Paul Theroux - The Tao of Travel - Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

"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.

— Back Roads to Far Towns, translated by

Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu (1968)

The Nomadism of Bruce Chatwin

CHATWIN WAS DELIBERATELY enigmatic, but a relentless explainer in the excitable way of a self-taught and widely read person, fond of theorizing. His work has this same excitable, distracted quality, with flashes of true brilliance in description. He was greatly influenced by Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana, and this admiration shows in his own work, in his idealizing oddity of description and a love of the grotesque or unexpected. His self-assurance showed, as Augustus Hare said of Mrs. Grote in his autobiography, as the stating of every belief "with the manner and tone of one laying down the laws of Athens."

Chatwin was just as unambiguous in his belief in the value of walking. Walking defined him. And he felt that walking defined the human race — the best of it. His earliest work was on nomads; he lived his life on the move. Chatwin scoffed at the term "travel writer" and even "travel book." He claimed that much of what he wrote, sold as "travel," was fiction. " The Songlines is a novel," he said, though most readers regard it as Bruce's own adventures in the Australian outback. Some of In Patagonia was made up or fudged. He was contradictory, intense, unreliable, elusive, a compulsive exaggerator, almost a Munchhausen, and also secretive. "Hate confessional mode" he wrote in one of his notebooks.

Chatwin could seem at times frivolous, or so intense and demanding as to be exhausting. But without question he was an imaginative writer and one of the great walkers in travel literature.

This is not plain in the text of In Patagonia, where a typical sentence is "I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn" — a trek of two hundred miles, but he doesn't say how he got there. Or "I crossed over into Fireland" or "I passed through three boring towns" or "I went to the southernmost town in the world." He is an insubstantial presence in his books ("I am not interested in the traveler"), but in his letters home he was explicit. "Dying of tiredness. Have just walked 150 odd miles," he wrote to his wife.

The walker sees things clearly: the sun on the walker's head, the wind in the walker's face, the country under the walker's feet: "I walked out of town to the petrified forest," he wrote in The Songlines. "Wind pumps whirled insanely. A steel-blue heron lay paralyzed under an electric cable. A dribble of blood ran along its beak. The tongue was missing. The trunks of extinct monkey-puzzles were broken clean as if in a sawmill."