Paddy Booz tells of meeting a Taoist Grand Master on the streets of a provincial Chinese city. The man was wearing his Grand Master's blue robes and high hat. He and his young disciple had walked the length and breadth of China.
'But what', Paddy asked him, 'did you do during the Cultural Revolution?'
'I went for a walk in the Kun L'ung Mountains.'
In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or 'errance' - the action or rhythm of walking - was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God.
The aim of a dervish was to become a 'dead man walking': one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.
The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves. - Meister Eckhart
You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself. - Buddha
Walk on! - Buddha's last words to his disciples
Solvitur ambulando. 'It is solved by walking.'
In the early Christian Church there were two kinds of pilgrimage: 'to wander for God' (ambulare pro Deo) in imitation of Christ or of Fatehr Abraham who quit the city of Ur and went to live in a tent. The second was the 'penitential pilgrimage': in which criminals guilty of 'enormous crimes' (peccata enormia) were required, in accordance with a fixed set of tarrifs, to assume the role of travelling beggar - with hat, purse, baton and badge - and work out their salvation on the road.
The idea that walking dissolved crimes of violence goes back to the wanderings forced on Cain to atone for the murder of his brother.
He who does not travel does not know the value of men. - Moorish Proverb
Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death. - Pascal, Pensees
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk; every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it...but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill...This if one just keeps on walking, everything will be alright. - Soren Kierkegaard, letter to Jette (1847)
It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks. - Anatole France
'Travel': same word as 'travail' - 'bodily or mental labour', 'toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature', 'exertion', 'hardship', 'suffering'. A 'journey'.
In Tibetan, the definition of a 'human being' is a-Gro ba, 'a go-er', 'one who goes on migrations'. Likewise, an arab (or bedu) is a 'dweller in the tents', as poosed to hazar: 'he who lives in a house'.
A pilgrim on the Hadj has resumed Man's first condition: if he dies on the Hadj he goes straight, as a martyr, to Heaven. Similarly, Il-Rah 'The Way' was first used as a technical term for 'froad' or 'migration path' - before being adopted by the mystics to denote 'the Way to God.'
The concept has its equivalent in the Central Australian languages where tjurna djugurba means 'the footprints of the Ancestor' and 'the Way of the Law'.
On his deathbed, Bruce Chatwin gave Werner Herzog his backpack.