Tuesday 7 May 2013

Journeys on The Silk Road limps along the path to enlightenment

From The Week of April 29, 2013

While most of us endure ordinary lives of quiet contentment, using our victories as shields against our defeats, others experience quite different lives, ones alternately uplifted and ravaged by extraordinary events within and without their control. While some of these individuals do not choose their fates, others embrace them, hurling themselves into life's challenges with a restless bravery we would consider foolhardy. What motivates these men and women to forego the soft pleasures of life for the hard realities of the road may never be clear. It may well be that one must be them to know their peculiar drive to see, to strive, to know. But as we never can experience that drive, let us glean what we can of it by seeing it in action. Let us comprehend through demonstration. And that Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters achieve with considerable success in their sprawling paean to exploration and discovery.

An adventurer transfixed by the beauty and the mystery of central Asia, Aurel Stein was, in his time, a famous British explorer. Living during the time of the Great Game, which pitted the empire of Britain and Russia against one another for the vital assets of the near east, he was an ascetic who devoted his life to a series of bold campaigns from Afghanistan to China. Unlike men of his day, these were not grand affairs of noble pomp or political statecraft. They were, instead, testaments to self-sufficiency. For other than Mr. Stein's guide, he often travelled alone, allowing only a canine companion to journey with him him across the landscapes of an unknowable world.

These adventures reached a crescendo in 1907 when, in the outskirts of territorial China, Mr. Stein found the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, a legendary treasure trove of objects and documents concerning Buddhism's ancient rise and the teachings that empowered it. Negotiating with the cave's protector, Stein purchased what is now considered to be the oldest complete work of written literature, the Diamond Sutra, a ninth-century scroll which details the virtues of enlightened detachment and argues that life, and everything contained within it, is fundamentally impermanent. This famous find earned Aurel Stein considerable acclaim in the west where the scroll eventually found a home. However, in the east, he is considered a thief of Asian treasures of inestimable wisdom.

Describing both Stein's sojourns and those of the Diamond Sutra subsequent to its discovery, Journeys on The Silk Road is an expansive work that ambitiously attempts to tie together several related topics. In this, it is moderately successful, shedding light not only on the biography of a now-forgotten man who endured unimaginable deprivation in pursuit of forgotten knowledge, but the ethical minefield that is the relocation of cultural treasures from their historic resting places and to the shining museums of the west. In-between, it attempts to shed light on the Diamond Sutra itself, embedding it into the late-20th-century spiritual awakening that has eaten away at the power of the traditional religious faiths.

Though Ms. Morgan and Mr. Walters successfully illuminate all three of the work's major aspects, Aurel Stein is easily their most transfixing element. He manifests here as a figure as driven as he is isolated, an extraordinary individual who eschewed all of life's customary rewards to embark upon a fairly personal mission of discovery. His almost insane courage is a testament to the human will, a milestone that may not soon be past.

Nearly as engaging is the moral quandary that results from Stein's actions. Is it ethical to remove cultural treasures in the name of the greater good? Certainly, one can make the argument that any of a number of conflicts or misfortunes could have destroyed the Diamond Sutra had it been left in the Cave of a Thousand buddhas which is not exactly in an easily accessible region of the world. Surely more people are able to appreciate it now that it has been treated, protected, and even digitized for the masses to witness. And yet, the Diamond Sutra was not Aurel Stein's to take. It was not the cave's protector to sell. And it certainly isn't the British Library's to keep. It is a re-creation of Chinese scholars who were working a wooden printing press 500 years before anything of its like would arise in the west. It is a cultural work of China, depicting the philosophy of an Indian prince, none of which is remotely European. This issue is handled here with intelligence and sensitivity.

But for all its virtues, Journeys on The Silk Road fails to maintain the reader's attention. It is something of a Frankenstein, an amalgam of different elements that never quite alchemize into a united whole. A detailed summary of the Diamond Sutra's survival of WWII is given as much weight here as the work's actual contents. Moreover, Stein falls out of the work's final third, leaving it to be carried by adventures through modern-day Buddhism which simply don't satisfy.

An engaging history of an amazing man, a remarkable document and its perilous history that, though edifying, never quite coheres. (3/5 Stars)

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