Some 15 years ago, while an editor at a travel magazine, I proposed to my boss and editor in chief, Klara Glowczewska, that I undertake what I pitched as a Grand Tour of Asia. My argument was that while the traditional 17th-to-19th-century Grand Tour — typically a monthslong trip taken by young, often aristocratic, usually British men, meant to enhance their artistic education — once focused on Italy, the center of the religious-cultural world, surely a 21st-century iteration of such a trip would compel one to go east, to Asia.
Klara approved the pitch, an act of generosity that spoke to her own intellectual curiosity, and off I went. Over two months, I traveled through Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, China and Japan. Every night, I filed a 2,000-word report of the day’s activities and learnings to my editor, Deborah Dunn.
To say the trip was transformational is an understatement, and the subject of another letter. But while on it, I became obsessed with a different but related journey: the path that the Buddha’s teachings took through Asia, beginning in the sixth century B.C., which radically changed the continent, providing it with a highly elastic doctrine that could easily adapt to different cultures’ native beliefs and systems of faith. To travel through Asia as I did, from Sri Lanka, once one of the most powerful Buddhist kingdoms in the world, through Sarnath in northern India, where the Hindu prince then known as Siddhartha Gautama gave his first sermon, and then east was to get to chart how a belief does — and must — change in order to first survive and then flourish.
