Japan’s most celebrated poet, writing in the 17th century under the name of Matsuo Basho, found his truest home on the road. Sleeping on a grass pillow, seeking out auspicious places from which to watch the full moon rise, living not quite as a Zen priest and not quite as a layman, he is best remembered for the monthslong travels he took on foot. Yes, sometimes he found a horse to ride but, most often, he was traipsing along in straw sandals, engaging with fellow travelers — an aging priest, two itinerant concubines — and keeping a diary (in poetry and prose) of what he saw and felt.
In giving voice to what he called this “windswept spirit,” he was consciously following in the footsteps of a great line of spiritual ancestors famous for their long walks. The elderly monk Zoki headed out toward the shrine-filled pathways of the eastern forests known as Kumano in the 10th century, sleeping at times in a shelter made of branches, recording the wistful cries of deer, the rustle of autumn insects. A century and a half later, a courtier named Saigyo gave up his position as a palace guard to become a wandering poet and monk. Basho even invokes the 13th-century nun Abutsu, who in her mid-50s made the two-week walk along the Tokaido, the crowded seaside highway leading from the official capital of Kyoto to the de facto one at Kamakura, to present an inheritance claim in a court of law.
Roaming in the wake of such immortals, as he considered them, Basho thought of his walks as a spiritual discipline. In making his climactic journey along what he called “the narrow road to the deep north,” he was visiting not just a remote part of his country but the neglected corners of himself, otherwise obscured by society and routine. The full moon he sought is a classic Buddhist image of enlightenment.
Nobody could claim that walking is peculiar to Japan; Chaucer had sent his pilgrims toward Canterbury centuries before Basho was born. But Japan has long given the world an image of men and women quitting the busy world for a life of clarity and simplicity. In his classic essay on walking, Henry David Thoreau might have been drawing on the Basho who wrote, “My solitude shall be my company and my poverty my wealth.”
Look at the exquisite woodblock prints of the 19th-century artist Utagawa Hiroshige: Again and again they present us with figures walking along, say, the 53 stations of the Tokaido. This is the world as seen when traveling on foot, among fellow pedestrians, strollers and shopkeepers. Hiroshige’s predecessor Katsushika Hokusai likewise produced 36 views of Mount Fuji — a favored site for climbing even now. Walking, on journeys or in festivals, becomes a way of losing oneself in the natural world and its rhythms — and of recalling how small humans remain in both time and space.
The Buddha often used the metaphor of a path to suggest the road toward liberation; Japan’s classical arts — judo, kendo, shodo (the craft of calligraphy) — all use the suffix “-do” to suggest a spiritual course, or “way.” Along the busy streets of Kyoto, you’ll still see monks proceeding every day with bowls extended, seeking alms; within their temple walls, they practice walking meditation as if to dissolve all distinctions between the zendo and the crowded world. Not far away, on the cold, dark mountain that presides over northeastern Kyoto, Hieizan, monks belonging to the Tendai sect of Buddhism are encouraged to undertake a circuit of roughly 25,000 miles, over the span of seven years, culminating in a 1,000-day marathon of fearsome intensity; only 46 men have completed the course since 1885. The monks traditionally carry daggers by their sides with which they’ve pledged to take their own lives if they so much as falter along the way; after nine days of intense fasting, the figures shown in photographs look almost posthumous, as though lit from within by an unearthly glow.
Yet even my nonmonastic neighbors here in Nara are enthusiastic hikers and walkers, making sacramental climbs of local peaks or completing the traditional circuit of 88 Shingon Buddhist temples on the island of Shikoku (helped in many cases nowadays by a bus). When they finally arrive at their ultimate destination — the grave-filled mountain of Koyasan, on neighboring Honshu island, where five pilgrimage routes converge — they’ll likely see yamabushi, or white-clad mountain ascetics wearing straw sandals and blowing conch shells, who have given themselves over, in some cases, to monthslong walks.
Walking is a congenial way of stitching a community together; when I head out at 6 a.m. on jet-lagged mornings, it’s to see many of my mostly retired neighbors taking themselves and their dogs on sociable constitutionals. Nobody is ever jogging unless it’s a foreigner. Walking is a way to slow oneself down, to cultivate attentiveness and to return to the elements, as the roundabout entrances to the museums on the islands of Naoshima and Teshima encourage visitors to do. A country that lacks Western-style addresses, where simply extricating yourself from a train station can take 10,000 steps, is made for the flâneur who recalls the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that not finding your way is very different from getting lost.
Basho was 50 when he left home on what would be his final walk, to see the dedication of a new shrine at Ise; his health was failing. The journey would not be as strenuous as the five months he’d spent covering 1,500 miles in the far north — followed by two more years of wandering in more familiar terrain — but he undertook it, as ever, in order to come to terms with loneliness and impermanence, and to draw close to those who had come before. Almost his last published words, before his death in 1694, remind us that, for a Buddhist, the path goes on forever, into misty distances we can’t begin to anticipate. “So I must take to the road again,” the lifelong wanderer wrote. “Farewell, my friends.”
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