Step Thirteen

So one thing we've seen time and again in history is that religions travel well. Religions seem to travel better than language (Jews stayed Jewish when they moved out to Eastern Europe, but they dropped the Hebrew and Yiddish grew up), or food types, or anything, really, except tangible goods. And even then, I'll bet that Jesuit missionaries were pretty frequently shipwrecked or robbed somehow along the way but still managed to spread their religion.

In my ongoing quest to be the best/most successful Silk Road-er ever, I think this is an important lesson to learn. And I think that the story of Xuanzang, or at least as Sally Hovey Wriggins tells it, is an excellent case study to support this point.

So Xuanzang is this Buddhist monk who decides to contravene a direct order from the emperor and head out on what turns into a sixteen-year walk, all the way to India, with the interest of re-discovering Buddhism. He's a profound Mahayana Buddhist (not surprising), and he's wondering how to reconcile Mahayana beliefs with Theravada texts that he's been reading (to his profound consternation), and what better place to do that than in Theravada Buddhism's home? So off he goes, and it's quite a story.

Amidst all the miracles (which are all pretty cool - Xuanzang's biographer had quite the dramatic flair, even if everything is 100% true and accurate) and all the flattering state visits and all the 'Oh heavens. These people are rather strange. Nice, but straaaaaaaaannnngggge...' moments, Xuanzang discovers more than just an obscure part of his religious roots: he discovers the power of religion.

His monk's garb gets him lots of help along the way, as do his institutional ties, but his personal practice is what really gets things done. In every conflict that he has with a ruler, for instance, the demonstration of his dedication to his principles or his Awesome Buddhist Arguing Skills or his stick-to-his-guns attitude where Mahayana and Theravada clash manage to let him come out on top in some way or another, but I want to look at this on a more fundamental level.

I want to take Xuanzang's journey and say that being religious was the only way he could travel at all, really. Looking back to some readings from last week/the week before/some time that was not very far away but is also not now, there's this story of the first Buddhist missionaries being merchants! Which was framed as this way to show that Buddhism was tied to commerce, but I want to say that it really shows that commerce was tied to Buddhism, which is a pretty minute distinction, but one that I feel is important. It's not that Buddhism went where commerce went, it's that commerce grew where Buddhism was present and BECAUSE of Buddhism.

I don't think it's anything inherent to Buddhism - I'm sure any other religion could have done the same thing - but I think that Xuanzang' story shows just how much Buddhism dragged commerce along with it.
Xuanzang left China with essentially nothing, and ended up with massive amounts of presents and things, given by King A for Kings B through B-prime. This is a form of goods exchange - the kings he visited gave him presents back in exchange for these, and he heads off every time to see someone else and give and get presents. Really awesome presents, too.

Furthermore - and finally, I guess - the information exchange that we see between trade partners is the same information exchange we see here. Xuanzang is learning about Theravada Buddhism (and teaching about Mahayana, something that I think is super important given his route through the Himalayas and the interesting contents and origins of Himalayan Buddhism), but he's also learning about all the petty kingdoms - and the not-so-petty ones, and the nomadic tribes, and India itself. Xuanzang ends up becoming an advisor to the emperor when he gets back, and all because he has this wealth of information about lands previously shrouded in mystical mystery. And the trade relations between India and China really start happening once the emperor has this adequate information about India and once all the various Indian rulers have this adequate information about China. Commerce followed on Xuanzang's heels (sometimes so close it was essentially in his shoes), as commerce follows on the heels of religion in general.

Things Xuanzang has taught me: that Step Thirteen should be Be a religious pilgrim - you get to explore the world, get presents, get political clout, and get credit for starting commerce. 

Step Six

I figure that, at this point, it's a good idea to consider the notion of knowing where you're going. I really have no articles to quote or class notes that brought up this idea, but I've really been thinking about it, this concept of trip planning.

I'm a compulsive planner. I have lists upon cross-checked lists upon timed lists upon lists attached to detailed calendar sketches of what my days look like. I double and triple check all my meetings, visits-with-friends, class times, etc. When plotting my schedule this year, I made up about six tentative ones including sub-ins for each class in each schedule. I plan everything out in obsessive detail. But when I read things like Ernest Shackleton's South, the story of his journey to the Antarctic, or this fictional book about Marco Polo whose cover I can visualize but whose title and author escape me, there seems to be a lack of evidence of planning. And this piques my curiosity.

My question really is: is an adventure an adventure if you plan it out? And furthermore! Were the people travelling on the Silk Road(s) LOOKING for adventure?

For the first, I don't have an answer. I can't conceive of not planning an excursion of any kind - so for, me, I suppose, I would have to say that I certainly hope one can still have an adventure if one has a plan. Otherwise my life looks pretty boring from here on in. But at the same time, what makes even the adventure of a new school exciting is the unknown, right? That allure of the mystery of things, the unpredictable nature of them, the adrenaline rush of nerves, etc, etc. And is an adventure without the excitement really an adventure at all? Something several of my classes this semester are making me think much more consciously about the problem of definition, and this really isn't the place to get into a debate about what adventure IS, but one facet of the discussion applies, I think: the nature of something can vary incredibly based on one's vantage point.

In the case of the adventure of the Silk Road(s), I'd say that this idea of the allure of the unknown was definitely present - but perhaps not on the part of Christian's pastoralists or Xinru's religious pilgrims. The Silk Road history that I've read up 'til now has come from a largely European perspective, with overtones of Orientalism. In this sense, we can relate the feeling of adventure as the allure of the unknown to concepts of "the Orient" in Europe during the Silk Road's heyday: that the fascination with the Other was what drove a large part of Eastward-headed traffic on the Silk Road.

Obviously that's a sweeping generalization, but I think it's something worthy of consideration. That's what adventurers DO, right? They search for the adrenaline rush and therefore don't plan as obsessively as I do so that they can have that delicious prickle of newness and excitement. And so for Europeans headed out - for trade, yes, and potentially with religious goals in mind - was it a conscious decision to go on an adventure in search of the elusive and expansive unknown? Or was it simply that they had know way of knowing what exactly they were getting into, so they had no way to sketch out list after list after travel route after emergency contact information?

Either way, I think a valid Step Six might just be Figuring out how much you need to know about where you're going.

Step Two

It turns out that travel on the Silk Road involved ridiculous amounts of risk.

So I'm looking at this map of the routes, and there are a bajillion tiny names of places and snaky rivers and marvelously detailed miniature mountains. And I'm getting out my List of Places and Scenery, to mark everything off with some kind of awesome colour code (because what else does one do with new hi-liters?), and I'm realizing that there's no way that ALL of these Silky Tourist Attractions can be on the map.

It also turns out that you can't just GoogleMaps the Gobi Desert. 

Anyways: risk. After finishing my finicky labeling and hi-lite-ing, I just sat there, staring at this brightly coloured map that's now pinned to my bulletin board, and I thought, "There were no hi-liters in the early centuries of the Common Era". Which is beside the point, because there were other ways to mark key spots and I sincerely doubt that the traders had to know the location of, say, Lhasa. I Googled around until I found a map that showed me where the Gobi Desert (and a bunch of other places that I had to write in) was, and, let's face it, the early-CE equivalent of Google was wandering around the traders' haunts and inquiring very carefully and with liberal donations to drinking funds. And even then, how do you trust your sources?

I'm fairly certain that Google and its affiliates have not lied to me and I am safely assured that my map is accurate enough for my purposes, so the beginning of my journey rests on a firm foundation. But if I were a would-be trader -- I would of course first have to be reincarnated as a man, but I digress -- and I were setting out for the first time, I would have absolutely no certainty as to my foundations. Granted, I'm sure I would've had people I DID trust, but who would give away the secrets to this incredibly lucrative and already well-traveled trade route?

AND THEN. Just looking at all the deserts and the mountain passes and the distances between cities where BANDITS and ROCKSLIDES and ANIMALS and CARRIER DEATH and LOSS OF TRADE GOODS and LOSS OF SANITY and DEHYDRATION and STARVATION and I-DID-NOT-KNOW-THEY-TRADED-HERE-TOO and all the other traumatic possibilities of such an extended travel (getting swindled, running out of tea, losing one's second-best desert wear so that, upon meeting tribal cheiftans, one is ridiculously under-dressed and therefore subject to all sorts of terrible treatments)...

Major disincentive to going anywhere NEAR there.

And what happens if you get lost? If you stray so far off-track that you end up in Kathmandu and have no way of communicating your way out because you didn't MEAN to go to Nepal in the first place? What if you lose your maps? Carrying this one in my head is starting to look like a better and better plan.

Step One: start a travelogue

Step Two: get some maps