“Matsuo Basho in his Paths to Oku (Atalanta) says that “the months and days are travelers of eternity. The year that is leaving and the next are also travelers. For those who let their lives float aboard ships or grow old driving horses, every day is a journey and their home itself is a journey.”
Many of us view life as a journey and make of it an inexhaustible source of wisdom and knowledge. In the era of mass tourism, selfies and serialized destinations, a gap is opening towards that other way of traveling. Romantic travelers return, those who go in search of sacred places or power, those who follow the path of myths and legends or those who simply seek to heal vital imbalances thanks to travel.
Rabindranath Tagore in Gitanjali reminded us that “the traveler must knock on each of the doors of others, to find the most sacred temple of his being.” We look outside for what we have inside, but on many occasions we have to travel to discover it.
The globality in which we live banishes difference, the original and the authentic. Cities and destinations are becoming more and more similar. Everything is homogeneous, but there are still paths to discover. There are many books that encourage us to travel in a deeper and more personal way. There are spiritual journeys and multiple pilgrimages to rediscover. In the end, when you start walking you do nothing more than join that human chain that has been passing through those same sacred places for millennia. The path is known. Where we had thought we were alone, we will reach the center of our existence.
As Peter Stanford suggests in Pilgrims (Criticism), you don’t have to be religious or spiritual to do it. Pilgrimage consists of contemplating life more carefully and deeply. Every step one takes is a learning experience, an opportunity for observation, a distance from that daily life that sometimes oppresses us. You can make a pilgrimage in a group, along well-known and well-known routes such as the Camino de Santiago, the 88 temples of Shikoku or the massive Kumbh Mehla that is celebrated every twelve years in northern India. There are also more intimate and unknown tours such as the mysterious churches sunk in the earth of Lalibela (Ethiopia), or the island of Bardsey (Wales) where the Celtic monks went. Without a doubt, the book by this prestigious writer, journalist and television presenter is an excellent guide to delve into the history of the different pilgrimages that span the history of humanity. Forbidden places like Mecca or difficult to access places like Jerusalem. Others massively crowded like Rome or Lourdes. And also the memory of legendary travelers such as Sir Richard Burton who in 1853 managed to enter Mecca disguised as a Bedouin. There is a new geography based on spiritual power. The man without spirituality drowns, and goes out in search of it to awaken or transform his inner world.
The religions and the history of their founders have established the majority of pilgrimage sites. From the apostle James, Saint Peter, Muhammad or Buddha, who traces a route that starts in Lumbini, his homeland, and continues in Both Gaya, the place where the tree of enlightenment is preserved, and ends in Sarnath where he gave his first speech.
However, we must keep in mind the inherent sacredness of many natural spaces. Firstly, we can find peaks like Machu Pichu, at 2,500 meters above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, with that remote city that remained hidden from the Spanish conquerors who arrived in the 16th century. The Western world discovered it in 1911, when historian and explorer Hiram Bingham crossed the jungle guided by Pablito Alvárez, an eleven-year-old local guide.
In Asia, probably the most sacred mountain is Kailas. Four important rivers originate from it: the Indus, the Brahmputra, the Karnali and the Sutlej. Colin Thubron, one of the best authors of travel books, dedicated Towards a Mountain in Tibet (RBA) to him and Raimon Panikkar together with Milena Carrara also made his Pilgrimage to Kailasa (Firefly). This mountain is considered the center of the universe by various religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Bön).
Likewise, the Kumbh Mela makes a pilgrimage to Prayagraj, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh where three rivers converge: the Ganges, the Yamuna and the invisible Sarasvati. Waters have always been associated with purification and initiation rites such as baptism. This place is where, according to the Mahabharata, the hero Yudhishthira came in search of spiritual cleansing. The last Kumbh Mela of 2019 attracted one hundred and twenty million people in a demonstration that spiritual paths are not something of the past but something alive.
Without a doubt, the Camino de Santiago is the most popular route today. Since 1993, when it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, an average of three hundred thousand pilgrims travel through it every year. In 1987, Paulo Coelho dedicated a novel to him, The Pilgrim of Compostela: Diary of a Magician (Planeta). Years later, Shirley MacLaine walked the trail and wrote The Path: A Spiritual Journey (Faro), as a New Age spiritual guru who advocated walking meditation.
There are three routes to get to Santiago. The most traveled is the French road that begins in Saint Jean Pied de Port or in Navarra, Roncesvalles. The Portuguese Way runs from south to north from Lisbon, Coimbra, Porto and Braga. The northern one, starting from Irún, is the hardest and least known route. The route by which one arrives to Santiago does not matter, but the path one takes when walking. José Tono Martínez tells it in the most recent The Ring of Gyges. The heterodox pilgrimages through Santiago (Evohé). Her book tells us about pilgrim and rebellious women, about the wonderful lamp of Valle Inclán and about the alchemists or searchers of the philosopher’s stone, in relation to the Camino de Santiago, a place that could be contemplated as finis terrae or even hades, the underworld where souls dwell.
Mythology offers us stories such as those of Orpheus, Heracles, Gilgamesh or Jason and the Argonauts, where the mystical and imaginary journey to strange and deep places results in rites of passage. Spaces of death and resurrection. The descent into hell and the deepest cavern. These are other forms of pilgrimage and personal or collective transformation.
Ignacio Jáuregui offers in Rituals. A journey through the thread that unites us (Fórcola), a pleasant tour of the different destinations linked to the ritual. He does it in a personal, sometimes too informal way, but his ability to pick up endless destinations is commendable. Places like the Menakshi of Madurai (India) that is understood as the world-temple with a self-sufficient universe. All the streets of the city converge in its center where every morning the pilgrims chant ancient mantras such as the gayatri. Temples that occupy entire neighborhoods like in Chennai, where ritual is the daily routine of every dawn. “Each gesture and ceremony returns us to our origins and to that divine source greater than us,” recalls Jáuregui.
Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Smell of India (Peninsula) said that “the Indians have perhaps lost contact with the direct sources of their religion, but they continue to be its living fruits. Thus, their religion, being the most abstract and philosophical in the world, is seen as something totally practical, as a way of living.”
Probably, that is what led me decades ago along the paths of the East. I started in India, when I was going through a major life crisis and since then I have not stopped returning. Tibet, Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia… The eastern routes are inexhaustible. Spirituality is inserted into the daily life of those countries. There are forms of religious syncretism and a freedom that allows different beliefs to coexist. There is polytheism, integration with the sacred, devotion to the spirits of nature, and that powerful idea that God is within us. It is not necessary to follow any creed, but under Eastern philosophies and a spiritual journey we can resolve many of our daily anxieties.
In The Eastern Gaze (Vanguard Books) I wanted to condense all those spiritual routes that have marked me. In each of them I was able to learn and evolve as a person. Places as gloomy as Tuol Sleng prison (Cambodia) taught me what forgiveness is. The pilgrimage to Jokhang (Tibet) showed me the true meaning of devotion. And natural places like the Kashmir Valley convinced me of the sacredness of nature.
Traveling enriches us when we do it as an act of introspection or a conscious exercise of distancing ourselves from the established world from which we come. We do not have to be heroes or devout servants of a religion, but as a large number of works of travel literature have shown, travel transforms. We travel to know the other and we end up knowing ourselves, or as T. S. Eliot said in the poem that closed his famous Quartets, “we will not stop exploring, and at the end of the road, we will return to the place where we started and we will know it as if it were the first time.”
