The Zen of making a journey

We human beings are journeying people. We emerged on our historical path as wandering hunter-gatherers. We now make sense of our lives by understanding them as a journey: an unfolding story of who we are and what we do in the world. We travel through time as we think, talk, and worry about our career arcs, our family histories, or our financial forecasts. We construct narratives of the paths we have followed and will follow. In our better moments, we think, talk and pray about our spiritual journeys.

We frame our lives by our stories about the journey that has been, and the journey that will be. A journey is therefore not just between two places, but is about living and interacting with all points we meet along the way and at the same time we observe the route as it evolves in our mind's eye and in actuality in the world around us. We create an image of a place where we started and a place where we hope to end. Being on a journey is therefore about being a part of that route and also being above the route and looking down on it. In a very significant way, journeying is an elemental part of who we are as human beings.

Sacred Journeys

We find that actual journeys have an importance in nearly all spiritual traditions in the form of pilgrimages. In our tradition, we undertake a pilgrimage to help us remember the Buddha’s teachings and to connect with their living location, for example to Lumbini, the place of Buddha’s birth or Sarnarth , the site of his first teaching. These are sacred journeys to sacred places to pay respect and to experience a direct connection to our historical spiritual past. Early Indian practitioners were seen as 'wanderers', who were free of worldly attachments. The mendicant’s life was identified as being on a journey in which the travelling was only a part. Japanese itinerant monks travelling around looking for a new teacher are known as ‘unsui’, which translates as “clouds, water”, natural phenomenon that have a flow and a movement of their own. Although these models of travelling have a distinct spiritual purpose for the Zen practitioner, we are aware that in touching the sacred we meet ordinariness and indeed vice versa (see koan 300 in Master Dogen’s The True Dharma Eye¹). As John Daido Loori says in his response to this matter: “The truth of ordinary and sacred, wherever it is encountered, is, after all, in your hands alone.”² Certainly then to go on a spiritual journey, can in itself involve an ordinary path and destination; we can go on a sacred journey by taking a simple walk.

The Journeys of Basho

The spiritual approach to an ordinary journey was adopted by Basho, the 17th century Japanese poet, who is credited with establishing the present form of haiku. Although he had travelled previously, in 1684 he set out on his first journey purely for the sake of spiritual and poetic practice. His aim on this journey was to ‘face death’ and thereby to temper his mind and his poetry. He called this "the journey of the weather beaten skeleton”³, meaning that he was prepared to face a ‘death’ of any description on his travels. The journey was a very rewarding one for Basho and he produced a number of works on his experience and he wrote a travel journal.

Another year is gone –
A travel hat on my head,
straw sandals on my feet⁴

Basho based his travelling on the principle of ‘lightness’, a notion that rests on the tenth Ox Herding picture, in which the ox trainer returns to where he lives and moves through the mundane ordinary world, fully taking part in life through the process of spiritual awareness. So, whatever the nature of experience or suffering that comes along, the traveller just smiles with a calm, non-attached attitude but being fully engaged as life emerges. Basho recorded his journeys in a style closely resembling his haibun, which always included short verses and in these he evoked nature’s beauty and the inherent evanescence and impermanence of life. His journals can be called records of a ‘wandering heart’ and the modern equivalent of these can be found in the work of Ken Jones.⁵

However, if we base ourselves on Basho’s example it would be erroneous to consider that the purpose of the journey is to produce a journal or verses for others to admire. On the contrary, the journey or walk simply is to provide an opportunity to be present in a place and to value the experience that arises as a consequence of being in that place. Indeed the experience of being in a place can be used as a jumping-off point for following what is evoked and the internal processes and memories that this sets in train.

In order to appreciate how this process can begin we can use the idea of the fifth century Chinese scholar Liu Hsieh, who in his poetry criticism wrote about ‘yu wei’ or the ‘aftertaste’ of a poem and this notion can be applied to things we encounter in ordinary life. Hence with many of our experiences, an aftertaste lingers in our memory, waiting to be prompted by a new event encountered on life’s journey. Consequently on an actual journey we can meet both the past and present as it is held within ourselves. By being present at a place on a journey we can meet our self and the dropping of the self. The journey becomes the universe and assists us in becoming whole and forever changing. This process is summed up by a translator of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, Sam Hamil: “the journey itself is home. The means is the end, just as it is the beginning. Each step is the first step, each step the last.” 6 In this way we can see each journey as a pilgrimage: a sacred journey not just to where the route takes us, but to the interior workings of the self. It is a pilgrimage to the ordinary mind which involves an attitude of visiting something sacred and of paying respects to that which arises. As John Muir, the American naturalist, comments: “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”⁷

Inner and outer landscapes – undertaking a journey

So how then can we form an ordinary journey into a sacred one? How can we encounter the spiritual on an ordinary walk or on a visit to an ordinary place? Firstly, we need to note what happens on any journey we can become interested in any or every distraction that comes along and with each distraction, all the while, our memory ticks through its filing system, bringing up images, feelings, and all sorts of ‘aftertastes’ and remembrances that have attached themselves to us. This is what we can observe as each step and each place along the journey’s route, induces something in us. Hence with this process, each place, even each step can become an exploration of location, of reflections, of memories, of emotions, of thoughts and of the evolving presence of all this. Essentially and always, a journey is simply an exploration of what is there and what is arising at the moment. Sam Hamill again on Basho: “his journey is a pilgrimage; it is a journey into the interior of the self as much a travelogue, a vision quest that concludes in insight. But there is no conclusion.”⁸ We can arrive at a place and note all that is present both internally and externally and this is a process similar to that met in meditation.

So as we undertake a journey with this orientation to travelling, along our path, we begin to recognise something as familiar – a thing itself or a memory or an association with it. We will be meeting the familiar in terms of “I know this”. There will be the recognition of the comfort of the familiar and the security of that which is always present for us. As Rebecca Solnit observes, there exists for us all a “tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.”⁹ So meeting the familiar involves garnering something from our memory and some link about who we are will arise as we recognise our presence in that place at that time. We always take our self, our ‘landscape of memory’ on any journey and this always emerges. It is this which once recognised can then be put down, as the putting down allows the freshness of the moment to arise. It is this that permits the difference and novelty of any place to be encountered and accepted. Indeed it is all this that makes the journey possible.

What is required is curiosity about what is here and what is just around the corner. Here we need to remember that it is not just the physical location that is ‘here’ and ‘around the corner’ for these places are also present in the process of our mind. ‘Here’ and ‘round the corner’ are both part of the inner and outer landscapes. We need to develop a process of investigation, which inquires about ourselves, ‘Where am I now?’ ‘What could arise within my mind, will it be familiar or different?’ ‘Where will I end up on this wandering?’ The wandering journey is therefore both an outside activity as well as an inside process. You pay your money for your tickets on the bus or the train and the journey takes you on its own path; looking out the window you can also observe both the passing countryside and the travelling of your mind. As Nicolas Bouvier notes in his book on his journey to the Kyber Pass: “Travelling outgrows its motives. It proved sufficient in itself. You think you are making the trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.”¹⁰ Any kind of journey has the potential of throwing you onto yourself in a different way. It can remove many of the everyday worries of life that we carry around but then fills it up again with issues of the moment. A journey’s process can move us from the familiarity of our habitual ways into a new view of those habits as well a putting down of those usual patterns of our self.

There always is a relationship between the context of where we are at any moment and the process of what is going on in our mind and our memory. For in this process one moment leads to another and we move in some way and travel from where we have been to where we believe we are going. At each point on our route what happens is that a small occurrence or some object in a place becomes a stimulus for remembering and a stimulus to curiosity. These things interact with each other, so we wonder about the relationship of ourselves to these stimuli. ‘Why did I think that?’ ‘Where does that memory in this place take me?’ ‘Why is it like that?’ ‘How did this come to be?’ In this way each occurrence and each place becomes the centre of the universe, it becomes the middle of the compass and also the direction away from it. This process can be determined by serendipity, sometimes by happenstance and sometimes by our conscious or even unconscious intention. We very easily move from the landscape in which we are physically situated into the landscape of our mind. Indeed these are not separate places, there is no boundary between them, they are part and parcel of each other, always ongoing, always changing, always reflecting our self in the universe. Inner and outer geography have no separation.

Each place and each occurrence offers us a sign post to where the next moment may be, but it is important to know that the signpost is also just a signpost pointing nowhere, as the sign went missing long ago. As we say in our Chan Hall Opening Ceremony:

The fool by the signless signpost
Stands pointing out the way.

So to be present in any place at any time, our investigation is to find out where we are. Then when a sense of that arises, our curiosity is pricked such that the signpost does suggest the next place and a route evolves for us to follow.

Framing a story

As we allow ourselves to be in a particular place, everything that arises demands a story. We like stories, as they fill in the gaps; they give us some confidence in the difference between inner and outer worlds. This is because they are external frames for the process of putting together bits and pieces of ourselves. As David Loy says, “The foundational story we tell and retell is the self, supposedly separate and substantial yet composed of the stories “I” identify with and attempt to live.”¹¹ Basho’s journeys are made up of a collection of stories with their haiku. Stories act as stepping stones on journeys and indeed there is a way of considering each journey as merely a number of stories that have been assembled in some order. The order may come from the inner geography or indeed the outer geography and when they coalesce into a journey, a sense of the wholeness of the narrative and the narrator arises.

It is not just ourselves that we meet, for on any kind of journey we naturally connect with others. “Just as writing allows us to read the words of someone who is absent so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there.”¹² In any place we stand, it therefore places us in a community, an actual one, a historic one and the one we create in our own mind. Here our journey thoughts set us on a course of sharing and it is in shared memories, shared places, shared narratives that our community stories arise and by this means we come to feel a part of each other. It is in the recognition of sharing that we move from the ‘me’ to the ‘us’ and it is in the recognition of our component nature that we move from the ‘us’ to the ‘all of us and everything’ with each of us merely being a part of something bigger. By this means all our journeys are destined to find their meaning by intersecting this great journey. Naturally we find and construct insights and meaning for ourselves as we travel in this way, however the nature of these self-revelations do not have a lasting character. Nicolas Bouvier is again aware of this process and its impermanence. “That day I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face-to-face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting the central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which is paradoxically maybe our surest impetus.”¹³

Destination?

With this process of openness, a journey can become one of refuge or respite as well as an exploration. Each journey can begin in a different way, with the idea of the route being stimulated by a personal story or an historic event or just pure curiosity. The route can be somewhat serendipitous but it will be a route followed from a starting point to where a decision has been made for it to be concluded. There is a way in which each route develops its own meaning. There can always be distractions, trips down dead ends, long ways around and just going down some narrow lane to see where it gets to. An outline of a physical wandering is identical to the wandering and movement of memory and of mind. At some point we must end up somewhere in order to think of the next step but in that ending up our mind can take us down its own cul-de-sac. In taking such journeys there is the constant meeting of yourself.¹⁴ Again Nicolas Bouvier lets us know what such journeys entail, “Carried along on the hum of the motor and the countryside passing by, the journey itself flows through you and clears your head. Ideas one had held onto without reason depart; others however are readjusted and settle like pebbles at the bottom of the stream. There is no need to interfere; the road does the work for you. One would like to think that it stretches out like this, dispensing its good offices, not just to the ends of India but even further until death.”¹⁵

Notes

1. Dogen trans Kazuaki Tanahashi and John Daido Loori, 2005. The True Dharma Eye. Zen Master Dogen Three Hundred Koans. Shambala. Boston.
2. Dogen op cit p. 409.
3. Makoto Ueda, 1982, Matsuo Basho. Kodansha International. London p26.
4. Makoto Ueda, op cit p. 27.
5. Ken Jones, 2006, The Parsley Bed – Haiku Stories. Pilgrims Press. Aberystwyth.
6. Matsuo Basho, trans Sam Hamil, 1998, Narrow Road To The Interior. Shambala. Boston p. xx
7. John Muir, 2013 My First Summer in the Sierra. J. Missouri , Saint Louis Missouri p. 125
8. Matsuo Basho op cit p. xx
9. Rebecca Solnit, 2006, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Canongate. Edinburgh. p. 117
10. Nicolas Bouvier , trans Robyn Marsack, 2007, The Way Of The World. Eland London p. 13
11. David R. Loy, 2010, The World Is Made Of Stories. Wisdom. Boston. p. vii
12. Rebecca Solnit, 2014, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Granta. London. p. 72
13. Nicolas Bouvier, op cit p. 317
14. Descriptions of journeys I have undertaken can be found at eddyswanderings.blogspot.com
15. Nicolas Bouvier, op cit p. 47