For the intrepid traveler, there are more resources than ever before. But what about the traveler who is at a crossroads in life, longing for something else, neither diversion nor distraction, beyond escape and mere entertainment? What about those eager for a journey that is personally meaningful?

For millennia this cry has been answered by pilgrimage, the transformative journey to a sacred center. The ancients referred to this path as the Way of the Pilgrim, an acknowledgement of travel for the sake of devotion, commitment, even penance to a holy site, a destination that blazes with meaning -- in short, a journey of risk and renewal. 

The Art of Pilgrimage is a guide for travelers ready to embark on a sacred journey and for armchair travelers curious to know what it means to travel with soulful purpose. Geared toward the modern-day pilgrim looking for inspiration and a few spiritual tools for the road, it combines stories, myths, parables, and quotes from famous travelers of the past with practical suggestions and contemporary accounts from people traveling the sacred way today. Not a guidebook to holy sites, this book is designed to help travelers focus on the purpose and intention at every stage of their journey no matter where they are going.

The Art of Pilgrimage includes stories of traditional pilgrimages such as those to Canterbury or Jerusalem, but also ones to Shakespeare's home, Graceland, or the "Field of Dreams" in Iowa. Phil Cousineau from his own travels covering over 50 countries and offers readers the advice he gives when leading his own small group travel programs.

The Art of Pilgrimage

The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel SacredBy Phil Cousineau

Conari Press

Copyright © 2000 Phil Cousineau
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781573245098

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 upthe Mekong River in Cambodia to see one of the great riddles of the ancientworld, the sacred sprawl of ruined temples and palaces that a twelfth-centurytraveler said "housed numerous marvels."

    On our first morning at the walled city of Angkor Wat, we witnesseda glorious sunrise over its lotus-crowned towers, then beganthe ritual walk up the long bridgeway toward the sanctuary. Our armswere draped across each other's shoulders. Our heads shook at theimpossibly beautiful sight of the "marvelous enigma" that earlyEuropean chroniclers regarded as one of the Wonders of the World,and later colonialists described as rivaling the divinely inspired architectureof Solomon.

    We walked as if in a fever-dream. Halfway down the causeway, wepaused to take in the beauty of the shifting light. We snapped a fewphotographs of the nagas, the five-headed stone serpents, that undulatedalong the moat and of the chiseled lacework in the colossal gatewaylooming before us, then grinned at each other and took a deepbreath of the morning air. At that moment, we noticed a gray-robedBuddhist nun limping by us on her way to the temple. Her head wasshaved and bronzed. When she drew even with us, I held out an offering,which she calmly accepted with stumps where once had beenhands. Stunned, I then realized why she had been walking as if onstilts. Her feet had been severed at the ankle and she was hobbling onthe knobs of her ankles. I was stricken with images of her mutilationby the demonic Khmer Rouge, then wondered if she'd been a victim ofone 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 stifflythrough the mud of one of the nearby ponds.

    The encounter with the Cambodian nun was an ominousway to begin our visit, a gift briefly disguised as a disturbance. Herenigmatic smile eerily anticipated the expression on the sculpturedfaces of the fifty-four giant bodhisattvas that loomed in the Holyof Holies above the nearby pyramid temples of the Bayon. Eachtime I met their timeless gaze, my heart leapt. As the lotus ponds andpools throughout the complex were created to reflect each workof religious art, the faces of the bodhisattvas and the nun mirroredeach other. I began to think of the nun as the embodiment ofthe 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 athousand statues.

    As far as prayers allow, the nun's eyes seemed to respond.

    I rambled through the ruins with my brother for the next severalhours, stunned by our sheer good fortune of being there. The Angkorcomplex was destroyed in the fifteenth century, then forgotten for 400years and overrun with the stone-strangling vines of the jungle.Marveling at the beauty laced with terror in the stories of our youngCambodian guide (who told us the local villagers believed that Angkorwas built by angels and giants), time seemed poised on the still-pointof the world. This was more than an architectural curiosity, a piousparable of fleeting glory; it was a microcosm of the universe itself.According to scholars, the walls, moats, and soaring terraces representedthe different levels of existence itself. The five towers of Angkorsymbolized the five peaks of Mount Meru, the center of the world inHindu cosmology. This was the world mountain in stone, a monumentalmandala encompassed by moats that evoked the oceans. A visitwas an accomplishment demanding the rigorous climbing of precipitouslysteep staircases, built that way not without reason.

    "It is clear," wrote Vice Admiral Bonard, an early colonialist, "thatthe worshiper penetrating the temple was intended to have a tangiblesense of moving to higher and higher levels of initiation." Our threedays stretched on. The hours seemed to contain days, the days heldweeks, as in all dreamtime adventures. We were graced with onestrangely moving encounter after another. Silently, we mingled withsaffron-robed monks who had walked hundreds of miles in the footstepsof their ancestors from Cambodia, Thailand, India, and Japan topray in the sanctuary of a place believed for a thousand years to be thecenter of the world. Gratefully, we traded road stories with travelerswho'd been through Burma, Vietnam, and China. After dark, we readthe accounts of fellow pilgrims who had been making the arduous trekhere by foot for centuries, from China and Japan in ancient times, thenby car from France and England, and by boat from America.

    Though neither Buddhist nor Hindu, wandering through the site Iwas more than smitten by the romancing of old stones. In the uncannyway of spiritually magnetized centers of pilgrimage, I felt a wonderfulcalm exploring the derelict pavilions, abandoned libraries, and lootedmonasteries. My imagination was animated by the strange and wonderfulchallenge to fill in what time had destroyed, thrilling to the knowledgethat tigers, panthers, and elephants still roamed over the flagstonesof 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 templegrounds, 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 hadendured a thousand years of historical chaos. The maimed children andfierce soldiers we encountered everywhere were grim evidence of anever-ending war. Once upon a time, foreigners were spared the horrorsof remote revolutions, but no more. In a local English-language newspaper,we read that Pol Pot had ordered the executions of three Australiantourists, saying only, "Crush them."

    Overshadowing even this were the twinges of guilt I felt for havingundertaken...