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Author photo (c) Jade Albert
AAK: Why did you write this book?
RB: For two reasons main reasons. One is simply that I've always wanted totravel between China and India and write about the experience. That tripalways seemed to me the ultimate getaway, and when I turned fifty, I feltan urgent need for a getaway of dramatic proportions. Second, for athousand years, the road between China and India was the most importantthoroughfare of ideas, commerce and conquest in the world, the greatestevent of them all being the spread of Buddhism from India to China. Iwanted to restore the sweep of history to a part of the world that hasfallen out of the western consciousness, to put it back where it belongs.
AAK: What is the meaning of the title?
RB: The book is based on my duplication of a famous journey undertaken byone of the most storied figures in Chinese history, a Buddhist monk namedHsuan Tsang who, in the 7th century, went from the Chinese imperial capitalat Changan (today's Xian) to India in search of the Buddhist truth. So mytitle refers mostly to two ways in which Hsuan Tsang's trip was, so tospeak, ultimate. First I believe that he achieved the greatest travelexploit in history, even greater, say, than Marco Polo's several hundredyears later. Second, his purpose was not to acquire fame or profit but toengage in a deep and enduring quest for philosophical knowledge, spiritualtruth, to unlock the secrets of mind that, the Buddhists believed, wouldliberate human kind from suffering. In other words, Hsuan Tsang undertookthe ultimate journey in search of ultimate truth. Q. Does that word "ultimate" refer only to the monk, or to you as well? A. It would be immodest in the extreme for me to rate my own journey withHsuan Tsang's' and yet I was thinking of myself when I gave the book thattitle. I've done quite a lot of travel in my life, as a student years agoand as a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine and the New York Times,but never did I undertake a trip of the dimensions or the arduousness ofthis one. So, yes, it was my personal ultimate journey too.
AAK: How do you describe the book: is it a travelogue, a spiritual journey, anadventure story, a personal quest?
RB: I would hope a little bit of all of those. First of all, it iscertainly a travelogue and a personal adventure. The book is a narrativeof my own trip from Central China to southern India and back, during whichI kept my eyes open and had quite a few adventures and misadventures. I wasaccused of being an American spy in a noodle shop in Jiayuguan in China; Iwas invited to participate in a cremation on the banks of the Ganges Rivernear Varanasi; I met the last remaining Jews at a synagogue in Calcutta; Itracked down the supreme leader of Hinduism, a supposed incarnation ofShiva known as the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, and interviewed him in atown called Nerul, not far from Bombay. But there's plenty of history andBuddhist philosophy in the book too. I wanted to give a sense of the greatevents that took place on the China-India road, which was ancient by thetime Hsuan Tsang traveled it. And I wanted to highlight the nature ofHsuan Tsang’s own spiritual journey, his philosophical quest, which wasincredibly deep, a thing of beauty in itself. So I tried to write anaccount that would be fun to read, full of people and events, but thatwould have real information in it, about China and India, about suchhistorical figures as the great Khan of the Turks or the Kushan KingKanishka of India, as well as about Buddhism and about the nature ofspiritual search as well.
AAK: How long was the trip and how did you travel? Was it difficult terrainto cross?
RB: In all, I covered about 12,000 miles, mostly by train, bus and jeep,and, yes, it was difficult terrain. I found it lonely and exhausting attimes, exhilarating at others, though probably my single greatest hardshipwas simply the incredible heat of Central Asia and India in the summermonths, when I traveled. The return trip went along the Karakorum Highwaythrough the incredibly rugged terrain of Pakistan, and then along thesouthern oases of the great Takla Makan desert in Western China. That wasan ordeal that I wouldn’t want to go through again, though having done itonce was wonderful.
AAK: Is this a trip anyone could take, without prior experience in Asia?
RB: Probably, but one would have to expect lots of delays, lots of languageproblems and a pretty high degree of discomfort. But yes, anybody withenough time and endurance could do the same trip.
AAK: What was the hardest part of the journey?
RB: The beginning and the end. The beginning because, for reasons Iexplain in the Introduction, I didn’t have the proper travel documents inChina and I was traveling in a part of the country that is absolutelyclosed to journalists. I had to move about in low-key fashion, so as notto attract the attention of the security police. This was not made easierby the fact that the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade,when I was in China. There were some close calls and a good deal ofsuspense. The end was full of difficulties, because of the heat, the lackof comfort along the way, the very extremity of the terrain, which isawesome in its desolation. Then there were times in India and inSouthern Nepal when I battled with something close to heat prostration,and an intestinal disorder that almost put me out of commission.
AAK: Were you ever afraid for your safety on this trip? If so, when?
RB: You're always concerned for your safety when you travel to unfamiliarterritory, and I had a few scary moments, like the time I found myself onthe Kazakhistan-Uzbekistan border in a car with two brawny young guys inmilitary fatigues asking me for money. There were places I didn't go,because I felt it was too dangerous. I thought a few times that our jeepwould tip over a cliff and we'd be plunged into the Indus River inPakistan. But I never felt that my life was in danger.
AAK: What appealed to you so much about the life of the monk whose steps youfollowed? Why did he inspire you to make such tremendous effort?
RB: Hsuan Tsang's goal was to find the deepest truths about human nature andhuman identity, and he needed to undergo a kind of trial, a fabulously longand difficult journey away from what was familiar to him, in order to carryout that search. He was a high-born person, very famous as a Buddhistteacher before he left for India, and he could have had a comfortable,privileged life at home in what was then the world's richest and mostcosmopolitan city. Instead, he went off to see the world, and to studywith the greatest philosphers of his time. I find that tremendous,admirable, worthy of emulation. And I also have transposed Hsuan Tsang'squest into something personal, meaningful for me and, I think, for all ofus. We all need to find our truest selves, to figure out who we really areapart from the definitions that are imposed by circumstance and authority.There are many ways of doing that, but my way, having reached a kind ofimpasse in some areas of my life, was to take this ancient Chinese monk asa model and to try to do--in four months of travel, not seventeen--what hedid.
AAK: That sounds rather abstract. Can you be more specific? For example,you describe yourself in the book as a man unable to commit himself in arelationship with a woman, but now you are married to the woman you wereseeing before you left on your trip. Is that what you are talking about?
RB: My marriage to Zhongmei, who was my traveling companion for thebeginning and the end of the trip, is certainly a specific example. Yes, Iwas unable to commit myself, and that inability was symptomatic of moregeneral trends in my life that I wanted to change. Let me put it this way. When I was younger, still a student, I embarked on long exotic travels,once going overland from Europe to India, and I promised myself that mylife would have plenty of adventure in it. Then, years later, I foundmyself turning fifty and leading a rather sedentary existence, havinggotten to a certain point but unable to get farther, living in a kind ofgilded cage of my own making, feeling kind of bound by inertia. My lifewas by no means tragic; it wasn't even unhappy. But I was thinking aboutthe persistence of my sense of unbelonging, my feeling alienation, myinability at the age of fifty to come to terms with love and commitment, tofeel content. I felt that a total break might give me some perspective andhelp me to do the things that had eluded me, like getting married, but Iwas also hesistant to leave home and endure the discomforts and dangers ofa trip. In other words, I was stuck. But the amazing thing, as mymarriage to Zhongmei shows, is that when I finally succeeded in breakingaway from my routine, something did change. I did come back from myultimate journey a bit calmer, a bit less impatient, a bit more definedthan I was before, surer of what I want for the future. It's true, as Isay at one point in the book, that you have to go far in order to return toyourself.
AAK: Why does traveling open so many emotions otherwise unavailable to us?
RB: For one thing, real travel is lonely; it confronts you with yourself,isolated from your familiar ground, and loneliness itself is a powerfulemotion. Maybe one of the things that travel does is enable you to accepta degree of solitude, which is a very different matter altogether fromloneliness, more noble, stronger, less desperate, more in tune with theessential human condition. I felt this when I spent a night in a placecalled Tash Rabat in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, which is about as faraway from home as I've ever been. But remember the epigram for my book isa line from Cavafy about how no ship can take you away from yourself. Youcan travel, but you take yourself along whever you go. You can learn andyou can change, not by running away from yourself but by confrontingyourself with something entirely different, experiencing things that youwouldn't experience in the safety of home.
AAK: Buddhism has gained enormously in appeal in the West in recent years.Why do you think this is so?
RB: I think, paradoxically, it's because we live at a time of unprecedentedmaterial plenty and of egotistical ambition, and Buddhism provides apersuasive antidote to the resulting soullessness of it all. Havingexperienced such incredible, garish degrees of prosperity and ease, andhaving striven so hard to be rich and glamorous, we are ready forBuddhism's lesson that this kind of striving is not what makes us happy.Buddhisms central premise is that we have an illusory notion of the self,and that we become ferociously attached to things that, if we understoodUltimate Truth, we would know were figments of our false awareness. At thesame time, Buddhism does not depend on belief in a Supreme Being. It is inthis sense a rather unreligious religion. So it provides a philosophicalalternative for people in a secular age when traditional religious solaceseems unavailable to many.
AAK: Are you a Buddhist yourself, or did you become one on your trip, and, ifyou did, how does that square in your mind with your Jewish upbringing?
RB: I admire Buddhism and I find studying it very rewarding. I find many ofits formulations, its love of impossible paradoxes, the power of its logic,to be poetic and fascinating. But I'm not a Buddhist. I talk in the bookin this sense about some of the similarities and differences betweenJudaism and Buddhism and I describe the reasons why, spiritually andculturally, I see my Judaism as a kind of personal moral requirement formyself. But this too is something that going far away, exploring anothertradition, helped me to see more clearly.
AAK: Twenty years ago, you became Time Magazine’s first Beijing bureauchief. How has Asia changed since then? Has growing commercialismdestroyed any mystery travelers might still be seeking?
RB: China certainly is almost unrecognizable from the days when I livedthere in the late 1970’s through the early 1980’s. But this is commonknowledge. In the book, I try to show the changes in some of the lessobvious ways. For example, in the way that it has become possible torelate to people. The question about commercialism destroying mystery isan important one. My trip brought home to me the sad fact that there isalmost no such thing as the truly remote anymore (though, as I’ve said, ifyou take the southern route across the Takla Makan, you will be as remoteas possible and still be on the planet). But there is also a spiritualand philosophical remoteness that remains. The Shankaracharya ofKanchipuram, for example, whom I met after much effort in India, is afigure who shows that the human search for meaning still provides plenty ofmystery.
AAK: You are most well known as a literary critic for the New York Times. Whenyou write, do you ever hear your critic's voice in the back of your head?Can you turn the critic off when you need instead to be a creative writer?
RB: Well, many writers are also critics, or, at least, many of them writereviews of other people's work. I just do it more regularly than most. Idon't think you turn off the critic when you write yourself; you try toapply to your own writing what you've learned by examining other people'swork.
AAK: One contradiction inherent in many insatiable travelers is the anticipationof returning home, and then once there, the desire to leave again. Has thisfeeling come over you since you've been home?
RB: To be honest, yes, even though when I wrote the book I was convincedthat I had, at long last, satisfied the urge to get far away and would becontent to remain at home. I know that to take another trip like the one Itook for Ultimate Journey would be lonely and difficult and that I'llfeel homesick, miserable at times, queasy in the stomach. And yet, thelure of the exotic, the appeal of the getaway, endures.
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