Far Towns), at the time a remote and forgotten part of Honshu, the main island of Japan. Bashö was accompanied by his friend Sora, and both dressed as pilgrims. On this long walk Bashö describes the enlightenment he seeks:
Spent night at Iizuka, bathed at hot-springs there, found lodgings but only thin mats over bare earth, ramshackle sort of place. No lamp, bedded down by shadowy light of fireplace and tried getting some rest. All night, thunder, pouring buckets, roof leaking, fleas, mosquitoes in droves: no sleep. To cap it off the usual trouble cropped up [illness], almost passed out. The short night sky at last broke, and again picked up and went on. But the night's traces dragged, mind balked. Hired horses, got to post town of Ko-ori. Future seemed farther off than ever, and recurring illness nagged, but what a pilgrimage to far places calls for: willingness to let world go, its momentariness to die on the road, human destiny, which lifted spirit a little, finding foot again here and there, crossing the Okido Barrier in Date.