On Saturday I will hop on a plane and fly to Mumbai, to begin a two week tour of northwestern India.  I will be accompanying, and giving lectures for, a group of alumni from Williams College.  Our route looks like this (my part of it will end when the red line gets to Delhi; I will not go on for the extra trip to Varanasi):

      I have never been to India and am very much looking forward to the opportunity.

      Some of you might be wondering how it is that I, who have no travel experience in India, can be giving lectures on India to a group of American tourists.  Well, I do have some book learning on India.  Over the past decade I have been teaching a course called "Asia and the World" (a two-year old syllabus can be found here), a broad introduction of Asian history and politics that compares China, India and Japan, with a bit of Indonesia thrown in for good measure (through one of my favorite novels, This Earth of Mankind). 

       I can talk about caste and Raj and Congress and samsara and the like, but I have never gotten close to the people and places of India.  And now I will. 

       And I am pushing back against the Tao Te Ching once again.  I know, I keep saying the same thing as I prepare for a foreign trip, but that is the fate of one who keeps Tao in mind.  Here is the relevant passage (47):

You can know all beneath heaven
though you never step out the door,
and you can see the Way of heaven
though you never look out the window.

The further you explore, the less you know.

So it is that a sage know by going nowhere,
names by seeing nothing,
perfects by doing nothing.

    Basically, I agree with the first sentence but not the second.  Yes, you can come to see Way without traveling; but traveling does not have to mean knowing less.  If you take travel the wrong way, if you think it will tell you more than it can, then you may wind up knowing "less." But if you go knowing that all you will learn is an extension of what is already knowable of Tao, then, I believe, you can come to know "more."  I will certainly learn more by going to India: it will show me facets of Way I have not seen before and it will remind me, again, of the vastness of Way.

     Blogging will be intermittent while I am gone.  I will pre-arrange a series of posts, probably poems and favorite passages, that will pop up from day to day.  I will try to blog from the hotels in India, but our schedule is rather grueling and, I am afraid to say, if it comes down to a restful dip in the pool versus a rushed session in front of the computer screen, I’m diving in the water!.   

      As I go, I will try to link my disparate worlds: sights and impressions of contemporary India and thoughts from ancient China.  It could make for an interesting mix.  And when I return, I will certainly write a few longer pieces on what I have seen and thought. 

     In the meantime, here is something from Lieh Tzu (p. 82) on travel:

How perfect is travel! In perfect travel we do not know where we are going, in perfect contemplation we do not know what we are looking at.  To travel over all things without exception, contemplate all things without exception, this is what I call travel and contemplation.  That is why I say: "How perfect is travel!"