Full Episode
Hello, hello and hello. You are truly welcome to this Double Droger podcast. I'm Alex Wilding and in this episode I want to share some thoughts about pilgrimages and how they fit into the Buddhist way of doing things. I will sing the Guru Rinpoche mantra to a tune that you might not expect.
And finally, I will tell you whether the chair practitioner who appeared in the previous episode was scared out of her wits or whether she triumphantly rose above fear. Firstly, though, may I take a moment to encourage you to take a moment of yours to like this episode, subscribe to the podcast, tell your friends in whatever way is appropriate for the channel you're listening on
At the time of first publishing, the podcast is hosted on Podbean, but it's very likely that you're listening somewhere else. If you do want to see the brief comments, but they don't appear in your channel, you will find them on Podbean. So, pilgrimage. It's something that's known and treasured by many, many religious traditions around the world. Catholic Christians...
may make a pilgrimage to Rome to see the Pope giving blessings in the square of St. Peter's, or to Lourdes in France in the hope of healing. Less often they may make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, poor suffering Palestine, and perhaps more often to more local sites, such as Croke Patrick in Ireland. That's the one that serious pilgrims climb barefoot.
Way back decades ago, I knew a group of people who happened to be Roman Catholics. Some had been born into that religion and some were new converts to a circle, mostly consisting of students, who had gathered around an apparently somewhat charismatic priest.
One of the things that bonded them together was taking part in a pilgrimage in the east of England in which they took turns carrying a heavy wooden crucifix. It's possible that it's the one that finishes at Walsingham, which you can Google, although to be quite honest, I can't remember that for a fact. I wasn't properly a Buddhist then, but I certainly wasn't leaning towards Catholicism.
Anyway, good or bad, it was clearly an experience they valued very much, and it did, as I said, bond them tightly together. If you dig around, you'll find quite a number of pilgrimage sites in Europe, many of them not well known to the wider public. While we're about it, my guess is that the Muslim Hajj is probably the best known pilgrimage in the whole world.
Every Muslim is supposed to make that pilgrimage at least once in a lifetime if they possibly can. And I read recently that the number of pilgrims each year passes two million. The Hindus too have at least one massive, massive pilgrimage, the Kumbh Mela, that takes place approximately once in every 12 years.
The last one was in 2019, and apparently the estimate of the total number of participants is an astonishing 200 million. The authorities estimate that the busiest day involved 50 million people. Thank goodness, not all at one single site, but it's still a mind-boggling number. So it is very clear that pilgrimage is something that resonates strongly in the religious part of the human mind.
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