Meeting the Buddha: On Pilgrimage in Buddhist India [Paperback]

From E.M. Forster to Peter Matthiessen to Allen Ginsberg, many of the world's most acclaimed writers have traveled to the holy lands of India seeking spiritual enlightenment. Their lyrical and highly personal recollections are compiled here for the first time in one volume, taking readers on a colorful journey to each of the eight Buddhist pilgrimage sites of India.

A Japanese pilgrim wearing a robe stamped with the symbols of Buddhist shrines he has visited.

Introduction

by Andrew Schelling

“T  he householder’s life,” says old Buddha’s document The Digha Nikaya, “is full of dust and hindrance.” And immediately you feel it, right in your shoes. From the start, Buddhism showed a sharp impatience for stay-at-home habits. It has spread out from India, traveled to China and Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and America, and in twenty-five hundred years hasn’t shaken that fine old skepticism.

The impulse to ramble is as old as humankind. We have ample testimony of a close ancestral connection to migratory animals, and it appears that the earliest calendars were incised animal bone, small enough to slip in a pocket as the human clan arranged its year by traveling to seasonal food sources. Archaeologists are uncovering routes of migration our human forebears followed, keeping herds of reindeer and antelope, bison and sheep in sight. For most human beings, for tens of thousands of years, home was quite literally “on the hoof.” The hunter, the nomad, the rambler, and finally the pilgrim. Perhaps it is no more than the swift human intellect and our proud, strong legs following a primordial hunger to see what’s around the bend, over the next hill, or just lƒŽ