The Nomadic Alternative – Page 200

All and clung to the towns. They sat and grew fat in monasteries that abutted taverns and abbatoirs, and their Brahma chants mingled with cries of laughter and slaughter. "Mountain wilds are clear and boundless, while the settlements of men reek of fish", exclaimed Hsieh Ling Yun in his Poetical Essay on Living in the Mountains.

Other incitements to travel come from the tales of India and the Western countries, related by pilgrims who trod the footsteps of the Buddha. The Chinese Buddhist was scarcely ever so detached from the world as to suppress all curiosity about the birdless blood-red sands of the Gobi, the Himalaya, the frescoes of Ajanta, the Bodhi Tree itself, or the monstrous images of the Buddha Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which still stand in their rock-cut niches, like whales up-ended in dry docks.

But intellectual vagabondage was one thing, mass movements of the common people another. Once pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines became a regular feature of peasant life, it was time for official-dom to start persecutions. Chinese officials, it was true, travelled, but they were either peripatetic officials or tourists - usually rather grand tourists. They travelled in style with servants, stayed at comfortable hotels, sketched quaint architecture and made scholarly jottings on the historical curiosities of the region. But the peasant's place was his village. Once he felt the compulsions of the road he was indissociable from the brigand. He was a public nuisance. As a dignitary of the Tang dynasty advised the Emperor in a memorandum of 819, "Old men and young men stream along the roads. And if you do not put an immediate stop to it, people will make more and more journeys to temples." The stability of any Mandarinate presupposes its capacity to impose settlement on its people. For 'purposeless' travel does not simply disrupt the economy; it facilitates the spread of ideas. In 1800 Chinese provincial governors received yet one more Imperial edict to bar the roads, to prevent the people going on pilgrimages because these are "inimical to agriculture, provoke degeneracy, and erode obedience and morals."
*These 2 ref. from Kristopher Schipper, Les Pèlerinages en Chine: Montagnes et Pistes, in "Les Pèlerinages", Sources Orientales, Paris, 1960.