Backpacker Fiction

The Tao of Travel

I've always wondered if Buddhism is in some way as essential to travel as travel is to Buddhism. For most of his life, the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama, traveled around Northern India and Nepal teaching his doctrine and discipline. It was even the process of leaving his palace at age 29 that began his search for knowledge and understanding. The act of leaving one's home environment in order to experience the unknown world is both the first step for a traveler and the first step in Buddhism. Coincidence?

Traveling is life's best teacher. Henry Miller said that "One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." Travel forces you out of your snug comfort zones the way your mother used to force you out of bed on a Saturday morning to go shovel the driveway.

When you leave behind your closet full of clothes, your computer and cell-phone (although these two items are nearly as common as mp3 players these days) and your friends and family, you leave your palace of familiarity as the Buddha did.

The moment you land in that steaming tropical haze and are faced with the swarming crowds outside the airport, you get the most pungent wake-up call of you life, similar to that of the Buddha first coming into contact with old, sick and dead men.

Illusions are shattered, the curtains of perception fly up and the world as it actually is is revealed to us.

And in this newly revealed world, the traveler is forced to abandon his old identity, his small and uncomfortably tight cocoon of judgments, philosophies goals and achievements.

The traveler learns to ditch what's too heavy to carry; he pares himself down to his bare essentials; his beard (or armpit hair, for the women) grows. What we thought important no longer is.

No wonder so many cultures encourage leaving the home community for a "walk-about" or "vision quest" - time spent alone in nature waiting for the bear-spirit to reveal itself to you. These spiritual rites of passage are essential for many to pass from the innocence of childhood to the awareness and wisdom of adulthood.

Travel imparts an autonomy, forces you to be self-reliant, to think on your feet, to be responsible for your own actions. Most of all, it gives the balance of perspective. Who cares if you miss a night out with your friends to the city's hottest club? You've boated down the Irrawaddy delta on a fishing boat with two mischievous monks and danced at the biggest beach party in the world.

Posted by Matthew R. Loney at 7:45 AM