The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  Walking across Japan, he ate from the trees and from the food shared with him, by both Japanese citizens, who had nearly nothing, and by fellow American servicemen he encountered. Incredibly, no one in the US military inquired where he was stationed, or what his orders were; they assumed, because he was in uniform, and in Japan, he was in their quadrant or district for a reason. He did nothing to dispel this assumption. At their canteens, he would pocket some of the extra food, and the next time he encountered the starving Japanese, he would share what he could with them. Some nights he slept in makeshift US Army bases, other nights under the stars in the countryside. It did not hurt that this was late August, and Japan was not yet cold.

  He made his way to the Chinese mainland with relative ease, securing a spot on a US Naval freighter ferrying humanitarian goods between Japan and Manchuria. To gain access to the ship, he committed the only lie he had on the entire trip: that as a medic he had been reassigned to a division in mainland China and as such they were expecting him post-haste. No one checked on it, and soon he was across the Yellow Sea.

  It was after that, once he was in China, that the hurriedly assembled US infrastructure began to fall away. His intention was to go to Bodh Gaya, for at that point, in his limited understanding of Buddhism, he thought that was where one went if one wanted to get a core understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. Someone had put those words in his ear and he’d locked onto them. Back then, there were no guidebooks, no research libraries; he was a man with hardly more than a wisp of information, but a ton of intent. I think of how crazy that must have been. I thought I had gone to the East on a wing and a prayer, but I’d at least known my geography, attended seminars, read books; I was in short exposed to a great deal of information before I set out for Burma. I knew where I was going, down to the name of the monastery. Comparatively, Anagarika Ratha was flying blind. He’d simply walked east, intent on a place called Bodh Gaya that was located in that general direction! I can imagine his dismay to learn, once he’d reached China, that he still had two thousand miles to go! Nevertheless, he persevered. I was to learn that about Anagarika Ratha: he persevered. Above all else, that was the one thing he could do. And in that was perhaps the foundation of his greater understanding.

  While he was in China, he went about figuring how he’d get to Bodh Gaya. He moved south toward India, hitching rides where he could, hoboing it on trains where he could, but mostly he walked. It felt like the most honest method of travel. He took nothing that was not offered to him. Additionally, he’d made a vow in his head never to use money. He’d seen so much of the financial underpinnings of war that he wanted no part of it. Understandably, this didn’t make travel easy. I’d at least had traveler’s checks and a money belt full of cash to get me to Myanmar. Anagarika Ratha, though, was minimalist in the extreme. He wanted to be a man on the land. He wanted that to be the interface. He worked for food. Foraged for it. Learned to exist on a quarter of what he’d eaten back home. Life had become simplified in the extreme. It was simple, but not necessarily good. He was still dogged with the same pains, the same truths he saw that were just as universal here in China as they were in the places he’d been before: there was sickness, depravity, death, poverty. Suffering knew no border, no language, no culture. But what allowed him to move through all of this was the simplification of his life, crystalized into a single intent: make it to Bodh Gaya. And each step he took got him one step closer.

  It was after some weeks that he happened upon a fortunate series of events. Passing through a small town with a Buddhist temple, he saw that there was a great deal of activity there, more than such a small town or its temple should produce. Out of curiosity he crossed over to it, and found that there was a traveling proselytizer there, which is unusual in Buddhism, because Buddhists for the most part don’t proselytize. In this case, it was an Indian man, along with a group of Chan monks, around which were a number of people who were Chinese, Tibetan, and even Korean. It turned out they were pilgrims, and the Indian man was a representative of the Mahabodhi Society, which at that time was vigorously promoting pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, a destination they characterized as the “beating heart of Buddhism” in the world. They were one of hundreds of groups moving through Asia at the time, financed by the Mahabodhi Society, trying to convince local populations to visit Bodh Gaya. It turned out there was a particular political agenda attached to this, but the man who was Gray Allen didn’t know this at the time. It seemed heavensent. Here was a group of fellow seekers intent on doing the exact same thing as he: traveling to Bodh Gaya!

  So after hearing the man’s speech, Gray indicated he’d like to join the pilgrimage, and fell in with them.

  They were soon headed south, by bus when they could, but more often in a great walking mass of pilgrims. Few spoke serviceable English, so Gray was resigned to walking silently among them, trying to ascertain through gesture and intonation what their conversations were about. It was nice to hear the upward lilt of their voices as they finished their sentences, even if he did not understand the language, for it indicated that there were many questions being bandied about. That is not the tone of war—there are not many questions, not outwardly in war—but rather matter-of-factness, statements, orders. And Gray thought that perhaps part of what was lost in war was the humility of questions, the genuflection implicit in publicly taking the position that you did not know things. There was no threat in questions, no ego, no attempts to control or subvert. One was humbly asking to be filled up, rather than to foist upon another the certitude of one’s own knowledge and ideology. Of course, questions could be twisted and rhetorical, but those in the end were not true, honest questions. They were agenda masquerading as inquiry, and Gray saw none of that here. These people were honest in their seeking, so much so that they would walk two thousand miles, filling the air more regularly with questions than anything else; they inhabited unknowingness without shame or guile.

  He learned a little Tibetan along the way, as he found the Tibetans most sociable among the pilgrims. They seemed interested in all that was foreign to them, because, as it turned out, away from the high-altitude frozen steppes of Tibet, virtually everything is foreign! Including the lone white man among them, who still wore his military pants and boots. They wanted to know everything about him, where he came from. In his pantomime, he tried to approximate the world, and show that he’d come from the other side, from the United States. This seemed lost on them. Finally, he found a guava, situated their current location on one side of the guava, then rotated the fruit and located his home on the other side. The Tibetans broke out laughing, as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. For a long time, Gray was unable to make out what the source of their amusement was. It was not until days later, when they’d come across an errant piece of newspaper pinned up against a chain-link fence, and one of the Tibetans took out a pen, that Gray began to understand what so amused them. The Tibetan, who was a monk and thus one of the more educated of the population, fixed their current location on the newspaper with the pen, then handed the pen to Gray to mark where his home was. Gray first attempted to mark an “x” on the other side of the paper, and once again the Tibetans broke out in raucous laughter. The monk poked at the paper, insisting that Gray write the “x” on the same side the monk had. Gray relented, drew an “x” on the far side of the sheet, scribbling in a few quick shapes to suggest the continents, and the Tibetans, seeing this, nodded with broad-cheeked smiles and “ahs.” Still, Gray felt compelled to drive home the point that he’d come from the other side of the world, and curved their crude map until the sides met in a cylinder. He tapped once again the “x” where they currently were, and rotated the cylinder to show the “x” from where he’d come—the other side of the world. The Tibetans were in stitches! Why did he keep doing this?! They laughed and laughed and laughed. And it was not until a little later that Gray understood: the Tibetans thought the world was flat. This was 1945, and there were still people who thought the
world was flat! Gray was flabbergasted. Perhaps that was why there were so many questions in the air. They simply didn’t know things and were curious.

  It was so foreign to the world he’d just been in, with its advanced science, advanced tactics, advanced philosophical and religious thought.

  Could it be that knowledge was a sort of static? An elegant haze that occluded the primordial understructure of being, within which was unoccluded truth, answer, and reason? He had no idea if this was idealism, reflective of his desperation and pain, but something in him suggested that while unremitting suffering was a hallmark of human life, as evidenced by five thousand years of perpetual warfare, disease, malfeasance, and death, so too must there be a quality or dynamic, somewhere, within existence, that allowed man to endure despite this. It was something beneath the noise. Not in the moreness of information or knowledge or acquisition, that is to say, in progress, that lodestar of human civilization, but instead in regression, in the stripping away of all the strata of thought and concept and acculturation of the world. It was not in sharp-edged statement, he thought, it was in the yielding illiteracy of questions. If nothing else, for Gray, it was a relief to be in the company of people who were the furthest thing from know-it-alls. For everyone in war knows everything, and no one in war knows nothing.

  Their travels carried them through the southern mountains of China, through Nepal, and down into the flood plains of India. They lost some pilgrims through attrition, gained some through the Mahabodhi Society’s continuous efforts to recruit new pilgrims along the way. The Indian Buddhists that headed this effort were quite convincing. For, concurrent with World War Two, India had had its own internal convulsions as it neared Independence in the late 1940s. And the Mahabodhi Society’s message of Buddhist acceptance was a welcome one, not only to Gray, but to a great many people along the way. It said that Buddhism was not an imperialist religion like the rest of the major religions. That wars were not fought over Buddhism. Buddhism was about peace, first internally, which in turn spreads outward into the world. There was no pope in Buddhism, no caliph, no jihad, no inquisition. The world, the representatives of the Mahabodhi Society declared, didn’t need a spirituality that created notions of good or evil, of us versus them, of the Other. Anything divine in concept was not divisive in concept. It was an effective message. Gray, so tired of war and ideology, readily absorbed it. Could it be that the world could clean up its act, one person at a time, by that person’s efforts to unwind his inner strife through meditation? Could such a bottom-up approach work? For the top-down approach of government and creed hadn’t.

  There was something curiously communal in meditation. The pilgrims sat in meditation to start the day and finish the day, observing their breath, observing their thoughts. It was a hugely inward experience, a mind state that Gray was, by his own admission, remarkably unskilled at, and yet there was something to sitting amid hundreds of other sincere aspirants, who searched their inner cosmos with equal aplomb and frustration, on all sides of you. It was communal in the way the military was. Even if you resisted war, as Gray had, there is something to the collective that inexorably draws us to it. In the case of war, your unit is your tribe. Even the lone wolf feels the call of the collective. Our minds are at once ours and part of whatever group we assimilate into. It is just a matter of which group, which tribe—as all tribes in their own way afford us the communion we so desperately seek—but their karmic effects on the world are decidedly different.

  It took them almost three months to finally reach Bodh Gaya. They arrived at night, and while they had seen electric light along the way, strung intermittently in the small towns, the Tibetans were positively thrilled at the show of light that was Bodh Gaya, particularly at the Mahabodhi Temple structure along the banks of the Falgu River, where the Buddha had attained his enlightenment. The grounds were festooned with electric lights. It looked to Gray like the county fairs back at home. Ill-strung bulbs everywhere, wound through trees, stretched atop rickety poles. The grounds were alive with pilgrims. It turned out that the Mahabodhi Society’s efforts were far larger than Gray had understood. They’d drawn pilgrims from far and wide.

  The first thing that Gray and his fellow pilgrims did was sit beside the Falgu, beholding those sacred waters that the Buddha had beheld, and meditate. Gray could feel the energy of the place, the excitement that seemed to bristle among his fellow pilgrims, and yet curiously, his meditation, he found, was no better, no less frustrating, no more fulfilling, than it had been along the journey. He could not follow his breath with any success, and the much-hoped-for lightning-bolt illuminations he sought did not come either. He was simply a man with his eyes closed, still thinking the same thoughts that dogged him in all the other locations of the world, still without answer or respite. Bodh Gaya had been the shining star on the horizon this whole time, the promised land of answer and completion, and all it was was another place, humid, filled with mosquitoes and the smell of trash. He felt let down. That was his first impression of Bodh Gaya.

  Upon awakening the next day, his mood had reset a bit, and he wandered amid the temple grounds, considering the remarkable architecture of the temple. Its foundation had been built over two thousand years ago at the behest of the emperor Ashoka, who wanted to commemorate the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. In the intervening years it had fallen into decline, been rebuilt, fallen into decline again.

  What struck Gray as he moved through the temple was the large presence of small Hindu shrines tucked in every affordable corner or niche. How a lot of the Buddhist iconography had been minimized, while the Hindu deities were given prominent positioning. Even more so, despite the considerable presence of Buddhist pilgrims on the grounds, there were about a hundred armed Indian guards, there to ensure that the Buddhist pilgrims kept themselves to particular areas and paths on the temple grounds. Gray soon realized that Mahabodhi Temple was really two temples: one in which the Buddhists practiced, and one in which the Hindus worshipped. They were kept separate.

  Gray was soon to learn why, for that morning, after morning meditation, the pilgrims were invited to a speech given by the leader of the Mahabodhi Society, a clean-shaven doctor by the name of Mukherjee. A stage had been set up on the far side of the grounds and as many as a thousand pilgrims collected around it, sitting eagerly in the grass to listen. Gray was mindful of the three dozen or so Indian soldiers that ringed the event, as if to keep order. There was a curious tension in the air. At least Gray thought he sensed it. Mukherjee, however, taking the platform to some polite applause, did not appear to convey the same concern. He was benevolent-eyed, calm, happy.

  The voice he spoke into the microphone with was one of crisp, British-educated English. He thanked everyone for coming, then went into the history of the site, in an attempt to further illuminate the pilgrims on the importance of the sacred grounds they’d come so far to visit. “You may be surprised to find the presence of so much Hindu worship on the site of the Buddha’s original enlightenment. It is, at present, under Hindu control—recognized by the nation of India as a Hindu religious site. We do not blame history for this, we do not blame the Hindus. For any reading of any history book will show that sacred sites are constantly repurposed and reused by later faiths. You can understand why the Hindus took to this place when they found it in disrepair in the sixteenth century. It’s a nice place, isn’t it?”

  He said this with a broad smile, gesturing to the expansive grounds, the immaculate trees and remarkable temples.

  “Yet, we as Buddhists must acknowledge that the ritual activities you see here—the painting and clothing of statues, the fire pujas, the conversation with and direct worship of the figures of the Buddha and other Hindu gods—are in direct contradiction to all the Buddha taught. One was never to worship the Buddha, only pay tribute, honoring the memory of the dharma he discovered and passed on to us. Buddha was not a god. If I may say, what is going on here is nothing short of idolatrous, fetishistic ritualizing, a perv
ersion of the true wisdom of the Buddha.”

  A feeling of unease was growing in Gray. There was an edge to Mukherjee’s words, though his faith was never anything but abiding, friendly. Gray would later learn that Mukherjee gave this speech almost daily, to each new wave of pilgrims that had been called to the site. Hence, the need for the guards. For Gray could see, beyond the cordon of guards, Hindus, watching with impassive, unwelcome eyes.

  “That is why we have called you here. You are the sangha. The future of Buddhism. And as the supreme purveyors of peace in the world, we would see to it that all religions have their place, their temples, their cultures. But we as Buddhists must demand the same. For if we cannot claim the most sacred site in Buddhist history as our own—the very site where the Buddha gained enlightenment—what can we claim? Each one of you is called to action. This ground is ours, if any ground is ours. We must get the word out. We must lobby with the Indian government. We must raise money. And most importantly, we must occupy these grounds through our worship; we must become blades of grass on this field, letting our roots set in, so that we are as much part of it as the temples have been for the last two thousand years. For what is a religion if it has no center? What are Judaism and Christianity, if they do not have Jerusalem? Bodh Gaya must become a Buddhist Jerusalem. In the end, I tell you, this will not come about by my words, but by your actions. By the assertive, focused karma you put forth into the world. The Hindus may have the rest of India—for anyone here knows they intend to cast out the Muslims—but they may not have Bodh Gaya. Bodh Gaya was nothing before the Buddha’s enlightenment, and it will be nothing until the Buddhists take it back. Thank you.”