Anand Amaladass S.J.
Editorial
Image: Sid Arya
The Star of Bethlehem guided the Three Kings and in later centuries countless faithful were lured to their Holy Land. Thus pilgrimage became a Christian institution and paths of faith would become path of discovery. By the fifth century there were two hundred monasteries and pilgrim hospices near Jerusalem. St. Augustine and other Church fathers warned that the Christian tourist to the Holy Land might be distracted from his journey to the Heavenly city.
The rise of Islam and the increase of Muslim pilgrims congested the Christian routes and brought a bitter contest for Jerusalem. But as the distant Holy Land became less accessible, pious Christians found the balm of pilgrimage nearer home — Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, Rome, ‘the threshold of the Apostles,’ Constantinople, etc.
In India Benares on the Ganges became sacred. It is said that that by the seventh century the city held a hundred temples to Siva. The Buddhists taught that the Deer Park at Sarnath was a rung on the ladder to heaven. India became a land of sacred places. One traveller to Kashmir observed (of course exaggerated) that there was “not a space as large as a grain of sesame seed without a place of pilgrimage.”
The Lutheran reformers condemned pilgrimages and worship of saints as childish. The failure of the warriors to liberate Jerusalem became a blessing, as it became a catalyst for European discovery of the Eastern world. In the West the Christian “Pilgrim’s Progress” was toward no earthly destination and the crusade too ceased to be a battle against unbelievers and acquired more exploratory overtones, as when Thomas Jefferson urged his good friend to “preach a crusade against ignorance”. (Daniel J. Boorstin, 1983)
There is a Sanskrit work Dig vijaya — “conquest of the quarters” by Mādhava. This work, like many other vijayas dedicated to Saṅkara and other great teacher-renouncers, narrates its hero’s pilgrimage throughout the Indian subcontinent, defeating scholars from rival schools. This is now portrayed as migration and spiritual conquest by the comparativist theologians. Chinmaya mission retells the eighth-century Advaita teacher Sankara’s legendary “conquest of the quarters” (dig-vijaya) founded by Swami Chinmayananda (1916–1993).
Migration or exile is common theme in all the major religious traditions. From the first exile of Adam from heaven man has been experiencing this trauma of exile in different levels of his being. Muslims give tremendous importance to the flight of the Prophet from his native city of Mecca to the city of Medina in the wake of threats to his life from his rivals and the Islamic calendar Hijri starts from the date of this exile.
In the great Indian epic Mahābhārata war broke out only upon the dispute on exile. Almost half of the story of Rāmāyana has been narrated in the backdrop of Rama’s fourteen years self-style exile. Coming from Kapilavastu in Nepal with self-style exile, Buddha reached Both Gaya, where he attained enlightenment.
Political exiles started during the British period. Bahadur Shah Zafar was banished to Rangoon, Burma, at the ripe age of eighty. In 1801, 73 heroic protesters (against the British) from Tamilnadu were sent to Penang in exile.
“A man’s destination is not his destiny,
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another, where a man dies bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is his
Let his village remember.” (T. S. Eliot)
