"What's the Purpose of Pilgrimage?"
Not-Knowing Is Most Intimate
Hello dear reader! I hope this post finds you in good spirits and health. Below is a guest post from my Dharma friend Jody Greene, whom I first met during our inaugural monastic practice period at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the fall of 2008. Jody’s an experienced yoga practitioner & traveler, and a world-class scholar at University of Santa Cruz where they are an Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. For decades, Jody’s guided people on pilgrimages around the world, including to Ladakh, Nepal, and India.
Below is a post from their blog WalkingandPraying about their time in Japan visiting Zen temples in Kyoto and Shikoku. They wrote this post while flying back to San Francisco after a four-month pilgrimage to sacred Buddhist sites. I will be podcasting with Jody about their travels (actually, later today!) and will post our conversation as soon as I can. Bowing and Presence!
Fayan was going on pilgrimage.
Dizang said, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”
Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan said: “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
Book of Serenity, Case 20
My Zen friends are chuckling. This is one of the most referenced—okay, maybe the most referenced—kōan for those of us practicing Dōgen’s Zen in America. It was kind of inevitable it would come up eventually in this series of reflections—and it’s certainly been on my mind for the past four months. I’d like some credit for holding off until the last post, when I am winging along at 30,000 feet on the way back from Tokyo to San Francisco, before pulling it out.
The thing is—this story remains the truest piece of insight I know about pilgrimage, or about life. What is the purpose of going “around” on pilgrimage? We’re literally walking in circles, especially, at least aspirationally, on Shikoku, the final (or actually not quite final) stop on this journey. I didn’t close the circle on Shikoku by walking all the way back to temple one, though in a variety of other ways, there was plenty of closing of loops in my departure from Kōbō Daishi’s divine realm. Mustang was supposed to be a circle as well, come to think of it—but that didn’t quite work out as planned, either. Did I fail at my pilgrimage because I didn’t succeed at walking in circles? Or was it enough, in the end, to just “go around” here and there, up and down, left and right, with as much attention and devotion as I could muster? And what is this “enough,” anyway?
Readers with long memories will recall that I started this pilgrimage with a couple of burning questions. I’m not going to bother rehearsing them here, because the answer to both has been, and remains, “I don’t know.” There has been a surfeit of not knowing at every stage, in fact. Not knowing whether the glacial streams feeding into the Tsarap Chu in Ladakh would rise so much in one day that we wouldn’t be able to make it out of the river gorge to camp. Not knowing how deep the water was under all that silt. Not knowing whether it would clear enough to make a sunrise visit to Macchupucchare basecamp to see something—anything—worthwhile, after a monsoon trek. Not knowing whether to stay or go on Shikoku. Not knowing whether to eat sentient beings or not to eat sentient beings. Not knowing whether we’d make it back from Mustang—or when, or how, or if. Not knowing why I signed up for a tripartite pilgrimage entirely comprised of places whose strains of Buddhism differ radically from the one I purport to practice.
Being out in the world in this way, on pilgrimage in faraway places, even with a series of skilled and skillful guides, I felt more exposed to not knowing than at any time in my life except, perhaps, in periods of profound grief. I say “exposed,” because it helped me realize how many things there are all around me in the ordinary course of my life that buffer and protect me from the sensation of not knowing. It’s almost instinctive to quell that sensation—that’s part of being an adult. Not knowing is a problem to be solved by … learning, solving, understanding, mastering. There’s also a temporal dimension at play here: much as in a monastic practice period, I had time over the past four months to not know, to expand into what Suzuki Roshi famously called “Beginner’s Mind.” I had time to not feel rushed into knowing. I had time, as one of my beloved teachers often says, to give up on trying to figure things out and just allow them to happen—or not to happen—in their own way.
What does it mean to say that not knowing is “most intimate”? This notion of intimacy is curious and not how the word is usually used, at least by most folks I know. I think it means something like, not knowing puts us into greater and deeper connection with the world. Not knowing, if we stop fighting with it for a minute, opens us to the world right in front of us right now—of necessity, in fact. When we don’t know, we have to look, listen, receive information from our surroundings. We have to pay more attention (at least as long as we don’t or can’t shut down in the absence of knowing). We have to ask for help. Knowledge, concepts, ideas: these come in handy, but they also get in the way and separate us from what’s right in front of us. It’s almost like: we skip it, because we already know. In the space left open by not knowing, stuff actually happens—like, a lot of stuff. I remember once, in the wildly stormy start to a Winter practice period at Tassajara, standing on the path near the bathhouse at Tassajara fixing one of ten thousand broken, flooded things in a pause between the storms. Abbot Ed walked past, and I asked, so casually, a little grumpily, “what’s happening?” He looked right at me with eyes on fire and completely alive, and said, “so. many. things.
Imagine if Fayan left on his pilgrimage confident that he knew the purpose of pilgrimage. Chances are, he’d kind of miss the actual pilgrimage he was having. I think of some of the folks I met on Shikoku, and honestly, and I could be way off here, it felt like for some, the purpose of pilgrimage was to complete the pilgrimage. Actually—to have completed it. And that’s fine—truly, it’s a remarkable feat and I have even more respect now than I did before I tried it for those who complete the circuit. I just got to wondering, is anybody else here just floundering around, walking and praying? Anybody just here, rather than here to have been here? “Have you done [Shikoku, Annapurna Circuit, the Camino, etc]?” is a way we ask about sacred places. But are we ever done with them, or they with us?
Yesterday I was blessed to spend the last of my precious days in Kyoto on Mt. Hiei. If you’ve heard of Mt. Hiei at all, it’s probably because that’s where the marathon monks of the Tendai sect make their home. These remarkable beings commit to 100 or, if given permission, 1000 days of unimaginably challenging austerities called kaihōgyō on Mt. Hiei and its surroundings. It is said that if you complete the 1000 days, you will become enlightened. If you don’t complete it, you are expected to take your life. But rather than focusing on the successful spiritual athletes, I thought a lot during my day on Mt. Hiei about those who didn’t complete even the 100 days. Maybe some of them, I thought, faced some pretty significant not knowing as they ran in the dark in the middle of the night—not knowing why or how this kind of austerity would lead to awakening, or what “awakening” is, anyway. not knowing why they should just keep going around, not knowing why they signed up for this. And maybe, just maybe, in electing to step away, they had an experience of intimacy with themselves and the world that left them transformed and more attentive—more tender and aware—than they were before they began. Anyway, I bowed to them many times when I was up there, my fellow pilgrims. To all those who had walked and prayed, regardless of their success or failure, beyond winning and losing.
Speaking of losing, Mt. Hiei has another claim to fame. The founders of many of the great schools of Japanese Buddhism—Pure Land, Nichiren, both Rinzai and Sōtō Zen—all of them were trained as Tendai monks on Mt. Hiei … and all of them left to form their own schools. It’s kind of like a monument to spiritual defectors. One of those defectors, of course, was Dōgen, founder of my own lineage. I don’t really have words for what it was like to wander in the mist across the temples and mountain paths of Enryakuji, the temple complex of Mt. Hiei, knowing that Dōgen walked the same paths, trained, rang the bell, and practiced on this very mountain as a young teenager. He looked out across the same misty mountain ranges, down at great Lake Biwa, through the exquisite Fall foliage, and across to the city of Kyoto. If it took me a while to get “around” to my own tradition on this pilgrimage, I sure felt like I’d come home for real as i bowed in pure awe in front of tiny weathered Kaidanin, the centuries-old wooden temple where Dōgen likely received the precepts at the end of his first year as a trainee monk, at the age of 13. Dōgen Zenji, boy monk, taking his vows for the first time, right here. Most intimate, for sure.
It seems very clear that for a good portion of his time on Mt. Hiei, Dōgen was engaged deeply, intimately, with “not knowing.” Within a very short time, he’d identified the question that lies at the core of his teachings, and one his Tendai masters couldn’t help him answer: if we all have Buddha nature, if we all come from original enlightened being, why do we need to practice, to “train,” to ring bells and take vows? Why do we go around on pilgrimage? How did we get so far from home?
I thought a lot during my time on Mt. Hiei about this young man—a child, really—walking those trails, sweeping the steps, copying sutras, sitting in meditation, not knowing why he was there to practice at all. By 17, he had moved on to Kenninji, the other temple that left an indelible mark on me in Kyoto. I had not realized that Dōgen practiced there until after I visited. But thinking back on its rock gardens and its serenity, now all I can think of is teenaged Dōgen, full of questions, still not knowing what he was doing there, still not knowing why he was practicing at all, eventually resolving to set off on his own pilgrimage to China to try and find some answers—and, while there, to break the bonds of question and answer and wake up.
Why on earth do we go on pilgrimage, go off to dusty lands, leave home and the ones we love and who love us, to take up a time or a life of practice, of pilgrimage, of walking and praying? I don’t know. I really, seriously, don’t. And I suspect very few others who have ever committed to this path know either. But along the way, out of the depths of our confusion, if we’re very fortunate, we might just fall a little in love with the world.
“What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
I don’t know. But I think—like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains—you should try it and see what happens.
Beautiful, and so touching. Not knowing is most courageous.