Page 168 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

pilgrimage 1469

The route of travel of
Baha’i pilgrim Charles
Mason Remy in 1908.

haps especially—to those of
south Asia. The Hindu term
tirtha-yatra means broadly
“journey to river fords,” illus-
trating a devotion to flowing
water evident since Vedic (relat-
ing to the Hindu sacred writ-
ings) times (from c. 1500 BCE),
and pilgrimage practices often
involve taking a purifying dip,
as well as visiting holy figures
or gaining sight of a deity con-
tained within an image. The
to pilgrimage. The landscape of the Holy Land and the Mahabharata (c. 300 BCE), a Vedic epic, contains sections
holy city have provided potent reminders of Jesus’s life as describing and noting the religious merit to be gained
well as of the location of his future return (just as in Islam from visiting numerous tirthas (sacred places). Such merit
Paradise will be transferred to Jerusalem during the Last is said to apply to people of all classes and castes and
Days). The early centuries of the church brought the usually involves a temporary renunciation—akin in some
quick emergence of a pious tradition of traveling. During ways to Christian asceticism—that rejects bodily com-
the fourth century CE Helena (c. 255–327 CE), the forts and pleasure. As one scholar of Hindu pilgrimage
mother of the Roman emperor Constantine (c. 274–337 puts it, “The returning pilgrim should be thinner and
CE), toured the Holy Land, adapting the model of tradi- poorer” (Gold 1988, 263). Other important features of
tional Roman imperial progress through a province for the Hindu pilgrimage landscape include hilltops, caves,
her own spiritual as well as political purposes. As the and forests, creating a complex sacred geography that
Christian empire developed so did the pilgrimage routes encompasses the whole of India. Furthermore, with the
of often highly ascetic travelers, who expected to see the economic migration of Hindu populations into the West,
biblical narrative played out in the places visited. A features of the sacred Indian landscape have been trans-
growing monastic tradition was also evident in Palestine lated into new parts of the world, so that, for instance,
and neighboring lands. However, with the decline in the convergence of two rivers in Ohio has been com-
Muslim tolerance of Christian visitors to Jerusalem from pared by some Hindus with the confluence of the sacred
the tenth century CE onward, European sites became in- Indian rivers: the Ganges,Yamuna, and Sarasvati.
creasingly prominent pilgrimage locations. Rome housed On the Indian subcontinent the religions of Jainism
the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul, and other shrines, and Sikhism maintain pilgrimage traditions that have
such as Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, were some similarities with Hindu practices. According to
viewed as symbols of Christian military opposition to Buddhist tradition, among the last words of Buddha
Islam, celebrating St. James in his role as a warrior, armed (c. 563–c. 483 BCE) were instructions to his followers to
with both a sword and a cross. Some sites even repli- visit places marking the most significant events of his
cated the sacred landscape of the Holy Land, such as life. People soon added numerous holy spots to this
Walsingham in Norfolk—known as “England’s Nazareth” biographical landscape, within and beyond India. Just as
because it claimed to have an exact copy of the holy house the emperor Constantine reinforced his imperial power
that Jesus had inhabited as a boy. by placing pilgrimage churches in the Holy Land, so the
The qualities of the landscape have been central to emperor Ashoka—the first Buddhist pilgrim of whom we
Judeo-Christian pilgrimage traditions, but also—and per- know—used imperial patronage during the third century