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The Revival of the Buddhist Pilgrimage |
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| 作者 |
Forbes, Duncan
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| 出處題名 |
The Middle Way: Journal of the Buddhist Society
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| 卷期 | v.79 n.2 |
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| 出版日期 | 2004.08 |
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| 頁次 | 93 - 96 |
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| 出版者 | The Buddhist Society |
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| 出版者網址 |
http://www.thebuddhistsociety.org/
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| 出版地 | London, England, UK [倫敦, 英格蘭, 英國] |
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| 資料類型 | 期刊論文=Journal Article |
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| 使用語言 | 英文=English |
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| 附註項 | From a talk given at the Buddhist Society in November 2003 |
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| 摘要 | One of many good reasons for going on the Buddhist pilgrimage is to see for oneself the places where the Blessed One lived, moved and had his being and to be reassured that he was not merely a figment of the imagination.
There have been four Buddhas in this bhadra kalpa (our era). Of these, Shakyamuni Buddha, the Sage of the Shakyas, is by far the best known, as no records survive of the lives of the previous three, only the vestiges of monuments at some of the places of their birth and death.
But there is no doubt that there was, in the ancient world, a recognized pilgrimage to the places made memorable by 'our' Buddha. These places, as inscribed on two stone reliefs of the Gupta period now in the museum at Sarnath, are four: Lumbini, Bodh-Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagara, the places of his birth, Enlightenment, first sermon and decease, respectively. On one of the reliefs, four more places are added for a longer pilgrimage. They are Kapilavastu, his home town; Shravasti, where he spent many of the rainy seasons of his long life; Vaishali, the capital city of the Licchavis, where he also spent much of his time; and Pava, where he ate the tainted food that hastened his death.
After many years, these places disappeared from view so completely that in 1854, an Oxford professor asserted before the Royal Asiatic Society of London that Shakyamuni Buddha was a mere myth and had never had an earthly existence.
From that year onwards, however, a rapid change came about in a most unexpected manner. The scholar, Stanislas Julien, translated into French the detailed record that the Chinese monk he called Hiouen Thsang had written of his 14 years of travel to and residence in India in the seventh century of the Common Era.
Xuan Zang, to give him his name according to the Pinyin system of transliteration from the Chinese, set out from Xian. There one can still see the seven-storey Wild Goose pagoda in which he spent his remaining years translating into Chinese the scriptures he had brought back from India. One can also see a large monument to him as Tripitaka, immortalized in the book called Monkey, together with his companions Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy, beside the Bezarlik Caves close to the Fire Mountains on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
In those days, one had to go west from China to get to India by land. So Xuan Zang's descriptions of his travels were called Records of the Western World. He followed the Silk Road as far as Bokhara before turning south through Afghanistan to get to the middle land of India via the north-west. No doubt it was hard going. On the other hand, he could always be sure of getting a meal and shelter at one of the many Buddhist monastic establishments (sangharamas). He would be passed on from one to the next, an indication that Buddhism was still flourishing in those regions. In fact, the great Kanishka's stupa at Peshawar was still standing, and it was I who, less than a generation ago, had the 'privilege' of seeing the last remnants of that mighty monument being dug away as material for the nearby brickyard.
Fa Xian, who preceded Xuan Zang in the fourth century CE, took the short cut down the Indus gorges. He has given us a graphic description of the trail hanging over the abyss, supported only by baulks of timber driven into the rock face, now the route of the Karakorum Highway. He found Buddhism flourishing, even in the mountain regions.
But both he and his successor found emptiness and desolation at some of the pilgrim sites in the Middle Land. We are not sure of the reasons for this. However, malaria could have been a cause, at least in part. The deadly aul malaria of the lowlands of the Nepalese border region was feared right up to living memory. In later years the planters who moved into these lands from the south, had their own prophylactic -- gin and tonic. The two travellers warned that one should watch out for white elephants, lions, tigers and wolves |
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| ISSN | 00263214 (P) |
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| 點閱次數 | 876 |
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| 建檔日期 | 2009.10.15 |
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| 更新日期 | 2020.11.05 |
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