Phil Cousineau is a bestselling author, editor, photographer, award-winning documentary filmmaker, adventure travel leader, and independant scholar who lectures around the world on a wide range of topics from mythology, mentorship, and soul. His books include The Art of Pilgrimage, Soul Moments, Riddle Me This, and The Soul Aflame. A protege of the late Joseph Campbell, Cousineau is also the author of The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. He lives in San Francisco, California.

CHAPTER 1

The Longing

For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so, Then people long on pilgrimage to go, Andpalmers to be seeking foreign strands, To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.

—Geoffrey Chaucer,The Canterbury Tales

In February 1996, together with my brother Paul, I took the long boat rideup the Mekong River in Cambodia to see one of the great riddles of the ancient world, thesacred sprawl of ruined temples and palaces that a twelfth-century traveler said "housednumerous marvels."

On our first morning at the walled city of Angkor Wat, we witnessed a glorious sunriseover its lotus-crowned towers, then began the ritual walk up the long bridgeway toward thesanctuary. Our arms were draped across each other's shoulders. Our heads shook at theimpossibly beautiful sight of the "marvelous enigma" that early European chroniclersregarded as one of the Wonders of the World, and later colonialists described as rivalingthe divinely inspired architecture of Solomon.

We walked as if in a fever-dream. Halfway down the causeway, we paused to take in thebeauty of the shifting light. We snapped a few photographs of the nagas, the five-headedstone serpents, that undulated along the moat and of the chiseled lacework in the colossalgateway looming before us, then grinned at each other and took a deep breath of themorning air. At that moment, we noticed a gray-robed Buddhist nun limping by us on herway to the temple. Her head was shaved and bronzed. When she drew even with us, Iheld out an offering, which she calmly accepted with stumps where once had been hands.Stunned, I then realized why she had been walking as if on stilts. Her feet had beensevered at the ankle and she was hobbling on the knobs of her ankles. I was stricken withimages of her mutilation by the demonic Khmer Rouge, then wondered if she'd been avictim of one of the 11 million landmines forgotten in the forests, fields, and roads ofCambodia.

Her eyes met mine with a gaze of almost surreal serenity. Utterly moved, we offered a fewdollars for the shrine in the temple. She calmly accepted the donation in a small wovenbag, bowed, and limped away, like a thin-legged crane moving stiffly through the mud ofone of the nearby ponds.

The encounter with the Cambodian nun was an ominous way to begin our visit, a giftbriefly disguised as a disturbance. Her enigmatic smile eerily anticipated the expressionon the sculptured faces of the fifty-four giant bodhisattvas that loomed in the Holy ofHolies above the nearby pyramid temples of the Bayon. Each time I met their timelessgaze, my heart leapt. As the lotus ponds and pools throughout the complex were createdto reflect each work of religious art, the faces of the bodhisattvas and the nun mirroredeach other. I began to think of the nun as the embodiment of the BodhisattvaAvalokiteshvara, the god of inexhaustible compassion, who has come to symbolize themiracle of Angkor for millions of pilgrims.

How far does your forgiveness reach? the sculpted faces ask from a thousand statues.

As far as prayers allow, the nun's eyes seemed to respond.

I rambled through the ruins with my brother for the next several hours, stunned by oursheer good fortune of being there. The Angkor complex was destroyed in the fifteenthcentury, then forgotten for 400 years and overrun with the stone-strangling vines of thejungle. Marveling at the beauty laced with terror in the stories of our young Cambodianguide (who told us the local villagers believed that Angkor was built by angels and giants),time seemed poised on the still-point of the world. This was more than an architecturalcuriosity, a pious parable of fleeting glory; it was a microcosm of the universe itself.According to scholars, the walls, moats, and soaring terraces represented the differentlevels of existence itself. The five towers of Angkor symbolized the five peaks of MountMeru, the center of the world in Hindu cosmology. This was the world mountain in stone, amonumental mandala encompassed by moats that evoked the oceans. A visit was anaccomplishment demanding the rigorous climbing of precipitously steep staircases, builtthat way not without reason.

"It is clear," wrote Vice Admiral Bonard, an early colonialist, "that the worshiper penetratingthe temple was intended to have a tangible sense of moving to higher and higher levels ofinitiation." Our three days stretched on. The hours seemed to contain days, the days heldweeks, as in all dreamtime adventures. We were graced with one strangely movingencounter after another. Silently, we mingled with saffron-robed monks who had walkedhundreds of miles in the footsteps of their ancestors from Cambodia, Thailand, India, andJapan to pray in the sanctuary of a place believed for a thousand years to be the center ofthe world. Gratefully, we traded road stories with travelers who'd been through Burma,Vietnam, and China. After dark, we read the accounts of fellow pilgrims who had beenmaking the arduous trek here by foot for centuries, from China and Japan in ancient times,then by car from France and England, and by boat from America.

Though neither Buddhist nor Hindu, wandering through the site I was more than smittenby the romancing of old stones. In the uncanny way of spiritually magnetized centers ofpilgrimage, I felt a wonderful calm exploring the derelict pavilions, abandoned libraries,and looted monasteries. My imagination was animated by the strange and wonderfulchallenge to fill in what time had destroyed, thrilling to the knowledge that tigers, panthers,and elephants still roamed over the flagstones of these shrines when Angkor wasrediscovered in the 1860s.

But through our visit the dark thread ran.

With every step through the ghostly glory of the ancient temple grounds, it was impossiblenot to be reminded of the scourge of Pol Pot, the ever-present threat of landmines, andthe fragility of a site that had endured a thousand years of historical chaos. The maimedchildren and fierce soldiers we encountered everywhere were grim evidence of a never-endingwar. Once upon a time, foreigners were spared the horrors of remote revolutions,but no more. In a local English-language newspaper, we read that Pol Pot had ordered theexecutions of three Australian tourists, saying only, "Crush them."

Overshadowing even this were the twinges of guilt I felt for having undertaken thejourney—Jo, my partner back in San Francisco, was seven months pregnant with ourbaby. Though she was selflessly supportive, I was uneasy. So why make such a riskyjourney?

To fulfill a vow.

Twice in the previous fifteen years, my plans to make the long trek to the ruins of Angkorhad been thwarted at the Thai-Cambodia border. Dreading that war might break out againand the borders clamp shut for another twenty years, I believed that the research trip mybrother and I were on in the Philippines serendipitously offered a last chance to fulfill apromise to my father.

On my eleventh birthday, he had presented me with a book, not a Zane Grey Western orthe biography of my hometown baseball hero, Al Kaline, that I had asked for, but a bookwith a bronze-tinted cover depicting sculptures of fabulous creatures from a distant world.These creatures were not from a phantasmagorical planet out of science fiction, but thelong-forgotten world of the Khmers, the ancient civilization that had built Angkor.

From that moment on, the book came to symbolize for me the hidden beauty of the world.With the transportive magic that only books possess, it offered a vision of the vast worldoutside of my small hometown in Michigan; it set a fire in my heart and through the yearsinspired in me the pilgrim's desire to see this wondrous place for myself.

When my father became ill in the fall of 1984, I drove cross-country from San Francisco toDetroit to see him and, in an effort to lift his spirits, promised him that when he recoveredwe would travel together. I tried to convince him that after years of unfulfilled plans to seeEurope, we would travel together to Amsterdam and visit Van Gogh's nephew, whom hehad once guided on a personal tour through Ford's River Rouge complex in Dearborn.After Holland, I suggested, we could take the train to Périgueux in southern France andtrack down the story of our ancestors who had left there in 1678. Then, I said haltingly, wecould take a direct flight from Paris to Phnom Penh and visit Angkor Wat. He seemedpleased by the former, puzzled by the latter.

"Don't you remember the book you gave me as a boy?" I asked him, disappointed in hisresponse to my cue. "The one on the excavations at Angkor?" He riffled through thememory of a lifetime of books he had bestowed on friends and family Then his face lit up,and he harrumphed, "Oh, yes. Angkor, the Malcolm MacDonald book, the one with thesculptures of the Terrace of the Leper King on the cover." He paused to consider thepossibilities of our traveling together, then painfully readjusted himself in his old leatherreading chair.

"I just wish I were as confident as you that I was going to recover," he said with the firstnote of despair I'd ever heard from him. "Of course, I'd like to see these places with you. Itwould be wonderful." Then his voice broke. "But I don't know, son, if I'm going to make it."

No one I've ever met has pronounced the word "wonderful" like my father. He stressed thefirst syllable, "won," as if the adjective did indeed have its roots in victory and triumph. Heso rarely used upbeat words, so when he did I knew he meant it. Hearing it there andthen, watching this once-ferocious and formidable man sit in a chair, unable to move hishands and feet because of a crippling nerve disease, I was shaken. Still, I feignedconfidence and courage and promised we would hit the road together as soon as herecovered.

He didn't. Four months later, on the very Ides of March which he had announced everyyear in our house as though it were the strangest day on the calendar, my father died inhis sleep.

Shortly after the funeral, while packing up the books in his stilled apartment, I made one ofthe few vows in my life. I promised myself I would take the journey for both of us, makethe pilgrimage to a place made holy by the play of light on stone and the devotion ofpilgrims who had walked astonishing distances so that they might touch the sacredsculpture and offer their prayers on the wings of incense.

And, in so doing, perhaps restore my faith in life itself.

THE ART OF PILGRIMAGE

We journey across the days as over a stone the waves.—Paul Valéry

All our journeys are rhapsodies on the theme of discovery. We travel as seekers afteranswers we cannot find at home, and soon find that a change of climate is easier than achange of heart. The bittersweet truth about travel is embedded in the word, which derivesfrom the older word travail itself rooted in the Latin tripalium, a medieval torture rack. Asmany a far-ranging roamer has suspected, there are moments in travel that are like being"on the rack." For the wandering Bedouins, "Travel is travail." The ancient Greeks taughtthat obstacles were the tests of the gods, and the medieval Japanese believed that thesorrows of travel were challenges to overcome and transform into poetry and song.Whether we are on vacation, a business trip, or a far-flung adventure tour, we can look atthe trying times along the road as either torment or chances to "stretch" ourselves.

But what do we do if we feel a need for something more out of our journeys than theperennial challenges and pleasures of travel? What happens if the search for the new isno longer enough? What if our heart aches for a kind of journey that defies explanation?

Centuries of travel lore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our realjourney has just begun. At that crossroads moment, a voice calls to our pilgrim soul. Thetime has come to set out for the sacred ground—the mountain, the temple, the ancestralhome—that will stir our heart and restore our sense of wonder. It is down the path to thedeeply real where time stops and we are seized by the mysteries. This is the journey wecannot not take.

On that long and winding road, it is easy to lose the way. Listen. The old hermit along theside of the road whispers, Stranger, pass by that which you do not love.

* * *

"I left Tangier, my birthplace, the 13th of June, 1325," wrote Ibn Battua, one of the mostremarkable spiritual seekers who ever ventured down the long and winding roads of theworld, "being at the time twenty-two years of age, with the intention of making thePilgrimage to the Holy House {at Mecca} and the Tomb of the Prophet {at Medina}. I setout alone, finding no companions to cheer the way with friendly intercourse, and no partyof travelers with whom to associate myself. Swayed by an overwhelming impulse withinme, and a longcherished desire to visit all those glorious sanctuaries, I resolved to leaveall my friends both female and male, to abandon my home as birds abandon the nest."A nineteenth-century drawing of the Mosque at Mecca, revealing hajji, pilgrims, prostratingthemselves and circumambulating the Ka'aba.

For twenty-nine years, Battua made pilgrimages from Spain to China, roaming 75,000miles, three times the distance covered by Marco Polo. When he finally returned toMorocco, he wrote in his astonishing rihla, or travel book, that his native land was "thebest of countries, for its fruits are plentiful, and running water and nourishing food arenever exhausted."

If it is so that one's home is the "best of countries," why do millions of us, every year sincetime immemorial, cast our fates to the wind and follow the ancient tracks of the pilgrimroads of the world? By what "overwhelming impulse" are we swayed to travel to farawayplaces at great cost and often at great risk?

For Ibn Battua, the longing was a chorus of calls: religious, scientific, poetic, political, andmercenary. He was the quintessential pilgrim, spiritually grounded, soulfully inspired,responding to what Goethe called "the holy longing," the desire to be caught up in adeeper quest.

Meanwhile, according to the German scholar of travel, Winfried Löschburg, "the longing todefeat distance, the longing for the unknown became stronger and stronger in parts ofEurope. It was the desire to escape the baronial castle or the convent-school, and moveout into the wide world through the town gates...." Anatole France wrote that during theAge of Exploration, the urge was described as un long desire, the passionate pursuit ofthe hidden or forbidden, the novel or the legendary; impossible to satisfy but equallyimpossible to ignore.

The impulse to travel is as old as stone, as timeless as the rising and setting of the sun.Zora Neale Hurston felt that "Travel is the soul of civilization." To some, the urge is formotion itself, as with Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote, "For my part I travel not to goanywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." The very wordtraveler conjures up images of the romance of movement. Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Atraveler. I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the bestsymbol of our life. Going from—toward; it is the history of every one of us."

To others, like the French novelist Colette, travel suggests sensuous possibilities: "I amgoing away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, andwhere I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart." To the rapscallion roverMark Twain, long journeys held out the possibility of self-improvement: "Travel is fatal toprejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." The nomadic Bruce Chatwin told how atramp once described his own compulsion to wander: "It's as though the tides was pullingyou along the high road." In her landmark anthology Maiden Voyages, Mary Morris citesLawrence Durrell's splendid description of Freya Stark as an example of the way women"move differently through the world." Durrell writes, "A great traveler ... is a kind ofintrospective; as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances fresh interpretationsof herself inwardly."

There is a tradition of travel as a kind of peripatetic university. In his classic book Abroad,Paul Fussell writes, "Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be likestudy, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation ofjudgment. The traveler was a student of what he sought...." But, Fussell postulates, theromantic aura and aristocratic associations surrounding travel changed irrevocably withthe humbling horrors of World War I. Now there is no more true exploration, no serioustravel, only "jet travel to ruins."