The Nomadic Alternative – Page 197

this ultimate release included breathing exercises akin to yoga, ritual nakedness to "wear the rays of the sun", ecstatic dances and mystical gymnastics, sexual gratification at every turn, but most important the practice of sloughing off one's possessions to wander freely as the clouds among the mountains and streams and far from the society of worldly men.

The subject of many a Chinese landscape painting depicts harsh mountains and sheer waterfalls that dwarf a pair of minute travellers who wind their way along a twisting path or over a rickety bridge at the bottom of the scroll. On one level the painting represents the reality of the visible. However fantastic,the convoluted crags and foaming river gorges of Central China or parts of Japan are hardly exaggerated or distorted by the painter's vision. Peasants or recluses did travel to their huts or hermitages in the hills.

But the paintings are also mystical landscapes and the insignificant figures are also journeying on a quest into the crags of inner experience. Confucian circles in China understood the word Yu, 'to wander or travel', signifying the "progress of an itinerant counsellor from court to court". But the Taoists interpreted it another way. Wandering could be conducted on an inner plane. "Those who take infinite trouble about external travels, have no idea how to set about the sight-seeing that can be done within." The inner journey is inextricable from the outer.

"Following the example of the ancient priest, who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring nought for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house ..." and the poet Bashō leads the reader of his travel diaries on a sequence of walks through 17th Century Japan and describes with miraculous clarity the inner peace of the road. The poet's jottings of common-place events, passing travellers, ancient shrines, battle-grounds of another age, even the petals of bush-clovers floating on the water or the dyed iris-blue of some shoe-laces - all are signposts of an intense inner journey which reflect man's place in the world and the purpose in