I just finished reading Richard Bernstein's Ultimate Journey. Published in 1999, the book chronicles Bernstein's journey to the East to retrace the spiritual pilgrimage of Chinese monk Hsuan Tsang who crossed from Western China into India on the Silk Road on a 17-year journey that took place centuries ago. Bernstein's travelogue is fraught with the hardships of modern travel (crossing borders, getting visas, negotiating local ground travel) and reflection upon his years working in China as a journalist, woven together with a simultaneous historical narrative about the travels of Hsuan Tsang. I didn't love this book in the way that I hoped that I would. I actually like Rudy Wurlitzer's Hard Travel to Sacred Places much better as a travelogue, though I also had criticisms of the narrative arc of Wurlitzer's book. Whereas Wurlitzer's journey to the East (Laos, Cambodia, Thailand) centered around a trip that he took with his wife in the wake of grieving their son's death from a tragic car accident, Bernstein's main impetus for his trip at middle age seems to admittedly be because soon he will be too old to take such a trip. He revisits the sites of his youth and reminisces about the stories he captured as a fledgling freelancer writing for the Christian Science Monitor. Whereas Wurlitzer is a spiritual devotee and seeker, Bernstein traces the steps of a Buddhist pilgrim with seemingly little emotional investment. At times, the reader even sees the ugly American emerge when he demands an audience with a Maharaja basically unannounced and complains loudly on a train about his fellow travelers. The section of Bernstein's book on the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang glosses the experience - experienced at the end of a long journey through China to India to China again, the wonder of the cave murals is lost on Bernstein who is ready to return to the States by the conclusion of the book.

The one interesting piece of knowledge that I did glean from reading Bernstein's book was some of his recapping of Buddhist Jataka tales - the subject of cave murals throughout China and India. Apparently, there are more than a few stories of the Buddha self-mutilating in order to get closer to enlightenment. Not simply starving himself, but cutting off an arm to feed a tiger, beheading himself, gouging out his eyes - far more violent than Bodhidharma tearing off his eyelids to stay awake. Discovering these stories will I hope inform the long poem ("Kintsugi") I've been writing about wholeness, wounding, and mutilation. Digression - I think that the phenomenon of "wanna-bes" (thanks to my anthro colleagues) will also occupy some section of this long piece.