One of the great pilgrimage stories in any tradition, surely, is The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen. At the very dawn of his Zen studies, Matthiessen goes, with a professional zoologist, to count the cats in Inner Dolpo and to set eyes on one of the world’s rare and elusive creatures. But he’s also traveling, we soon realize, to see through the folly of such a venture (for him, not a professional zoologist). He’s traveling to look past the delusions of travel, to come face to face with the world and the memory of the young wife he’s just lost to cancer, so easily sidestepped if he were to stay at home. He’s traveling to see how the Buddhism that he’s beginning to learn about instructs and guides those born to the tradition; he’s traveling into isolation and high altitudes to confront his own anger and restlessness and spiritual ambition,
He didn’t see the snow leopard, which makes the whole trip worthwhile.
It’s not pilgrimage, in other words, that’s our undoing; it’s the thought that we will get anything out of it. Become a pilgrim with no agenda—no hope of finding anything—and who knows what may come to you? The problem is rarely in the activity, but in the hopes that we bring to it; everything can be a pilgrimage— even a trip to a tsunami-stricken fishing village—if only you can approach it in the right spirit, with clear-eyed attention.
There is humility in the act of pilgrimage, akin to the act of bowing; you’re surrendering your own path to follow where others have gone before. It puts you in place, in that sense, and your intentions in perspective. There’s community, of course, because you’re journeying with all those others, across centuries and continents, who have also traveled to Bodhgaya or Sarnath, and as much as anything, you’re walking in their footsteps and in their shoes. There’s truthfulness in the act, if it can get you out of your head, the place where you end up when sitting still lacks discipline or direction. There’s kindness, if the cats of Zanzibar need something you can give them, even if it’s only (as with the snow leopard) the wisdom to leave them alone.
