Pilgrimage - Part II - Into the Light

ENLIGHTENMENT is the goal of the spiritual seeker: to emerge from the primal night of our animal nature into the sunlight of the presence of God. So it was with me, driving through the darkness of Friday night and the mists of early Saturday: when the sun came, I found myself in Western Kentucky surrounded by trees that staggered skyward like narrow steeples. The leaves looked hammered from precious metals: bronze and gold, rust and copper. When the wind moved amid the birch and sycamore, the undersides of the leaves showed silver.

Following directions, I took the St. Catherine exit into downtown Louisville and found Unity of Louisville about three blocks down Brook St. The description of a brick building with a dome did not prepare me for the reality. I regretted not bringing my camera, but that was one of the decisions I had made: to travel light, to leave the electronics at home (except for the cell phone, necessary for communication and for safety). The building that houses Unity began life as a Jewish synagogue built on Islamic principles after a Byzantine model; Unity is a non-denominational Christian church seeking to respect all religions.

Handwritten yellow signs advertised the Buddha Relic Tour and also directed pet owners to the grassy space beneath the tree on the left side of the staircase where pets were being blessed. A kind volunteer at the booth offered to walk my dog around while I went inside to view the relics. The tour began with a video in the lovely sanctuary under the dome and then descended into a labyrinth that wound through the old building to the shrine area set up in the fellowship hall. At each step of the way, eager volunteers explained what was being shown, the proper actions of the ritual and the spiritual purpose behind each action.

I found it unexpectedly moving. The incense and the chanting evoked the fellowship of the ashram in Lexington where I took my first courses in meditation and Buddhist philosophy. The kindness of the volunteers, who were sharing their time and their unexpected place of worship with me affirmed the principle that Buddha and Christ may have departed the material earth but they are still to be encountered in human hearts.

The relics themselves? I don't think The Buddha himself would blame me for the feelings of skepticism I felt as I looked upon these objects in their beautiful little stupas of gold and glass. He taught that all earthly things are impermanent and ultimately unreal; that seekers of Enlightenment should not blindly accept what they were told but should think and reason and compare it to what he taught.

Reason tells me that the Buddha died approximately 2400 years ago. No clear line of provenance comes with any of these objects. The legend states that bead and crystal-like stones were found in the iron coffin that encased the Buddha's body after it was cremated. Eight kings contended for the relics; a great war was averted when a leading disciple of the Buddha divided the relics into shares. Each contender erected a memorial stupa to house the remains and honor the Buddha and incidentally profit from the pilgrims who came to visit. King Ashoka who came to rule a Buddhist empire is said to have found and opened the original memorials and to have redistributed the relics in 84,000 stupas throughout his realm.

Traditional Account of the Division of Buddha's Relics

That seems to require a heck of a lot of relics.* Reasonable reflection tells me this is no problem.  Give me a handful of gravel and a rock polisher and I could create a reasonable facsimile of the supposedly miraculous objects in front of me. Faced with a need for relics to unite his empire, what would King Ashoka do?


But here's the rub of all religion. If your practice of your religion hinges upon some material object or some specific holy verse or any ONE THING, than that one thing is actually your crutch and you don't have a religion. If you need a piece of the True Cross to feel closeness to Christ, then you haven't absorbed the meaning of Christ. But human imagination is powerful. Just as a sliver of wood might provoke a Christian into contemplating the meaning of Christ's death, so these shiny irregular beads, housed in gold and velvet, surrounded by incense and chanting and hungry belief, spoke to me of a man who had left a palace to walk the world dependent on the kindness of strangers. His words and his philosophy still serve as a lamp in dark places.

And amid all these reverent stones, isn't it possible that one really is a survivor of the historical Buddha's funeral pyre? I walk softly.

The first stop in the ritual is a basin of water in which a charming statue of the Buddha as a child stands. One selects a wooden dipper and slowly and reverently pours out water. I poured the water to wash out doubt with the first dipper, the second to wash away stress and the third to open mind and heart.

The second action is the striking of a Tibetan bowl bell. The sweet tone pierces one's flesh, delighting the heart and shimmering in the mind long after the metal has ceased to vibrate.

One then views relics of other notable Buddhist masters. Ananda, the Buddha's loyal companion and servant, was there. He's a favorite of mine, always getting into trouble, wanting to look at women, an ordinary man stumbling after a spiritual genius. He's not highly regarded amid the intellectual monks around the Buddha. The guys who immediately grasp what the Buddha is teaching are sent out to become missionaries; poor unEnlightened Ananda stays by the Buddha's side. After the Buddha is dead, his followers are dismayed. Who can remember the Master's teachings? Humble Ananda stands up and begins to speak, word for word, all the Buddha's sermons. The fellowship gasps; it sounds as if the Buddha is still there, speaking to them from beyond the grave. Ananda gives us all hope; if he can become Enlightened, than all of us can, with due diligence.

One then reads a sacred text and kneels on a cushion while a container of relics is placed on ones head. This is the heart of the ceremony. With my bad knees and physical issues, I could not kneel and expect to get up again. The very short lady doing the ritual held the relics as I bowed and recited the chant. Skeptic or not, I felt an energy radiating through me; I felt it coming from the other people in the room.

After the blessing, one can sit and contemplate or use a gold pen to trace a prayer in a special book. I have always loved to write so I traced the Buddha's name in an empty line that someone else had skipped. By staying at the cheap hotel described in Part I, I could make donation. I put money in the prayer box upstairs to thank Unity for hosting the relics; donated again in the basement to aid the charities supported by the tour and purchased a medallion with the image of Green Tara from the gift shop. All the objects there are made by the Tibetan refugee community in India.

I could not linger. I needed to reclaim my little dog and return to the world. No pilgrimage is complete without this part. To be continued....

For more information on the Buddha Relics Tour, visit this link: Maitreya Project. - Buddha Relic Tour

*For a rather gross and scientific discussion concerning the creation of Buddhist relics from more modern Buddhist masters and a comparison of the crystal like beads with other bodily objects go to:

Mummified Masters and Sarira-like objects from other bodies

Pilgrimage - Part I - In Darkness

Traveling from one place to another is only a journey. In a pilgrimage, motion in the outer world has the goal of promoting spiritual progress. Inconveniences, delays, even hardships can attend an ordinary journey. A good pilgrim should view these sufferings as an opportunity to grow in spirit.

On the weekend of Nov. 5-6, 2011 I made my own small pilgrimage to Louisville Kentucky to view the Buddha relics tour which was stopping that weekend at Unity of Louisville. Unity lies near the heart of downtown Louisville on the corner of Brook and College streets, an usual building that echoes in modest brick the famed Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

The route seemed simple: five to six hours traveling east on I-64 to Louisville with reasonable pit stops and walking breaks. But construction and repair have closed not only the I-64 bridge from Indiana to Kentucky but the I-65 crossing as well. The only bridge open is on the bypass far north of downtown. A local friend had advised me that it was a huge mess with up to three hour waits to cross the bridge. My plan for driving in on Saturday hinged on easy access off the interstate and wouldn’t work. In addition, I learned that the Breeder’s Cup Races were being held at Churchill Downs that weekend. I wouldn’t be able to stay downtown and traffic would be heavier than normal with all the world in from out of town.

So I left after work on Friday, driving through purpling dusk to meet the darkness head-on. I used to be fearless about night driving but age, caution and awareness of my body’s fading capacity make me reluctant to undertake a long drive after a long day at work. As night closed in around my pickup truck, the outer darkness reflected my condition as an ordinary human being trying to make sense of life and death.

The road outruns the reach of our headlights. We can see so far but what is really ahead of us is a mystery. Sometimes others pass us and we can see the gleam of their lights for some distance, taking that as assurance that there is something out there and that the road continues. As long as the road is familiar, we feel a degree of comfort but night hides all landmarks and changes everything. Familiar signposts bob up without context in a formless, alien landscape. 

If we travel long enough, inevitably we will be forced to take detours and unknown roads and will suffer anxiety.

My goal for Friday night was Evansville, Indiana. I’d often stopped there for gas on my trips to and from Kentucky as it lies about halfway between my current home and my old hometown. This time I would turn south, searching for the cheap hotel I’d booked, to snatch a few hours of rest. The main attractions of the hotel were that it accepted pets and was within my means.

The motel had always been cheap, but now it was battered by time and the rough economy. In some freak counterpoint to the rundown building and people, the place offered free copies of The Wall Street Journal. The desk clerk was gruff but took pains to describe where the ice machine was. The room had the stagnant smell of a room that never got aired. For a “nonsmoking” room there seemed to be too many cigarette burn marks around the sink. However, the sheets on the king bed were clean, the blanket warm, the mattress firm and running the fan freshened the air.

I read the Wall Street Journal, including the article about what kinds of art to acquire as an investment; the cheapest piece mentioned was $25,000. The Wall Street Journal has changed since I used to read it in graduate school. Less information, less overseas and business analysis and more feature pieces designed to make the well-heeled reader think that all would be well despite the protesters camping in city parks across the nation. In 1979, my business administration professor had praised the Wall Street Journal as a national chronicle of the American Dream. Now, under the aegis of Rupert Murdoch, the Journal is an advocate for riches without responsibility.

I had pushed myself out of my usual routine in search of spiritual insight. But the contrast between the sad motel and the smug Journal roused up the political beast and thinker within me. Feeling despair from the material world, I folded away the newspaper and took solace from my woolly little dog. We were tired—my dog settled down on the bedspread, I settled down under the blanket and both of us enjoyed a nice curl up and snooze.

I awoke at 5AM with the sensation that the sour air was corroding my lungs and the stale odor was sticking to my skin. The free breakfast, available at 7AM, was no inducement to stay. The dog and I decamped. Only the dog got breakfast.

I drove south, still in darkness with the additional complication of mist that grew thicker and thicker as I followed Route 41 south through town. Most people in that part of the world still slept. The houses were dark; none of the restaurants I passed were open. The tourist maps that I had were not clear exactly how the river crossing here was accomplished. Evansville maps showed only that town and a slice of Indiana; Henderson maps showed that community and a swathe of Kentucky. The depicted curves of the river were artistic and did not match. By crossing here I would avoid the construction zone in Louisville but I worried about finding the junction to the Pennyrile Parkway.

The dark, the patches of fog, sometimes so thick that where lights tried to illuminate the exits the world turned to impenetrable haze…this material reality reminded me of the difficulties the spirit faces as it struggles toward the light. But by following the road, I discovered that the way had been made easy for me. I came to an unheralded bridge and suddenly I was in Kentucky. Where the fog thinned, clumps of skinny tree trunks stood like streaks of ink laid down by a master calligrapher. The road was the same, but it turned out to be the road I needed. I was already on the Pennyrile, heading in the right direction. 

Premonitions of dawn gave me hope, but darkness and fog and hunger eventually drove me off the road for breakfast at a fast food joint. When I got back on the road, I suffered another check. The SERVICE ENGINE SOON light came on. I pulled off at a truck stop where there was a service depot for big rigs. One of the mechanics looked it over. He asked questions but my answers caused him to shrug.

"Did you buy gas?" He asked.

"Yes," I said.

 "Sometimes the light just goes on, just for that. You may have a bit of carbon on the sensor," he said.

With that slender assurance, I got back on the road. Perhaps he just wanted me out of his parking lot, but perhaps he was right. The truck ran fine throughout the trip.

Dawn came while I was eating. With the sun, the fog began to thin. Like a metaphor that Enlightenment can happen suddenly, the veil lifted and the trees, rust and red and bright, bright yellow, burst out of the gray netherworld into glorious light. The rest of the drive to Louisville was an excursion into lyric poetry. Western Kentucky boasts a landscape more beautiful than any description of Heaven. Under an autumn sun, with the varied trees cloaked in dying glory it is a feast for the eyes.

(to be continued)