Praying with the Feet

In Dharamsala I learned about merit through practicing circumambulation. But my introduction to this compact form of pilgirmage came in the early 1980s when I was living in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was, apparently, by accident, but then, perhaps not. This initial exposure to the profundities of pilgrimage began on a Saturday morning in the early spring.

I left my apartment to walk to the post office with a couple of letters in hand. Crossing the town common, I saw a small group ahead of me, their balloons and banners framed by the newly greening trees. Coming closer, I recognized some Buddhist monks in the crowd and realized that they were the world peace marchers who had been interviewed in yesterday's paper. The article said they were walking from Montreal to New York City where the UN was to hold a special session on nuclear disarmament, and that they were passing through Amherst on the way. In an idealistic mood, I even thought about joining them for the next leg of the march, but finally decided that my marching days were long past. Suddenly the four or five monks started beating their drums, the group started chanting and they came in my direction.

They were a bit of a rag-tag group, in sharp contrast to the sleek physicians I'd recently heard speak out against nuclear arms. The physicians had really scared me, especially when they talked about the effects of nuclear war on the ozone layer around the earth. Some clever researcher had calculated that all the mushroom clouds of a nuclear war would fill the ozone layer with so much dust that it would temporarily be unable to screen out the massive amount of ultraviolet radiation that usually rains on the earth. In the days that would follow, this surge of ultraviolet radiation would blind all the animals above ground. It wasn't hard to figure out that if all the wild animals in the world (including insects, I presumed) were blinded, they would die, and that the entire fabric of life would break. I felt as if something in me had rounded a corner when I heard that and realized that we were no longer facing the destruction of human life alone, but of all LIFE. What to do? Fight, and become like the opponent you grapple with?

I wondered what the peace marchers had to offer. I'd marched against the Vietnam war; I knew futility when I saw it. What could be more futile than walking several miles from one town to the next behind a bunch of Japanese Buddhist monks beating drums? My mind told me to pay the household bills and deal with the realities of my own survival.

As the procession passed me, I felt like I was in a live- action replay of the mid '60's: long hair, beards, light chatter about the spring weather. But I also felt something else: a subtle compulsion to step into the line. Maybe a futile action, like a long walk on a nice spring day, was just the right response to an absurd and hopeless world situation. At any rate, there was certain to be a mail box along the way.

As we crossed the street and started down the highway, I began to feel a bit foolish, but then I remembered something else from the article on the marchers. Someone who had walked in a similar procession in Europe said that the experience of walking at the front of the line, where the monks were, was very different from walking at the back. So I jogged up to the front of the 150- or 200-person procession to test out his theory. I still felt foolish, but keep on walking, because, I told myself, splitting off from the group at the very beginning of the march was going to make me feel even more foolish.

After about five minutes of listening to my internal chatter, I tripped over a stick on the side of the road, and chided myself: "Lost in your head as usual, a typical academic who can't keep his feet on the ground." But when it happened a second and a third time, I looked down and noticed that this particular stick was following me at a rapid pace. It was red on the tip, white on the shaft, and connected to the hand of a young woman wearing absolutely opaque glasses. Her seriousness of purpose hit me like the critical words of a respected teacher, and the chatter in my head stopped.

I began to look at the lovely bright green spring leaves expanding out of their bud-rolls and the fantastic green tint of the grasses newly liberated from a late snowfall, seeing them juxtaposed to large mushrooms of dirty clouds filling up the atmosphere, wounding the ozone layer and blinding the birds so pleasantly chirping away in the trees overhead. The image of an unraveling fabric appeared before my mind's eye, and as I looked at the bare trees that had not as yet leafed, I was struck by the vision of a planet covered with bare trees, the greenness of life vaporized by the insanity of humankind. My walking became solid and grim; the image would not leave me.

The steady beat of the drums seemed to encompass the crowd, almost like a cocoon that set us off from the traffic that rumbled by. Happy people, young and old, setting out for the day's errands and pleasures, seemed oddly juxtaposed to my own glum tramping in that cocoon of drumbeats. I couldn't bear to look at the trees swelling with life, so instead I looked down at the dark asphalt at my feet. That, at least, kept me out of the track of the swinging cane. Head down, I plodded along with the drums and the chanting in my ears.

Ahead of me, a monk in a yellowish robe and a muffin-shaped hat strode on. Though I was wondering how many of the seven miles I could walk, and where would I catch a bus home, his feet were obviously in no hurry. His sandals were worn down in the back -- he'd clearly been on the road a long time; perhaps time didn't even have much to do with his walking. His gait was so regular and solid, the movements of the students around me seemed almost spastic by comparison. I hated to think about how I would look to myself, let alone to the passers-by. We were coming up to the shopping mall on the outskirts of the town, a real blemish on the picturesqueness of the New England scene. I had a particular repulsion for such complexes, perhaps because I'm an expatriate from Los Angeles. A vast wasteland, I thought, a cultural desert. And through my mind's free associating, I found myself thinking about where I'd been at precisely that moment the previous Saturday: in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum, looking at frescoes stolen from dead ancient cities and monasteries on one of the Central Asian silk roads.

The frescoes portrayed Buddhist monks and deities preaching, sitting (even swimming!) and of course, walking. Walking through the wastes of the Taklamakan Desert to spread the word of the Buddha's salvific power. Inspired by a faith and a power which had died with them in the wastes of a desert whose name meant "go in and you won't come out." Looking at the mall to my left, its parking lot filled with cars radiating waves of heat from the late morning sun, I thought of our personal modern American wasteland with more than a little gloom. Wham, wham, wham, the drumbeats split my attention in half, the chanting oozed in, and here, in 1982, the sons of the Buddha were again trekking through the desert, spreading the word of hope. The sand under my feet was not of the Taklamakan, but the spiritual desert of modern life which conceived malls and nuclear bombs. The ancient sand dunes may have contained howling demons which were quelled by monks chanting along behind camels, but this desert was no less vast and no less in need of spiritual nurturance.

So the Buddha has not forgotten mankind. His emissaries of peace were still walking -- it was all the same human ignorance He had sworn to defeat. My glum mood broke. Even my sense of futility wavered. There was another power in the world, a selflessness in the midst of the mass of human greed and egoism. A consciousness that loved the birds and the grasses, and had perpetuated itself for thousands of years. Indian monks tromping over the Pamirs into the oasis cities of the Taklamakan. Central Asian monks tromping across the desert, out of their sweet oases to the cities and hills of China. Chinese monks walking to the coast and taking ships to Japan, and finally at the end of 2,000 years of pilgrimage, Japanese monks walking through rural Massachusetts. An unbroken chain of chanting and drum beating, of sandaled feet, yellow-robed generations in the sun, reminding us of another way.

And here I was, walking in the same line. The power of what was happening on that highway began to dawn on me, and as it did, I found that my feet were beginning to keep pace with the drums.

But if I looked up, looked at the telephone poles, the passing cars, I lost the flow, lost the power, was absorbed into the purposeless plastic desert all around me. I remembered the blind girl -- no need to look where one was going, the stream of chanting would carry one along. Looking back down at the sand on the highway, my feet surrendered to the drums and my ears surrendered to the chanting. Again I could feel the power of our procession, and the more I attended to it, the stronger it grew. A chain stretching in time and space, and yet still just a ragged bunch of idealists tromping from one side of the Connecticut River Valley to the other along Massachusetts State Highway 9.

Mile after mile down the highway, the drums made it so easy that I even began to resent the rest stops, because they broke the flow of energy. But the monks were wiser than I. They relaxed next to the highway in the shade of a church which had greeted us by ringing its bells. The monks were in no hurry. When they stood up and began to beat their drums, their pace was unchanged, and I fell into the flow they established.

The sense of power was now quite tangible, a real force being created in the world as we walked down the highway. So this is what pilgrimage is all about! My mind had become as quiet as a falling leaf. Now here was real action, an action which established a power in the minds of the marchers and the passers- by, which countered the twisted plans of governments and their "survivable" nuclear wars. It was the almost inhuman convolutions of the ignorance of their minds that had built the bombs, and it was their fear and anger that would set them off. The end of the world is held in the minds of those men, I thought, so naturally its salvation would have to be held in our own minds. So on we walked, 150 people walking to preserve the trees and grasses and birds of the entire planet from the darkness of human stupidity, selfishness and violence. But 150 people on the edge of a tradition, filled with the good and compassionate thoughts of millions of believers in positive human possibilities who had walked thousands and millions of miles for peace over the millennia. A true force to set before the world, to absorb and cradle its mad minds in the chanting drums of hope.

Crossing the Connecticut River to the other shore of this beautiful valley, I felt encouraged for the first time in years. Something could be done. Something inoffensive, something without a hint of violence, a prayer of the feet testifying to the power of altruism.

[Modified from an article originally published in Buddhists for Peace: Journal of the Asian Buddhist Conference for Peace, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1983; pp. 60-62.]