I had almost stopped reading travel writing two years back, after being bombarded by travel blogs. Perhaps, the travel blogs I used to read were not a great read as travel writing goes. But definitely, they came in handy when you had to find a good home stay or the driving route to a destination.
I think the last travel book I read (almost 5 years ago!) was Under a cloud, Life in Cherrapunjee, which was a highly readable account of life in the wettest place on earth (not really, the wettest place is Mawsynram, just close to Cherra). In the foreword of this book, author Binoo John says that the project was sponsored by Penguin India. This declaration made me wonder whether he was really passionate about the travel to Cherra or he did it just for the “project”.
In contrast, Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk is a more intimate and passionate account of something he really wanted to do - to live in a monastery (a bit clichéd, but the book works), though Iyer says that he was on Time Magazine’s payroll through his stay in Japan.
The book eventually showed me what great travel writing is. Maybe it was due to my short stint in Osaka in the early 2000, or for my fascination for The Razor’s Edge kind of life (which I know, I can never do) or may be for the highly readable prose of Iyer, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. For instance, prose like this I could instantly relate to:
Whenever I wandered the winter streets alone, though, Kyoto still aroused in me a surge of unaccountable elation: even in winter the skies were unreasonably blue, and the days had a bright, invigorating chill that seemed to admit of no despair. In Japan, there was truly a sense of a culture calmly on the rise, in possession of itself and buoyant, and the mild air itself felt cleansed of cynicism and decay.
Iyer also writes a lot on literature, both Japanese and Western, and on Zen in this book. The most amusing Zen story he narrates is “Is that so”. He also narrates the classic Zen tale of absent mindedness, the story of the Zen monk and poet Ryokan:
One day when the ever-hospitable Ryokan had a guest, he went out to the village to get some sake, asking the guest to wait for a minute. When the guest didn’t see his host for hours, he stepped out in search of him, only to find Ryokan sitting just outside gazing at the moon.
“Isn’t it beautiful?
“Yes. But what about the sake?”
“Oh yes, the sake. I’d quite forgotten about it.”
As Iyer says, the mind was absent to the world -but only because it was taken up with something higher!
The other day, I was chatting with my friend on Buddhism and he had an idea on blending Christianity with Buddhism – I wish I knew this excellent Zen tale then:
One of master Gasan's monks visited the university in Tokyo. When he returned, he asked the master if he had ever read the Christian Bible. "No," Gasan replied, "Please read some of it to me." The monk opened the Bible to the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew, and began reading. After reading Christ's words about the lilies in the field, he paused. Master Gasan was silent for a long time. "Yes," he finally said, "Whoever uttered these words is an enlightened being. What you have read to me is the essence of everything I have been trying to teach you here!"
Reminded me of what George Harrison had sung on his final album – “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there!”
PS: Iyer says that westerners flock to Japan for two things: Buddhism and Japanese women. Strange. If only they knew how to take it easy!
