Excerpt from The Pilgrimage


You will look West where the sun sags low on the horizon and then toward the East where the silver day moon is waning. You will want to stay here forever, but instead you must leave forever. Like all its other visitors down through the centuries, you must quietly fade away from Dharmarajika. Unlike many of the others, you will leave no offerings to the gods nor add any monuments to the small chapels. When the rains come, even your footprints will disappear.

But when you are far away, when you have returned to the other side of the earth, when you can no longer feel Pakistan’s strong sun and the tingle of its dust against your aging skin, when this part of your journey is over, you will discover that you have brought something of it with you. From time to time, you will conjure up a mystery from deep inside yourself, never sure of its reality or its identity. In quiet moments, when you are alone, you will remember your journey, the chaos of the open road, the peace of the Taxila Valley, the generous man who guided you to the top, the rustle of the wheat and dark heads bobbing behind the watery reeds. You will feel your senses purified, enriched and made keen once again. Then the ancient voices will whisper to you as they did atop the Great Stupa. There will be no thunderbolt of knowledge, no charismatic rebirth, but a fleeting sense of pleasure and recognition. For a fraction of a second in time you will feel a continuity with all life which has gone before you and all to follow. For all eternity you will have become a pilgrim.

Susan Adkins
circa 1995
ISBN 1-4010-4845-5

Great Stupa