walking an auxiliary practice, always subordinate to zazen. It was fine, I believed, if I wanted to go for walks, but that bore no relationship to the time on the mat. Living by then in a dirt-road rural location, I was offered countless opportunities for unstructured and undirected wandering. However, I always felt a certain tension between kicking stones down the road, exploring fields without much purpose, not unlike Thoreau a century earlier, and the Spartan discipline of wall and zafu. Walking, I knew, should be second best, or at least a minor distraction.
In an odd way I may have been called to walking. My father was a chemical engineer who left his lab at the Steel Company of Canada in Hamilton, Ontario, to join the group of scientists and researchers brought together to grow the agency that is now Statistics Canada. His lab-partner and close friend, a certain Ray Lowes, remained behind for a successful career at that Hamilton plant. My father brought his friend and I together with his name, although he was most commonly just known as ‘Lowes’. Lowes and his wife, Jane, visited us from time to time in Ottawa. This often took us ‘up the Valley,’ as we say in Renfrew, for a hiking and camping trip to Algonquin Park. For us, Lowes meant the woods and walking.
Back in Southern Ontario, Lowes continued walking in the woods. He fell in love with a certain collection of walks which ran past his home on the Southern Niagara Escarpment, winding northward past Hamilton, Milton and Caledon. In 1960 he outlined his vision for an expanded and connected set of trails which would extend from just outside Buffalo, New York, up to Tobermory, at the edge of Lake Huron, some 800 km to the north. Shortly thereafter, along with three other founders, Lowes began to organize the trail. The nine Regional Clubs which oversee the trail were established. In 1967, Canada’s Centennial Year, a cairn at Tobermory, the northern terminus of the Bruce Trail was unveiled. Seven years of determination, support, vision and hard work were realized when the Bruce Trail was officially opened. The Bruce Trail (http://brucetrail.org/) is now the oldest and longest continuous footpath in Canada. The Bruce Trail Conservancy has grown steadily since then, purchasing vulnerable natural treasures and ensuring their sustainability for future generations of walkers.
Over the next decades and phases of my life and practice affiliations, I continued to walk for practice, pleasure and adventure. In the country, walking was an accepted and expected mode of transport. Going to the grocery store in the village was a walking chore. Visiting friends often involved walking to and about their properties or walking to a swimming spot. More and more, I explored walking practice itself, practicing with walks into the woods where I would sometimes do my zazen. Although I didn’t know it, I was investigating the step and breath counting, the silent recitation and mindfulness of the natural world that I would learn later as traditional walking practices.
As my world became larger, I learned that not everyone valued walking as I did. In fact, on one occasion, I came to understand that it was viewed as peculiar and even suspicious. One Christmas, I traveled by van with a couple of buddies down the East Coast of the US, headed for respective families in Virginia and Florida. At the end of one long day on the road, we stopped for an overnight with friends in Maryland. Their home was in one of those sprawling 1980’s suburban developments, which had been laid out in a former farmer’s field, now paved over and re-constructed with winding utilitarian sidewalk-free roadways which only served to connect neighbourhoods. Commerce was neatly tucked away in a carefully concealed mall. All original natural details had been erased in preference for someone’s idea of a natural landscape – one which omitted trees.
On our dusk arrival and after ten or so hours on the road, my friend, John, and I decided it would be a pleasant distraction to take a walk. We set off from the house and, with no particular goal in mind, made our way around the development. Within about twenty minutes a police cruiser pulled up beside us and asked us our business. We explained we were out for a walk. The officer seemed completely non-plussed by the idea of people moving around the neighbourhood without the aid of a motorized vehicle. He left us alone, but not without a warning that this whole walking thing might be risky to us or unwelcome to the neighbours.
My next introduction to Buddhist walking was in Sri Lanka, a few years later, where I was participating in an international exchange program, Canadian Crossroads International. I was placed within the huge extended family known as Sarvodaya Shramadana (The Awakening of All through the Gift of Shared Labour). This “village reawakening” movement had hundreds of sites all over the island, each deeply embedded in village life. The Sarvodaya movement, the brainchild of Buddhist and neo-Ghandian school teacher Ari Ariyaratne, sought (and still seeks) to transform villages all over Sri Lanka through an interfaith philosophy summarized by the slogan “we build the road, the road builds us.” Their trademark activity was organizing road-building work-bees. Hundreds of villagers would come together, to share their labour and participate in the creation of entirely new roads. Men, women and children, of all ages, each took some role in hauling stone, clearing jungle, or feeding the crews.
My home-site, in a kind of regional outpost, near the central jungle-fringed city of Kegalla, brought me into an close collective living arrangement with thirty or so local village youth, all of whom, like most Sri Lankans, were Theravadin Buddhists. We frequently moved around between villages and projects by either an old Land Rover, diesel-seasoned local buses, or, of course, lots of walking. Anytime we needed to go down the valley to the larger village of Randeniya, it was an hour-long walk to the nearest “bus halt.” Wherever one might want to go, be it the bustling city life of Colombo, the tourist beaches along the south coast or the mountain tea-estates, one should expect a substantial pedestrian stage to the journey.
One morning at the centre, while I was doing zazen in my room (a re-purposed cement storage building), I became aware of one of the teenage trainees peeking in my paneless window. It seemed odd to me that sitting should interest another Buddhist. What could be more natural than doing sitting practice at wake-up? Later, my friend explained that in Sri Lankan Buddhism only a rare and senior monk might do extended meditation. Most people would do a brief three minute contemplation, but nothing as formal as zazen. The young men spying on me were wondering what sort of person I was to be doing this.
Later, my friend, Tilak, asked me if I might like to spend some time in another Sarvodaya location which was a Buddhist monastery in the hills. The clergy, I came to understand, were very much integrated into the Sarvodaya activities. I leapt at the chance, and within a week was transported to a monastery a few hours away and settled into my small, simple quarters, like a lay dorm. I was the only layperson and had only a little to do with the monks, since no one spoke English, and I think it was not proper for a layperson, even the esteemed “suddhu-aya” (older white brother), to mix with monks.
It was here that I witnessed another walking practice up close, although not very personally. Each day the monks would line up, bowls in hand, and file down the mountain road to another village for their daily alms round (which we will explore later as Walking Practice # 3). I was never invited but did come to understand the centrality of that walking practice for them. This was more or less the only way they secured food for themselves, so walking was woven into both the contemplative and daily living routines of their lives. That same thing happened, and has happened for centuries, in monasteries all over Sri Lanka and most other Buddhist nations. It would be years before I came to know the meaning of the alms-round for bringing Dharma to the villagers.
My months in Sri Lanka also introduced me to another type of walking which is also a very common religious practice, one which appears in most world religions: pilgrimage (which we will later meet as Walking Practice # 6). This practice sets the practitioner on a walking journey which physically, emotionally and symbolically repeats the steps of some ancient figure or visits the site of some milestone religious event or artifact. In my case, it was several visits to the treasures of the golden age of Sri Lankan Buddhism. In Anuradhapurra and Polonnaruwa, I walked through the one-square-kilometre city ruins of what was one of the largest cities of the 4th century BCE. The city became part of the new Buddhist expansion only two centuries after the Buddha’s
