In the early part of the Western calendar's 7th century, a
Chinese Buddhist monk names Hsuan Tsang walked across Asia, from the
northern Chinese city of Xian to India and back again, to visit the holy sites of
his faith and learn its "truth." Let's jump forward a millennium and a half, as
New York Times book reviewer (and former Beijing bureau chief for
Time) Richard Bernstein, inspired by Hsuan Tsang's own account of his
journey as well as a biography by one of the monk's contemporaries, decided
to follow the route as best he could. "I didn't want to just travel a route and
write about my own experiences," he explained. "Simply taking a long,
arduous trip doesn't have the weight in a world this small, when almost
anyone can go almost anyplace, unless it's somewhere like the top of Mount
Everest or the North Pole by dog sled. I knew I wanted my theme to be a
spiritual route, the route via which Buddhism spread through China, and once
you've decided that, Hsuan Tsang is the obvious choice."
Bernstein's journey, by automobile, train, and plane, went by a lot more
quickly than Hsuan Tsang's, but it was filled with just as much adventure and
enlightenment. Ultimate Journey is a captivating account of Bernstein's
spiritual and personal reawakening, and the sometimes very frustrating
conditions under which it took place. (Photographs from Bernstein's journey, coordinated to a map of his
route, can be viewed online at the Knopf website.)
RH: At the very beginning, you mention some of the
alternatives you weighed at this turning point in your life. What
tipped the scales in favor of this trip instead of, say, moving to a
farm upstate and learning how to make Shaker furniture?
RB: Well, in fact, I have learned how to make furniture since my
return. (smiles) I want to be honest...I did think about learning how to
make Shaker furniture, and I did feel that it would provide a retreat from the
daily hurlyburly that I was very much in need of, but there wasn't really ever
any very strong competition in the immediate sense between that and taking
this journey. The journey was something I'd had in mind for a long time. I
wasn't getting any younger, and I knew if I didn't do it fairly soon, I'd become
less and less inclined to do it, and more and more obstacles would appear.
Making furniture was something I'd always be able to do, but I couldn't wait
very much longer to make this trip if I wanted to fulfill my ambition.
RH: There was serious doubt whether you'd be able to get into
China.
RB: I had in my mind the idea that I'd only go if I'd be able to feel
assured of knowing how I was going to get from point A to point B all along the
trip, but I soon realized I couldn't even be assured of whether I'd be able to
reach the starting point, the city of Xian. So I decided I just had to go and hope
for the best. I went to Hong Kong, where anybody can get a travel visa
through a tourist agency without the application being reviewed by the
Foreign Ministry. But if you're on a watchlist, you'll get stopped at the border.
I had reason to think that might happen, but I was wrong, and I was let
through with no difficulty.
RH: How faithful were you to the route Tsuan Hsang followed?
RB: I'd say about ninety percent, maybe eighty percent. The border
crossings between China and Central Asia, and between China and Pakistan,
going out and returning, aren't exactly the ones he made. Those crossings just
aren't open; you can't do them. But Afghanistan is the major omission on my
route, much more so than the border crossing. There were real monuments to
see there, monuments Tsuan Hsang saw that I didn't.
RH: Those monuments he saw in Afghanistan include the statues
of Buddha that have been destroyed recently by the Taliban,
right?
RB: Yes, he went to them and described them in his account, as well as
other Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan. He was thrilled to see them; it was a
major destination on his journey. Missing the opportunity to see those is the
only big regreat of my trip. I got to see just about everything else he saw, and
the border crossings I made were only about fifty miles, maybe a hundred
miles from where he crossed. The terrain is the same, the people are the same,
so I felt the experience was pretty much the same.
Not going to Afghanistan, not travelling along the Hindu Kush or the Khyber
Pass, was a major omission, but on the other hand, whenever you embark on a
trip like this, if you're planning to write a book about it, you always worry
that there isn't going to be "enough" there. And there was plenty even
without Afghanistan.
RH: You undertook this journey to think about what was missing
in your own life, as an unmarried man at fifty. And then there was
a moment that you write about where things seemed to just click
for you. An epiphany, almost.
RB: I say in the book that it wasn't an epiphany, because I didn't want to
overdramatize it, but I experienced... I got away from the excess of small stuff
life is always encumbered with at home and I experienced solitude again. That
was the main reason why the trip helped me think through what was really
important. It's like that scene in City Slickers when Jack Palance holds
up his finger and tells Billy Crystal to find the one thing, the thing that
matters.
Zhongmei, who was my girlfriend then, traveled with me the first two weeks
in China, across the Great Western Desert, from oasis to oasis, and then finally
she dropped me off at the train station in a town called Kucha. It was early in
the morning, still dark and gloomy. I watched her walk away from the train
after we said goodbye, and I had this immense longing for her to be able to
continue travelling with me. I knew before that that she was important to me,
but when she walked away and I felt that powerful emptiness, I realized I
didn't want her to be walking away from me, yet I had been the one walking
away from marriage until that moment. Shortly after that, when I was on the
bus from Aksu to Kashgar, and she was on the train heading in the opposite
direction, I had this vision of us going off in opposite directions, two points
moving apart from each other, and I knew I didn't want that.
RH: She came out again for the last leg of the journey, right?
RB: When I was getting ready to head back to Xian from Delhi, I emailed
her and asked her if she'd be able to come back and join me. She did, which
made me happy in any case, but especially because of the gesture of love it was
for her to come out to Delhi from New York for this hard overland trip. She's a
tough young woman, but she's not the adventurer type. This isn't the sort of
trip she'd choose to make on her own.
RH: And it's a cliche, but I'm sure the marriage which has since
taken place is an adventure all its own for you.
RB: It is, but I feel that because we waited such a long time to get
married that a lot of the nonsense is behind us. We've dealt with a lot of the
problems that couples who get married more quickly have after the get
married.
RH: So what are your plans for the future?
RB: I haven't fully decided. I hope I'll go to the next stage of my private
life and start a family. The thing I most want to do in life is write books. I'm
juggling a couple ideas now, and talking to my publisher about what my next
book will be. I've been trying to think of a travel adventure I could undertake
that would make a good book, but frankly I haven't thought of one yet. Just as
a personal matter, I've never spent any time in Burma or Cambodia, so I'd like
to spend some time there. And there's being as good a critic for the Times
as I can be, which of course takes up a good deal of my energy and time.
RH: In Ultimate Journey, there's a passing mention of a
desire to write an historical novel.
RB: Writing a novel is in some ways equivalent to my making Shaker
furniture, though I'll probably be better at it than I was at making furniture.
Shaker furniture is hard. (smiles) I've been working for some time,
even before I made this trip, on a novel in the Alienist genre set in
Boston and Cambridge in 1859, the year that The Origin of Species was
published, and I'm hoping to get back to that.
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