Hindu and Buddhist Pilgrimage: The Persistence of Place

Dear Colleagues,

In the 21st century, pilgrimage continues as a vibrant form of religious practice, combining traditional and modern pieties. In the new global setting, it bridges conventional cultural dichotomies, such as pilgrim/tourist, religion/spirituality, spiritual/material, journey/goal, and real/virtual. From India to Japan, Hindu and Buddhist traditions offer popular and varied forms of pilgrimage. Emergent diaspora religions have also produced pilgrimage practices. Despite the geographic separations, the development of variations, and the imagining of new configurations, the staying power of place/space in pilgrimage persists.

This Special Issue will explore the variety, structure, and meaning of Hindu and Buddhist pilgrimage with special emphasis on the importance of sacred space/place and on its transformation in contemporary settings. It encourages historical, literary, anthropological, and comparative approaches. We welcome articles that deploy ritual analysis, ethnographies of lived experience, study of media and material representations (i.e., the role of temple scrolls, talismans, mandalas, and images), the ecology of landscapes, and the ideology of maps and re-examine the “discourse” of pilgrimage in light of contemporary adaptations. While the themes of place and destination help to ground our discussion, we invite research that explores the impact of the dislodgement or displacement on traditional forms, as often happens in contemporary and diaspora settings. Though transformed in new ways, pilgrimage practices continue to revive traditional religious lives. The paradigm of four stages of pilgrimage—preparation, journey, worship at site, and return to the everyday world—largely holds, but contemporary cultural and religious changes require re-examination.

For instance, in American Hindu practice, we can find in new homes the mapping and reconstruction of Indian sacred places through miniature models built in new separate rooms or backyards. In the case of Japanese Buddhist circuits, such as Shikoku, we can observe increased participation among non-Buddhist Americans and Europeans, a phenomenon that challenges the solid lines of distinction between devotees and tourists, between religion and spirituality, and between indigenous and global identities—all the while maintaining the relevance of place and journey. UNESCO’s designation of revered pilgrimage temples as “World Heritage Sites” affects the convergence of traditional pieties and global secular interests. In the contemporary COVID-19 crisis, the “social distancing” policies necessitate forms of virtual pilgrimage that readapt traditional pieties; yet these also can reaffirm the priority of the spatial experience.

In this exploration, we think that Michael Pye’s definition of pilgrimage as “the deliberate traversing of a route to a sacred place which lies outside one’s normal habitat” serves as a good prompt. The definition implicates notions of goal, intentionality, traveling, place, and suspending the ordinary. These categories also denote physicality and spatial orientation that find expression in virtual or filmed adaptations.

Some key questions to consider in dealing with pilgrimage: How does pilgrimage remain a useful category for comparative and anthropological analysis? What counts as “pilgrimage”? What are the relationships between routes or circuits and the goal of pilgrimage? How does pilgrimage as a both traveling and spatial experience facilitate interfaces between groups, traditions, sectarians, and nonsectarians? How does it bridge religious and secular practices and interests? On the other hand, how does pilgrimage promote grounding in one particular tradition? How does pilgrimage represent a penultimate transformative experience? To what extent is the experience facilitated by the encounter with a sacred place? How do we factor in economic, aesthetic, textual, geographical, and media forces in understanding pilgrimage and the role of sacred places? How do images, texts, and visionary experiences reinforce the sanctity of places? Along with identifying comparative or common themes in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese examples, can sacred journeys help to delineate the disassociation or discontinuity between traditions, for instance, among the varied Buddhist pilgrimage practices and forms that flourish from India to China to Japan?

Dr. Sam Britt
Dr. Claude Stulting
Guest Editors

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• circuits and routes
• circulations
• commerce
• festivals
• intersections
• journey
• Karma
• Labyrinths
• Liminality
• Mandala
• Miniature
• replications
• rites of passage
• spirituality
• stages and stations
• tourism
• transformation
• travel
• veneration