Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk (Hsuan Tsang) Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment by Richard Berstein.

The Meaning of Life
By Alexander Frater
1201 words
25 March 2001
The New York Times
Page 6, Column 2
English
(c) 2001 New York Times Company

ULTIMATE JOURNEY

Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment. By Richard Bernstein.
352 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.

Every Chinese schoolkid knows about the monk Hsuan Tsang and his seventh-century odyssey through the fabled outer reaches of the world -- how he traveled for 17 years, covered 10,000 miles and brought home ideas about the attainment of serenity that would affect China profoundly. Tall, handsome and ferociously brainy, he had long been troubled by the complexities of the Buddhist Truth -- the ultimate reality that would free mankind from the treadmill of life and death. Buddhist texts indicated that such questions could be answered only in the distant, mythical land we now call India -- but in 629, as he prepared to leave, the emperor sealed the borders. Hsuan Tsang ignored the order. Determined to unravel the truth about human happiness, and with only a notional idea of which way to go -- basically west -- he vanished, subversively, into Asia.

Richard Bernstein, a book critic for The New York Times, first came across Hsuan Tsang's story while studying Chinese at Harvard, and again in Beijing as Time magazine's first bureau chief there. The idea of following in the monk's footsteps occurred in middle age when, working as a book reviewer, ''sitting at home pronouncing on the quality of other people's writings,'' he took stock: never married, Jewish but not particularly religious, comfortably off yet growing increasingly snappy and bored. Making Shaker furniture became one option, the other a journey along the fabled ''Road of Great Events.''

Bernstein's plans to travel in China were made more difficult when, along with a colleague, he wrote a polemic on United States-Chinese relations that put him at odds with Chinese authorities. His first request to obtain a visa was denied; he later got one by bypassing the Chinese consulate in New York and applying through a travel agency in Hong Kong. In the meantime, at a New York film screening, he met Zhongmei Li, a beautiful Chinese classical dancer who had recently moved to the States; she later offered to join him for the first leg of the trip. (In China he found, to his amusement, she was famous; occasionally, even, chauffeur-driven limos were laid on.)

Bernstein, as much of a clandestine traveler as Hsuan Tsang, writes about both journeys concurrently and, as we move through those huge, barren Asian landscapes (passing massifs like the Flaming Mountains) the specter of the monk always shimmers just ahead. In fact Hsuan Tsang is also leading Bernstein on a third quest -- into his ancient Asian religion and, in particular, its Yogacara, ''mind-only school''; a thousand years before Descartes and the British empirical philosophers, Buddhist scholars were proposing separation between the self and the world.

Hsuan Tsang's eventual destination was India's great Buddhist university at Nalanda, where students were taught that all was mind -- both the mind itself and every terrestrial thing that, seemingly, existed outside it. But if all is mind, then isn't that idea mind as well? Or if everything is illusion, isn't the proposition -- like a dream within a dream -- also an illusion? Isn't what we have, in fact, a kind of double emptiness?

''Not easy, is it?'' Bernstein sighs, casting around for a modern metaphor and coming up with the vacuum cleaner in the Beatles movie ''Yellow Submarine''; having sucked up everything in sight, it apocalyptically sucks itself out of existence. Double emptiness! Hsuan Tsang, he concludes, ''went to India to resolve the paradox of the 'Yellow Submarine' vacuum cleaner.''

America's unintentional bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade does not ease Bernstein's passage. Even before the bombing, the owner of a noodle shop in Jiayu Guan sees his open notebook and publicly accuses of him of spying. When Zhongmei has to leave for an important engagement, she worries about his safety. With that dodgy holiday visa in his passport, he carries on into the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region -- off limits to journalists -- where he manages to talk his way out of China and into Kyrgyzstan. Reaching India, he meets its tumult head on: a tiny dark-eyed girl glimpsed in a rickshaw makes him yearn to give her ''a loving home and a rich American life''; the elderly Maharajah of Varanasi angers him by refusing an interview (''If you wanted to see Bill Clinton,'' the Maharajah grumbles, ''would you simply show up at his door?''); he has an anxiety attack in Varanasi's chaotic railway station -- the Indian dystopia in a kind of distilled form, horrible and fascinating.''

There are visits to Buddha's pastoral birthplace at Lumbini; to Sarnath, where he preached his first sermon; and to Bodhgaya, where he found enlightenment (and where Bernstein saw a banner reading ''COCA-COLA WELCOMES HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA''). Nearby, somewhere among Nalanda's spectacular ruins, Hsuan Tsang was welcomed by a crowd of thousands and given a daily ration of rice, betel nuts, nutmegs and camphor for the duration of his triumphant stay.

But what was Hsuan Tsang looking for? Perhaps confirmation that the world was ''like the moon reflected in the water'' (his words) but, more likely, mastery of the vast Buddhist canon. In Bodhgaya, pondering the rigorous metaphysics of the Diamond Sutra, Bernstein asks a German monk for help. It's all to do with selflessness, the German tells him, the realization that ''the object of your self-attachment is an illusion.'' That was how you began attaining Buddhahood.

In Delhi, to Bernstein's delight, Zhongmei rejoins him. As they follow Hsuan Tsang's homeward path over the breathtaking Kunjerab Pass, Bernstein already knows that Buddhism doesn't hold the answer to his questions (though he continues to leaf through its texts ''looking for the Truth that cannot be expressed in words''). What his odyssey left, instead, was a profound reverence for the Buddhist civilization of the seventh century.

The monk's own account of his journey, ''The Great Tang Chronicles of the Western World,'' is a Chinese literary classic. Bernstein's wonderful book, which ranks with Robert Byron's ''Road to Oxiana'' (1937), deserves to become a classic in its own right. If the best traveler's tales are really voyages through the mind of the author, then here we have a very cerebral story indeed -- intricate, closely argued and beautifully observed -- by a man who, driven as much by the quiet despair of middle age as by a search for deeper meaning, seems finally to have achieved something close to a state of grace. And ''Ultimate Journey'' ends on a note that would have brought a smile to the face of the monk. In an author's note on the book's final page, we read that last September Bernstein and Zhongmei Li . . . well, read it and find out for yourself.