A Peaceful Sojourn to the Mountaintop

To go on a pilgrimage. Here is an idea that may have retained its simple, fragrant essence. Regular people, poor people and peasants go on pilgrimages. Even as they vary by location and vision, all involve the putting of one foot in front of the other, of traveling to find an insight and to share that with other hard-working people. “The Chinese phrase for ‘going on a pilgrimage,’ ch’ao-shan chin-hsiang, actually means ‘paying one’s respects to the mountain,’ ” writes Gretel Ehrlich, author, naturalist, Buddhist. “The meaning of pilgrimage changed,” she goes on, “when Taoists set up their mountain altars and Buddhist monks began plying the trails. For them pilgrimage was not only paying homage to a place of power, but also the transformation of the inner and outer environment through the physical act of walking. . . .”

For all the humble attributes of the pilgrimage, it makes sense that when one leaves the workaday world one hopes to enter a gentle, spiritual realm or meteor fields of revelation and epiphany. To see more of the same old commercialism, pollution, greed and avarice could, in all fairness, be called a rip-off. To receive bronchitis and altitude sickness from the gods instead of epiphany could be expensive and annoying.

I think if you are going to go on a pilgrimage, and write a book about it, you must include all of this, and Ehrlich, to her credit, does just that. She goes to China to find the ancient culture she has seen in the medieval landscape paintings and scrolls of sacred mountains. Once there, she hopes to ponder the questions asked by the poet Qu Yuan in his second century book, the “Songs of Ch’u” particularly the poem, “Tian Wen,” or “Questions of Heaven,” in which Qu Yuan asks “a series of questions about the origin of the universe, the human condition, and the movements of the planets, sun and stars.” She climbs the sacred mountains, Emei Shan and Putuo Shan, travels to the Wolong Panda Reserve in Chengdu, then southwest to Yunan and on to Lijiang on the border between Han China and Tibet.

Looking for an ancient culture, Ehrlich is deeply saddened to find that neither Taoism nor Buddhism “had survived Mao or the daily catechism of confession and betrayal he imposed.” “Once, Taoism had been the source of Chinese reverence for mountains and a wild spirited textbook for living. Now, the urban temples looked like tawdry museums, theme parks for the occult.” Everywhere, she sees the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, and of Deng’s open-door policy, “a chance to join the global marketplace, where almost nobody cared if you were schooled, clothed, or fed, or that you had once been the most sophisticated culture in the world.” “The heart,” she writes, “was ripped out of the culture and its people.”

There are two obvious problems with these deeply felt observations (both, I’m sure that Ehrlich knows intimately): one, a visitor can hardly, in so short a time, locate the heart of a lost culture, and two, it is so very easy for us to bemoan the downsides of the global marketplace, to cluck over what many believe is just a narrow phase in human evolution, one that wreaks unbearable havoc on the environment and the souls of peasants, workers, managers and CEOs alike.

And Ehrlich finds that lost culture, in Xuan Ke, a musician living in Lijiang, who plays, with a group, “the sacred music of Taoism from the Tang Dynasty. This music used to be all of China’s,” he says. “They lost it. Now it is ours.” During a period of solitary confinement, after being accused in the frenzy of recriminations preceding the Cultural Revolution, Xuan Ke had the sort of revelation one might hope to have on a pilgrimage. “I realized that all singing and music arose from fear, the fear of death . . . there are sounds in this music to chase away demons. . . .”

So this is a wandering book of observations, no grand theories, some quiet revelations, a little sadness for what was lost and some reason to hope that the wisdom of the Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist cultures we pick over, cafeteria-style here in the West, still has a home in the East.