his quest and the magnitude of his achievement. It seemed to
me that his exploit was even more impressive than that of another
figure of enduring fascination for me, Marco Polo, who came along
six hundred years later. I take nothing away from the great Italian,
but Hsuan Tsang's trip was almost as long and more arduous, and
its goal, unlike Polo's, was not riches or renown but wisdom,
a benefit for all mankind.
The monk's selfless goal (so to speak) and
his perseverance through deserts and difficult mountain ranges
particularly appeal to Bernstein's pragmatic concepts of toughness
and goodness, I suppose (Bernstein calls the monk "the greatest
traveler in history"). But look again at the opening line
in that quote above: spiritual knowledge was not his purpose--"or
at least not what I thought I might achieve." Secular, non-Buddhist,
skeptic...and soon to be a convert on the Silk Road? That might
be too much for Buddhists to hope for. Besides, Bernstein first
has to get into China, no easy task for a journalist who had
earlier managed to make himself an enemy of the state.
Bernstein has a longstanding interest in China.
He went from studying the Chinese language and Chinese history
as a graduate student at Harvard to serving as Time's
bureau chief in Beijing--the first since the Communists seized
power in 1949. (He is now a book critic for the New York Times.)
He riled Chinese authorities, though, when he co-authored The
Coming Conflict with China (with Ross H. Munro) in 1996,
and colleagues predicted he wouldn't be allowed into China again.
(The Chinese press, for its part, branded Bernstein and Munro
white supremacists and liars.) Ironically, Bernstein's dilemma
isn't all that different from the monk's: Hsuan Tsang himself
traveled in a highly restrictive, dictatorial China, and he even
faced an arrest warrant for his failure to obey the emperor's
ban on travel beyond the borders.
Happily, Bernstein manages to slip into China
with a Hong Kong-issued visa, and once he launches his journey
from Xian, the Tang Dynasty capital (and the monk's starting
point), all the delicious travails and unexpected adventures
we armchair travelers relish pop up at a healthy clip. Like visiting
a collection of 'dangerous' ruins (near Mogui Cheng--'Demon Town')
that is said to have swallowed up an entire army in a sand storm.
And sizing up the dangers Bernstein faces as an American traveler
after the U.S. mistakenly bombs the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
in the course of waging an air battle against Slobodan Milosevic.
And--my personal favorite--facing the gastrointestinal dangers
posed by eating lamb's head.
As a travel writer, Bernstein doesn't write
with, say, Jonathan Raban's sardonic wit; we really should take
him at his word when he says he's a relatively happy guy. (Nor
does he offer Raban's amusing portraits of odd, idly met characters.)
He isn't one to dwell long over scenes angst-ridden, Romantic
travelers might pounce on greedily. On reaching those 'dangerous'
desert ruins, for instance, he writes,
Another few miles brought us to more such
ramparts and the remains of numerous other structures, an Ozymandian
scene that could easily have inspired rapturous nineteenth-century-type
ruminations about the traces of perished grandeur.
Nineteenth-century-minded writers, perhaps,
but not Bernstein. Instead, he glides onto a brief description
of the ruins' size and closes with only the briefest of Shelley-styled
ruminations:
Several thousand people had probably lived
in the town. It had been a vibrant place where melons grew, silk
was traded, and the finer points of Buddhist theology were intensely
debated. And it must have seemed to its inhabitants over the
centuries that it would be that way forever.
Bernstein's book isn't wholly without its
sad, introspective moments, but they tend to find expression
in resoundingly pragmatic musings. Describing an old woman too
poor to afford a slice of watermelon, he writes, "To have
lived a long, hard life, and not even to have the minor consolation
of a slice of summer watermelon for pennies--I have thought of
that woman often since then." And of a blind boy he finds
in an Indian orphanage, he writes,
Earlier I had photographed some of the sighted
boys, who were eager and happy to pose before the camera, and
I wanted to take this boy's picture too. There was melancholy
in his aspect, a kind of resignation. He was the last one to
start eating and the last one to finish, after which he stood
up, stepped over his plate, and walked unaided into the bright
square of light outside the door and down the walkway toward
the classrooms. I left my camera in the bag where it belonged.
To photograph him would be to announce that I could see what
he couldn't--himself.
Bernstein's command of the historical material
and the exotic scope of the journey--both his and the monk's--make
for informative reading. He does particularly good work summarizing
Buddhist tenets and defining the Chinese world into which Buddhism
traveled--a pragmatic country dominated by Confucianism and yet
offering a first cousin in Taoism as a means of introduction
into speculative philosophy. How, precisely, the predominately
practical, acquisitive Chinese mind accepted a world-denying
religion as its own is a profound question, and Bernstein answers
it with impressive authority.
Some of Ultimate Journey's more intriguing
material, though, lies in the connections Bernstein makes between
Buddhism and his own Jewish heritage--and what he personally
draws from the connections. Bernstein's status as "a strangely
religious nonbeliever, a devout sort of atheist" who feels
the strong pull of rituals seems the opposite of Hsuan Tsang's
dogma-rejecting preoccupation with looking inward. But on a larger
scale, he finds striking similarities between the two religions:
The more you look at Buddhism as a system
of thought, as a questioning of everything, and as a way of fashioning
a systematic alternative to our futile strivings and yearnings,
the more Buddhism acquires depth and richness--and the more it
resembles Judaism, at least in one important respect. Both Judaism
and Buddhism are intellectual religions, requiring not so much
acts of faith as the study of the most difficult this-worldly
questions. Talmudic Judaism is arguably the most sustained examination
of the question of right behavior in history; Buddhism was the
earliest and perhaps the deepest investigation into the fatal
flaws in the human character, the first doctrine that said, in
essence, that the truth shall set you free. Both also entail
antiquity and conscience. As I traced the route of Hsuan Tsang,
Buddhism never became a religion to me. The religion in which
I do not entirely believe is the Jewish religion. The God whose
existence I doubt is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But
my reverence for Buddhism as a manner of sifting the glitter
from the substance, as a means of overcoming the shallowness
of the self and of reaching for the tranquil power of the mind,
increased.
Despite his protestations to the contrary,
Bernstein's journey ultimately offers him significant psychological,
if not precisely religious, guidance, and, perhaps fittingly,
it comes as much from Judaism as it does Buddhism. The extra
layer this personal 'discovery' adds to Bernstein's book completes
it quite nicely, I think, and in its admirably understated way,
it justifies the title's metaphorical suggestion that Bernstein
found his own pragmatic brand of enlightenment on the Silk Road.
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