The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred
288
The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred
288eBook
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Overview
“A must read before a trip.” ―Escape
“One of the greatest travel books I have ever read.” ―Peter Feibleman, author of Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
#1 Bestseller in Atlases & Maps
The classic guide to making travel meaningful. The Art of Pilgrimage is a travel guide full of inspiration for the spiritual traveler.
Not just for pilgrims. We are descendants of nomads. And although we no longer partake in this nomadic life, the instinct to travel remains. Whether we’re planning a trip or buying a secondhand copy of Siddhartha, we’re always searching for a journey, a pilgrimage. With remarkable stories from famous travelers, poets, and modern-day pilgrims, The Art of Pilgrimage is for the mindful traveler who longs for something more than diversion and escape.
Rick Steves with a literary twist. Through literary travel stories and meditations, award-winning writer, filmmaker and host of the acclaimed Global Spirit PBS series, Phil Cousineau, shows readers that travel is worthy of mindfulness and spiritual examination. Learn to approach travel with a desire for risk and renewal, practicing intentionality and being present.
Spiritual travel for the soul. If you’re looking for reasons to travel, this is it. Whether traveling to Mecca or Memphis, Stonehenge or Cooperstown, one’s journey becomes meaningful when the traveler’s heart and imagination are open to experiencing the sacred. The Art of Pilgrimage shows that there is something sacred waiting to be discovered around us.
Inside find:
- Inspirational stories, myths, parables, and quotes from many travelers and many faiths
- How to see with the “eyes of the heart”
- Over 70 illustrations
If you enjoyed books like The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho, Unlikely Pilgrim, Zen on the Trail, or Pilgrimage─The Sacred Art, then The Art of Pilgrimage is a travel companion you’ll want to have with you.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609258153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Mango Media |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 570,946 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Phil Cousineau is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher and editor, lecturer, storyteller and TV host. With more than thirty-five books translated into more than ten languages and 15 scriptwriting credits to his name, Cousineau has also appeared alongside mentors Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith. He is co-writer and host of Global Spirit and has also appeared on CNN, The Discovery Channel, NFL Films, and more. He has been interviewed for stories in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
Currently, Cousineau lives with his family in North Beach in San Francisco, California. Learn more about his work at http://www.philcousineau.net.
Read an Excerpt
Art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action.
—René Daumal
PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.
—Ambrose Bierce
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions
that will make happiness;
one only stumbles upon them by chance,
in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere,
and holds fast to the days ....
—Willa Cather
Chapter One
The Longing
For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so,
Then people long on pilgrimage to go,
And palmers to be seeking foreign strands,
To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.
—Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales
In February 1996, together with my brother Paul, I took the long boat ride up the Mekong River in Cambodia to see one of the great riddles of the ancient world, the sacred sprawl of ruined temples and palaces that a twelfth-century traveler said "housed numerous marvels."
On our first morning at the walled city of Angkor Wat, we witnessed a glorious sunrise over its lotus-crowned towers, then began the ritual walk up the long bridgeway toward the sanctuary. Our arms were draped across each other's shoulders. Our heads shook at the impossibly beautiful sight of the "marvelous enigma" that early European chroniclers regarded as one of the Wonders of the World, and later colonialists described as rivaling the divinely inspired architecture ofSolomon.
We walked as if in a fever-dream. Halfway down the causeway, we paused to take in the beauty of the shifting light. We snapped a few photographs of the nagas, the five-headed stone serpents, that undulated along the moat and of the chiseled lacework in the colossal gateway looming before us, then grinned at each other and took a deep breath of the morning air. At that moment, we noticed a gray-robed Buddhist nun limping by us on her way to the temple. Her head was shaved and bronzed. When she drew even with us, I held out an offering, which she calmly accepted with stumps where once had been hands. Stunned, I then realized why she had been walking as if on stilts. Her feet had been severed at the ankle and she was hobbling on the knobs of her ankles. I was stricken with images of her mutilation by the demonic Khmer Rouge, then wondered if she'd been a victim of one of the 11 million landmines forgotten in the forests, fields, and roads of Cambodia.
Her eyes met mine with a gaze of almost surreal serenity. Utterly moved, we offered a few dollars for the shrine in the temple. She calmly accepted the donation in a small woven bag, bowed, and limped away, like a thin-legged crane moving stiffly through the mud of one of the nearby ponds.
The encounter with the Cambodian nun was an ominous way to begin our visit, a gift briefly disguised as a disturbance. Her enigmatic smile eerily anticipated the expression on the sculptured faces of the fifty-four giant bodhisattvas that loomed in the Holy of Holies above the nearby pyramid temples of the Bayon. Each time I met their timeless gaze, my heart leapt. As the lotus ponds and pools throughout the complex were created to reflect each work of religious art, the faces of the bodhisattvas and the nun mirrored each other. I began to think of the nun as the embodiment of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the god of inexhaustible compassion, who has come to symbolize the miracle of Angkor for millions of pilgrims.
How far does your forgiveness reach? the sculpted faces ask from a thousand statues.
As far as prayers allow, the nun's eyes seemed to respond.
I rambled through the ruins with my brother for the next several hours, stunned by our sheer good fortune of being there. The Angkor complex was destroyed in the fifteenth century, then forgotten for 400 years and overrun with the stone-strangling vines of the jungle. Marveling at the beauty laced with terror in the stories of our young Cambodian guide (who told us the local villagers believed that Angkor was built by angels and giants), time seemed poised on the still-point of the world. This was more than an architectural curiosity, a pious parable of fleeting glory; it was a microcosm of the universe itself. According to scholars, the walls, moats, and soaring terraces represented the different levels of existence itself. The five towers of Angkor symbolized the five peaks of Mount Meru, the center of the world in Hindu cosmology. This was the world mountain in stone, a monumental mandala encompassed by moats that evoked the oceans. A visit was an accomplishment demanding the rigorous climbing of precipitously steep staircases, built that way not without reason.
"It is clear," wrote Vice Admiral Bonard, an early colonialist, "that the worshiper penetrating the temple was intended to have a tangible sense of moving to higher and higher levels of initiation." Our three days stretched on. The hours seemed to contain days, the days held weeks, as in all dreamtime adventures. We were graced with one strangely moving encounter after another. Silently, we mingled with saffron-robed monks who had walked hundreds of miles in the footsteps of their ancestors from Cambodia, Thailand, India, and Japan to pray in the sanctuary of a place believed for a thousand years to be the center of the world. Gratefully, we traded road stories with travelers who'd been through Burma, Vietnam, and China. After dark, we read the accounts of fellow pilgrims who had been making the arduous trek here by foot for centuries, from China and Japan in ancient times, then by car from France and England, and by boat from America.
Though neither Buddhist nor Hindu, wandering through the site I was more than smitten by the romancing of old stones. In the uncanny way of spiritually magnetized centers of pilgrimage, I felt a wonderful calm exploring the derelict pavilions, abandoned libraries, and looted monasteries. My imagination was animated by the strange and wonderful challenge to fill in what time had destroyed, thrilling to the knowledge that tigers, panthers, and elephants still roamed over the flagstones of these shrines when Angkor was rediscovered in the 1860s.
But through our visit the dark thread ran.
With every step through the ghostly glory of the ancient temple grounds, it was impossible not to be reminded of the scourge of Pol Pot, the ever-present threat of landmines, and the fragility of a site that had endured a thousand years of historical chaos. The maimed children and fierce soldiers we encountered everywhere were grim evidence of a never-ending war. Once upon a time, foreigners were spared the horrors of remote revolutions, but no more. In a local English-language newspaper, we read that Pol Pot had ordered the executions of three Australian tourists, saying only, "Crush them."
Overshadowing even this were the twinges of guilt I felt for having undertaken the journey—Jo, my partner back in San Francisco, was seven months pregnant with our baby. Though she was selflessly supportive, I was uneasy. So why make such a risky journey?
To fulfill a vow.
Twice in the previous fifteen years, my plans to make the long trek to the ruins of Angkor had been thwarted at the Thai-Cambodia border. Dreading that war might break out again and the borders clamp shut for another twenty years, I believed that the research trip my brother and I were on in the Philippines serendipitously offered a last chance to fulfill a promise to my father.
On my eleventh birthday, he had presented me with a book, not a Zane Grey Western or the biography of my hometown baseball hero, Al Kaline, that I had asked for, but a book with a bronze-tinted cover depicting sculptures of fabulous creatures from a distant world. These creatures were not from a phantasmagorical planet out of science fiction, but the long-forgotten world of the Khmers, the ancient civilization that had built Angkor.
From that moment on, the book came to symbolize for me the hidden beauty of the world. With the transportive magic that only books possess, it offered a vision of the vast world outside of my small hometown in Michigan; it set a fire in my heart and through the years inspired in me the pilgrim's desire to see this wondrous place for myself.
When my father became ill in the fall of 1984, I drove cross-country from San Francisco to Detroit to see him and, in an effort to lift his spirits, promised him that when he recovered we would travel together. I tried to convince him that after years of unfulfilled plans to see Europe, we would travel together to Amsterdam and visit Van Gogh's nephew, whom he had once guided on a personal tour through Ford's River Rouge complex in Dearborn. After Holland, I suggested, we could take the train to P‚rigueux in southern France and track down the story of our ancestors who had left there in 1678. Then, I said haltingly, we could take a direct flight from Paris to Phnom Penh and visit Angkor Wat. He seemed pleased by the former, puzzled by the latter.
"Don't you remember the book you gave me as a boy?" I asked him, disappointed in his response to my cue. "The one on the excavations at Angkor?" He riffled through the memory of a lifetime of books he had bestowed on friends and family. Then his face lit up, and he harrumphed, "Oh, yes. Angkor, the Malcolm MacDonald book, the one with the sculptures of the Temple of the Leper King on the cover." He paused to consider the possibilities of our traveling together, then painfully readjusted himself in his old leather reading chair.
"I just wish I were as confident as you that I was going to recover," he said with the first note of despair I'd ever heard from him. "Of course, I'd like to see these places with you. It would be wonderful." Then his voice broke. "But I don't know, son, if I'm going to make it."
No one I've ever met has pronounced the word "wonderful" like my father. He stressed the first syllable, "won," as if the adjective did indeed have its roots in victory and triumph. He so rarely used upbeat words, so when he did I knew he meant it. Hearing it there and then, watching this once-ferocious and formidable man sit in a chair, unable to move his hands and feet because of a crippling nerve disease, I was shaken. Still, I feigned confidence and courage and promised we would hit the road together as soon as he recovered.
He didn't. Four months later, on the very Ides of March which he had announced every year in our house as though it were the strangest day on the calendar, my father died in his sleep.
Shortly after the funeral, while packing up the books in his stilled apartment, I made one of the few vows in my life. I promised myself I would take the journey for both of us, make the pilgrimage to a place made holy by the play of light on stone and the devotion of pilgrims who had walked astonishing distances so that they might touch the sacred sculpture and offer their prayers on the wings of incense.
And, in so doing, perhaps restore my faith in life itself.
THE ART OF PILGRIMAGE
We journey across the days as over a stone the waves.
—Paul Valéry
All our journeys are rhapsodies on the theme of discovery. We travel as seekers after answers we cannot find at home, and soon find that a change of climate is easier than a change of heart. The bittersweet truth about travel is embedded in the word, which derives from the older word travail, itself rooted in the Latin tripalium, a medieval torture rack. As many a far-ranging roamer has suspected, there are moments in travel that are like being "on the rack." For the wandering Bedouins, "Travel is travail." The ancient Greeks taught that obstacles were the tests of the gods, and the medieval Japanese believed that the sorrows of travel were challenges to overcome and transform into poetry and song. Whether we are on vacation, a business trip, or a far-flung adventure tour, we can look at the trying times along the road as either torment or chances to "stretch" ourselves.
But what do we do if we feel a need for something more out of our journeys than the perennial challenges and pleasures of travel? What happens if the search for the new is no longer enough? What if our heart aches for a kind of journey that defies explanation?
Centuries of travel lore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun. At that crossroads moment, a voice calls to our pilgrim soul. The time has come to set out for the sacred ground—the mountain, the temple, the ancestral home—that will stir our heart and restore our sense of wonder. It is down the path to the deeply real where time stops and we are seized by the mysteries. This is the journey we cannot not take.
On that long and winding road, it is easy to lose the way. Listen. The old hermit along the side of the road whispers, Stranger, pass by that which you do not love.
(Continues...)
Table of Contents
Foreword by Huston SmithPreface
Introduction
I The Longing
II The Call
III Departure
IV The Pilgrim's Way
V The Labyrinth
VI Arrival
VII Bringing Back the Boon
Gratitudes
Permissions
Recommended Reading
List of Illustrations
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
“Seeking answers to one’s own existence? Cousineau guarantees that the pilgrimage approach is the right path for obtaining those answers.” ―Brad Hooper, Booklist
“The quintessential traveling companion.” ―Spirituality and Practice
“Cousineau fires our night with flaming soul-bursts from every age and quarter… If there is such a thing as a world soul―an anima mundi―it would address our times in something like Cousineau’s voice.” ―Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions
“Phil Cousineau is the finest and most inspiring pilgrimage guide writing today.” ―Alexander Eliot, TIME magazine art critic, author of Because It Was Beautiful
“'…a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.’ Phil Cousineau wrote these words twenty-five years ago, and they ring true even more now. The Art of Pilgrimage has served as a guide to thousands of people seeking meaning in their lives―for a ‘time in’ in search of a new perspective―so this third edition brings me joy. Enjoy the stories, the insights, and the potential places you may travel whether from your armchair or a knitch in an airport. Phil is a consummate traveler; one who shares meaning and his soul.” ―Lauren Artress, author of The Path of the Holy Fool: How the Labyrinth Ignites Our Visionary Powers
“This book made me wish I could retrace my footsteps with Joe [Campbell] when we traveled the world together.” ―Jean Erdman Campbell, dancer and choreographer
“Phil Cousineau gets right to it―the human soul’s need for meaning. I’m so happy to see his Art of Pilgrimage again in celebration of all he has to teach us. Travel is a quest for meaning and pilgrimage is the answer. Whether your pilgrimage is to the sacred sites in your own neighborhood, to the Taj Mahal in India, or the Shrine of the Black Madonna of Poland, Phil Cousineau is a trustworthy guide. The Art of Pilgrimage is an essential companion to life’s journey and the depth of meaning you might find.” ―China Galland, author of Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna
“A treasure. It triggers the imagination and memory of all inner and outer journeys one has or has not taken.” ―Angeles Arrien, PhD, cultural anthropologist and author of The Four-Fold Way and Signs of Life
“Inviting, enlightening, deep, and enduring, The Art of Pilgrimage is the spiritual traveler’s bible. I first read it decades ago; it never gets old. It’s how I love to travel; it’s what I like to read.” ―Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of The Hand of Buddha and Navigating the Divide
“Whatever your longing, path, or destination, Phil Cousineau gives you the most valuable gear you could pack in your satchel.” ―Anthony Lawlor, author of A Home for the Soul and The Temple in the House
“Phil Cousineau is the most effective public speaker I have ever heard. His book on pilgrimage is one of the greatest travel books I have ever read.” ―Peter Feibleman, author of Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
“Phil’s book is a reminder that all poets are pilgrims of the word and all pilgrims are poets of the road.” ―Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“Phil Cousineau's The Art of Pilgrimage is a modern classic in the annals of travel writing. His book is a soul-stirring work that reveals the deeper meaning of our adventures on the road. Over the years it has inspired our own personal travel practices and informed our own work in the transformational travel movement. Phil's writing has also been a guiding light the way we mentor travelers in our programs to bring home the boon, the wisdom of every journey, so they might lead better lives when they return home.” ―Michael Bennett and Jake Haupert, co-founders of Explorer X and The Transformational Travel Council
“Stories, anecdotes, quotes, vignettes, and practical suggestions from travelers and pilgrims throughout history create a guide to building a personal journey by learning to slow down and linger, savor, and absorb each stage.” ―Library Journal
“If Joseph Campbell, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Moyers were to have collaborated on a book about journeys I suspect it would look very much like The Art of Pilgrimage.” ―Austin American Statesman
“Of all the books I’ve ever read about pilgrimage, this is the most poetic, personal, and timely.” ―John O’Donohue, author of Anam Cara
“If Phil Cousineau’s fine book were to have the influence it deserves, tourism might cease to be an environmental blight and become an educational blessing.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
“A must read before a trip.” ―Escape
“Phil Cousineau reminds us that we can make all of our journeys more intentional: With the roads to the exalted places we all want to visit more crowded than ever, we look more and more, but see less and less. But we don’t need more gimmicks and gadgets; all we need do is reimagine the way we travel. If we “truly want to know the secret of soulful travel, we need to believe that there is something sacred waiting to be discovered in virtually every journey.” ―U.S. Catholic
“I have made pilgrimages all my life. One, along the sea-roads of Charles Darwin, consumed more than twenty years. Then I found Phil Cousineau and now he is my guide on every wandering.” ―Georgia I. Hesse, founding travel editor, San Francisco Examiner
“The Art of Pilgrimage―that’s a classic.” ―Deepak Chopra, author of Spiritual Solutions
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