Where are you going - Part 1 - Rude Awakenings

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Where are you going

Part 1 - Rude Awakenings

Authors: Ajahn Sucitto & Nick Scott

Where are you going?

What follows is the narrative of a pilgrimage around the Buddhist holy places of India and Nepal made in the winter 1990-91. We made the pilgrimage on foot over six months, but recording it has taken more than ten years. Whil our journey took us to all the main pilgrimage sites, it was also a pilgrimage through the sacred and prfane of two very different men’s lives and the lessons learned from making this pilgrimage together.

We wrote this account to honour the people – many of them humble Indian and Nepali villagers – who supported us in the pilgrimage. We also wished to communicate some of the grittier realities of practising the Buddhist spiritual life on the road – with the understanding that this is where, in the time of the Buddha, it all began. Thus this pilgrimage is also a down-to-earth analogy for spiritual practise as we understand it. The living thing is both together and more wonderful.

Early in the writing we realised that both our voices needed to be heard. Alternating authors fit better the Buddhist understading that realities depend on perspective. It also freed us to be really honest with our thoughts about each other. The completed account we called Where are you going? Something we were ask over and again as we walked through India. We present here the account of the first three monthes, and although this is just half our journey, it retains all the difficulties and comedy of the pilgrimage plus a climax and a resolution.

Sources and references for works qouted in this book are contained in the chapter notes at the back. The narative’s Indian locale and Buddhist context required the use of some foreign and technical terms, and to make this easier for the reader, we have appended a glossary. Qoutes attributed to the Buddha are set in italis. Modern place names follow the use by the Survey of India, and Buddhist terms use the Pali-language version from the Theravadan texts unless the Sanskrit version is well known.

We hope you enjoy this book, but more than that we hope that by reading it you may share in the insights our journey gave us into ourselves.

Ajahn Sucitto

Nick Scott

Chithurst Monastery, April 2005