Product Description
Richard Bernstein's story of his long journey through Asia is at once a memoir of adventurous travel and a record of cultural discovery and spiritual quest.
In the year 629, a greatly revered Chinese Buddhist monk, Hsuan Tsang, set out across Asia in search of the Buddhist Truth, to settle what he called the "perplexities of my mind." Nearly a millennium and a half later, Richard Bernstein retraces the monk's steps: from the Tang dynasty capital at Xian through ancient Silk Road oases, over forbidding mountain passes to Tashkent, Samarkand, and the Amu-Darya River, across Pakistan to the holiest cities of India—and back.
Juxtaposing his experiences with those of Hsuan Tsang, Bernstein reconstructs the hazards and glories of this long and sinuous route, comparing present and past. The monk described what he saw and experienced: landscapes, customs, and, above all, people and the variety of religious beliefs held by those he met. So does our present-day author—taking us to Buddhist cave temples, to the holy places of the Buddha's own life, to the ruins of the Gandharan civilization in Pakistan, to the university in the Ganges Valley where Hsuan Tsang studied. He too encounters extraordinary figures— among them a German monk in Bodhgaya, a down-and-out maharaja, and a supposed reincarnation of Shiva.
And he follows the path of Hsuan Tsang not only in physical but in contemplative ways, reflecting on the mysteries and paradoxes of Buddhist philosophy and on the nature of the Ultimate Truth that was Hsuan Tsang’s goal.
Ultimate Journey is a vivid, profoundly felt account of two stirring adventures—one in the past and one in the present—in pursuit of illumination.
Amazon.com Review
In 629, a Chinese Buddhist monk named Hsuan Tsang left the Tang dynasty capital Chang-an (current-day Xian) and set off to India to see the principal shrines of his religion. His path was arduous, involving the passage of vast deserts and towering mountains, and the record he made of his years-long voyage served generations of travelers along the Silk Road until, finally, it was forgotten.
Richard Bernstein, a former New York Times correspondent in China (and now a book critic for that newspaper), follows Hsuan's trail in this outstanding narrative of his overland journey into the heart of Central Asia, a journey that takes him and the fortunate reader into places that few travelers are privileged to see--places, such as Kashgar and Samarkand, that have storied associations but that remain remote even in the age of CNN and fast jets. Though not without his fears and not without getting into a little trouble, Bernstein talks to just about everyone he meets along the way, pokes into little-known corners of history, and spins a wonderfully literate story of difficult travel that recalls such books as Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. Anyone who has ever dreamed of seeing the Ganges River and the Taklimakan Desert will find much pleasure in Bernstein's pages. --Gregory McNamee
Tags: China, Richard Bernstein, Silk Road, Ancient, Gregory McNamee, Bruce Chatwin
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Richard Bernstein’s ULTIMATE JOURNEY is a splendid account of his recreation of the extraordinary pilgrimage of a legendary seventh century Buddhist monk named Hsuan Tsang, arguably the greatest traveler in history. Retracing the monk’s steps through western China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and finally to India, Bernstein traverses seemingly impassable deserts, crosses formidable mountain passes, and meets a whole cast of colorful characters along his route. With the eye of a practiced journalist, Bernstein shares with the reader the experience of visiting out-of-the-way ancient ruins, traveling on primitive trains and sleeping in flyblown cheap hotels, producing in so doing a hugely entertaining read. What makes ULTIMATE JOURNEY truly outstanding is the manner in which Bernstein contrasts his own experience with that of his seventh century hero. Because Bernstein speaks Chinese and possesses an impressive familiarity with Chinese culture and history, he is able to bring the legendary Hsuan Tsang vividly to life, transforming even the more abstruse corners of the monk’s Buddhist beliefs into page-turning reading Carefully researched and elegantly written, ULTIMATE JOURNEY is a work that can be favorably compared with such classics of travel literature as Paul Theroux’s THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR and Peter Matthiessen’s THE SNOW LEOPARD. It deserves a place on the shelf alongside such splendidly-written evocations of the Chinese past as Jonathan Spence’s THE DEATH OF WOMAN WANG and THE DREAM PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI. For anyone who loves loves Chinese history, cares deeply about the triumphs of the human spirit and loves a good old-fashioned page-turning read, ULTIMATE JOURNEY is a trip not to be missed.
Rating: 5 / 5
Writing books is harder than reviewing them. Richard Bernstein is a book reviewer for the New York Times, and with “Ultimate Journey,” he tries to write a book about a journey he took in Asia retracing the steps of Xuanzang (Hsuan Tsang). A Chinese Buddhist monk who was one of the world’s greatest explorers, Xuanzang travelled over 16 years in the 7th century A.D. from China through Central Asia to India and back to China to bring back numerous Buddhist scriptures. Bernstein, a China “scholar” in his graduate student days and former New York Times correspondent in China, tried to recreate that journey in 1999. However, the book is a major disappointment, as it is MORE about Bernstein’s own Manhattan-aging-yuppie-midlife crisis than about Buddhism, Xuanzang or Asian travels. To start with, he mixes transliteration systems (pinyin and Wades-Giles, and even Grousset’s unorthodox system, i.e., Hiouan-Tsang), going back and forth among all three with no consistency. He is careless about spelling, using Urumqi and Urumchi alternatively, and careless with people’s names and places. The whole book, although chronological, is disjointed, as it digresses about his childhood, his current life in Manhattan, his love life (or lack of), spiritual and philosophical musings, and other assorted subjects. One comes away with very little understanding of Xuanzang’s life or what was the importance of his travels. It works better as a travelogue, but ultimately all those digressions about Bernstein’s life, rather than the places he’s visiting, make this a very unsatisfying and annoying read.
For more on the life of Xuanzang, Sally Hovey Wriggins’ “Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road” is a far superior book.
Rating: 2 / 5
“‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form’ we can imagine Hsuan Tsang chanting to himself as he was wandering, small and alone, under the yellowing sky” (p. 69), Richard Bernstein writes. His ULTIMATE JOURNEY is actually about three journeys. It is about the seventh-century pilgrimage of Hsuang Tsang, a Chinese Buddhist monk, “over icy mountains and through scorched deserts” (p. 6), on horseback, camel-back, elephant-back and on foot (p. 5), in search for “the ultimate truth, the truth beyond truth” that will enable him to become a bodhisattva, an enlightened being (p. 243). It is about Bernstein’s middle-aged attempt escape his “quarrel with bourgeois life” (p. 7), and “to make some kind of connection” (p. 86) with the ancient monk by travelling to China to retrace Hsuan Tsang’s 10,000-mile journey from China to India. It is also about Bernstein’s own search for meaning in his life as an unmarried, Jewish, New York Times’ book critic.
This is not your typical religious travelogue. For one thing, Bernstein is not an especially religious person, and admits he is “skeptical” (p. 244) of Buddhism. However, in retracing the footsteps of Hsuan Tsang to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha (p. 204), to Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first teachings (p. 219), and to the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya, where the Buddha found enlightenment (p. 234), Berenstein develops a reverence for Buddhism–which he considers “an intellectual religion” (p. 33)–”as a manner of sifting the glitter from the substance, as a means of overcoming the shallowness of the self and of reaching for the tranquil power of the mind” (p. 33). Still, Bernstein finds no answers in Buddhism. Travelling “The Road of Great Events,” however, he seems to discover the goal of man is to know himself (p. 273).
This is a fascinating book, and a 352-page JOURNEY worth travelling. In the same genre–and if you missed it last year, I also recommend George Crane’s, BONES OF THE MASTER (2000).
G. Merritt
Rating: 4 / 5
Bernstein’s entire preparation for India seems to have been a glance at a Lonely Planet and a chat with Tavleen Singh. He makes no further serious attempt to find anyone who can help him understand today’s India or the India Hsuan Tsang saw over 1,300 years ago. As a result, he has undermined his credibility with cliches, want of understanding, and dyslexia with Indian names.The misspellings are ubiquitous, from Srinigar to Potiala and from Gorokhpur to Indori, from the superfast Sabhathi Express to Delhi’s historic Red Ford. At one point, he takes a photograph of a Mr Yado (Yadav), carefully writes down his address and, later, posts it to Merjaphur (Mirzapur). He wonders if it ever arrived. So do I.It’s sad that in 2001, someone of Bernstein’s standing is still writing that Kolkata’s ‘most famous image is a black hole’, and that it ‘summons up images of medieval plagues and suffering’. He must also have been using an old guide book, as he opines that the only place to stay, apart from the Grand and the Tollygunge Club, is Sudder Street. Varanasi, which for his compatriot, the scholar Diana Eck, was ‘The City of Light’ is for him merely ‘a city of the dead’. He doesn’t talk to Veerbhadra Mishra, the mahant of the Sankatmochan temple, about his struggle to keep the river clean. Even Clinton was impressed by Mishra, but Bernstein knows that no religious leader is interested in keeping the Ganga clean as he’s consulted Tavleen Singh. He dismisses the late Kashi Naresh, who devoutly maintained the centuries-old Ram Lila at Ramnagar, as a ‘has-been maharaja’. Perhaps he was wise in refusing an interview for fear of being misquoted.Hinduism is beyond Bernstein’s ken-he is a self-confessed ‘secular non-Buddhist sceptic’. He hasn’t realised that it is more than simply ‘a religion of worldly renunciation’. One of the greatest acts of renunciation that Hsuan Tsang witnessed was when King Harsha Vardhana gave away his worldly goods at a ceremony he performed every five years at Prayag. This is one of many incidents not mentioned in the book. Neither, if you go by the book’s map, did Hsuan Tsang go anywhere near Allahabad. Bernstein is interested in Buddhism but that interest is intellectual. Thankfully, he learns through the course of his journey that Buddhism, like Hinduism, is a religion of experience. He is blessed with a light touch and an ability to laugh at himself. But it would have helped him if he had understood that while China is ‘an extraordinary universe, a domain of everything’, India is one too.
Rating: 2 / 5
This is a disheartening book. On paper, it seems an exciting project. A modern retracing of the footsteps of the Chinese monk Hsuan Tsang. Excursions into Central Asian locations such as Tashkent and Samarkand whose very names are redolent of romance and exotica. Unfortunately, the results strike me as the product of a rather listless exercise. The author, in the grips of a mid-life bout with melancholia and increasingly prone to travel fatigue, seems out of sorts with his original project. Yes, he completed his trip but you get the strong sense that it was conducted with gritted teeth.
Bernstein is a good writer and a good journalist. I very much enjoyed his prior book on France (“Fragile Glory”) as well as his thoughtful book reviews and topical surveys of current trends in modern thought in the New York Times. In the present instance, however, he seems to have run out of gas.
What do you hope to get out of this book? A better understanding of Buddhism perhaps? Sorry, but you would do just as well reading a few good survey articles on Buddhism in an encyclopedia or even some old Alan Watts books. Bernstein offers little more than a desultory ramble through the literature. He is, by temperament and “tribal connections,” unwilling to explore the experiential element of one of the world’s great religious traditions. It’s not so much the skeptical and secular outlook that I find off-putting. (Indeed, I tend to share this perspective.) Rather, it is the over-intellectualized cognitive distancing. Appropriate, perhaps, for a grad school seminar, but way off the mark in attempting to apprehend and elucidate a monk’s quest for ultimate enlightenment.
Well then. How about insightful reporting of life and socio-political developments in modern day Central Asia. Nope. Not really on the agenda for this trip. This distinguished journalist is clearly on sabbatical. No sniffing about for news and political intrigues here.
O.K. How about vivid accounts of the people met and situations encountered. Yes, there is some of this. But, on the whole, even this narrative is not particularly engaging. The author just doesn’t seem all that interested. For he is in the troughs of lingering depression. China, the ex-Soviet Republics, Pakistan, and India are merely colorful backdrops — scaffolds for his ruminations on what direction he should adopt in his personal life. Interesting in its own way, I suppose, but hardly meriting the investment of either your dollars or your time.
Rating: 3 / 5
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