Citation

Reader, Ian. Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2015.

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Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan

In Japan large numbers of pilgrims wearing white shrouds and carrying pilgrims’ staffs make a 1,400-kilometre circuit of the island of Shikoku that takes them to eighty-eight Buddhist temples in the company, according to pilgrimage lore, of the mendicant Buddhist holy man Kōbō Daishi. While many do so by foot, on a journey that can take six or more weeks, the vast majority go by bus or car, often in organized tour groups led by a priest or pilgrimage guide, that take only a few days.
In Japan, the Shikoku pilgrimage has been the focus of several documentaries, especially by NHK (Japan’s national broadcaster), that have highlighted its history, scenery, and associations with Japanese tradition. It has also featured prominently in a number of Japanese films and TV dramas in recent years, while the publication of a large number of memoirs by pilgrims has further made the pilgrimage into a media phenomenon in Japan, just as the Santiago Camino has become in Europe.

Camino de Santiago

Thousands of walkers and cyclists follow the Camino, the pilgrim’s way across Europe to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, which is said to hold the relics of St James, while many more go there each year by bus, plane, and train

Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico

Lourdes in France

Muslim pilgrimages

Millions of Muslims from around the globe make pilgrimages to Islam’s holy sites of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia every year, including two or more million during the annual hajj pilgrimage period.
In Mashhad, Iran, the shrine of Imam Reza commemorating the 9th century martyrdom of the eighth Imam of the Shi’ite Muslim tradition is a major focus of devotional travel for Shi’ites in general and Iranians in particular
the 12th century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti’s shrine in Ajmer, India, attracts millions of Indian Muslims each year (as well as many from other faiths).

Writer-pilgrims

In 2001, for instance, the German comedian Hape Kerkeling walked on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, and then wrote a book about his experiences (which was later translated into English)—selling millions of copies, topping the best-seller charts in Germany, and inspiring large numbers of Germans to follow in his footsteps.
Other writer-pilgrims include Shirley MacLaine and Paulo Coelho, whose ‘New Age’ style best-sellers have encouraged many people to do the pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage films

Television documentaries and films such as The Way, starring Martin Sheen and focusing on the experiences of an American pilgrim to Santiago, have added to its popularity.

Pilgrimages in India

This picture of large numbers of pilgrims on the move and of heightened public and media interest in the practice is evident also in India, where millions of Hindus embark on pilgrimages to Hindu holy cities such as Hardwar and Varanasi, where pilgrims bathe in the River Ganges.
In India, too, every three years the Kumbh Mela, a mass pilgrimage described as the world’s largest human gathering and centred on ritual bathing, attracts millions
Many other shrines and temples around the country attract large pilgrim numbers, including formerly remote mountain sites that have become more accessible because of improved transport links and other facilities. Shri Mata Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu, north-west India, for example, has benefited from the development of new lodging facilities, roads, and even a helicopter pad and services that enable wealthy pilgrims swift access to the shrine. Such developments along with skilful mass publicity by shrine authorities have raised the site’s national profile and produced an exponential rise in pilgrim numbers in recent times.
In the disputed mountainous area of Kashmir thousands of Hindu pilgrims make the trek to the cave-temple of Amarnath, sacred to the deity Shiva, during the brief summer season when the mountain passes are open. This pilgrimage, which has been the focus of attacks by terrorists who dispute India’s claims in the region, is nowadays heavily protected by the Indian Army. It has also been assiduously promoted by Hindu nationalists in order to advance Indian claims in the region.

Christian (notably Catholicism) has developed extensive numbers of pilgrimage sites often associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

Knock in Ireland, where in 1879 villagers had a vision in which the Virgin Mary appeared on the side of the local chapel, and which has subsequently been described as Ireland’s national pilgrimage site
Medjugorje in Herzegovina, to which many Catholics flocked after Marian apparitions were seen by a group of young people in the 1980s.
Catholicism’s spread to Latin America was accompanied by the appearance of Catholic pilgrimage sites there, including the aforementioned Guadalupe
African Christian cultures, similarly, have developed networks of sites to which the faithful travel.
Ethiopia’s long Christian history, for example, incorporates several significant pilgrimage sites, such as Axum, where the Cathedral of St Mary of Zion is said to house the Ark of the Covenant
Lalibela, whose rock-hewn churches were built eight centuries ago by King Lalibela in order to create a ‘new Jerusalem’ in his realm by symbolically reproducing that city’s structure, and which are a continuing magnet for Ethiopian Christians and, nowadays, for tourists worldwide.

Buddhist pilgrimage

Buddhists from around the world travel to Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment in India, and to other sites associated with his life’s journey
For Burmese Buddhists the Shwedagon Temple, in the capital Yangon, is a major national pilgrimage site housing hair relics said to be from the Buddha.
The Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka, which has a Buddha tooth relic, is a magnet for Sri Lankan Buddhist devotees.
Shikoku is nowadays Japan’s most popular Buddhist pilgrimage

Shinto pilgrimage

Shinto, has many pilgrimage sites, including the Great Shrines of Ise, which have close links to Japan’s foundation myths and its Imperial family.

Sikh pilgrimage

In India, too, the Sikh tradition has its network of pilgrimage places, including the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest site and main pilgrimage centre.

New religions create their own pilgrimage centers.

As new religious traditions develop, they frequently create their own special pilgrimage centres.
The Japanese new religion, Tenrikyō, developed in the 19th century by its visionary founder, Nakayama Miki, regards Tenri, where Nakayama lived and received her revelations, as the sacred centre of humanity, to which all should return to worship. Pilgrimage there is a core activity of Tenrikyō devotees, especially on 26 January each year, the anniversary of Nakayama’s passing.

Hare Krishna pilgrimage

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), better known as the Hare Krishna movement, was founded in 1966 by an Indian guru and has grown primarily in Western countries, developing its own pilgrimage centres for the faithful.
Bhaktivedanta Manor in Hertfordshire, close to London, is the movement’s British centre and a major site of pilgrimage for Hare Krishna devotees, as well as for Hindus resident in the United Kingdom.

A pilgrimage site could be shared by multiple faiths.

Not all pilgrimage sites are specific to one faith. Jerusalem has great significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is a site of pilgrimage for all three
in Sri Lanka, Sri Pada is a mountain pilgrimage site visited by Buddhists, Christian, Hindus, and Muslims
Kataragama, in the jungle of southern Sri Lanka, is especially important to the island’s Hindus and Buddhists.

Shared pilgrimage sites could produce both harmony and conflict.

While this can produce mutual feelings of harmony as different faiths share common ground, it can often produce tensions and conflicts grounded both in differences of faith and because of competing ethnic, religious, and political claims—an issue clearly evident in Jerusalem in modern times.
At Kataragama, tensions reflecting the recent conflict between the primarily Hindu Tamils and the Singhalese Buddhists have surfaced, as have strains over the expansion of Singhalese Buddhist influences in what was once a primarily Hindu site.

A pilgrimage place could simply be local.

Not all pilgrimage places are internationally significant or widely known; many are essentially local in nature.
many thousands of local and regional pilgrimage sites are visited by local clienteles, either to seek here-and-now benefits or because they are unable to travel farther afield. In her study of pilgrimage practices in India, for example, the American scholar Ann Gold talks about how Rajasthani villagers make occasional long-distance pilgrimages on special occasions, such as to perform death rituals for close relatives, while making more frequent short pilgrimages to local shrines to pray for more immediate needs.

Local pilgrimage sites help those unable to travel to perform pilgrimages.

Such local pilgrimages are significant in the wider world of pilgrimage, for they have long provided a means through which people unable to travel far can perform pilgrimages and seek their benefits.
Most people in medieval England, for example, would have found it difficult to get away from their homes for any length of time or to have the wherewithal to walk to prominent but distant pilgrimage shrines such as Canterbury. They did, however, have numerous local shrines and holy wells to which they could make short visits to pray for various blessings.

Local pilgrimages could replicate famed and distant ones.

Sometimes local pilgrimages involve replications of more famed and distant ones.
Small-scale replicas of prominent temples such as Varanasi’s Sri Vishwanath are found widely in India, often in the courtyards of other temples, to enable people who are far from Varanasi, for example, to nonetheless ‘visit’ it.
Other Shikoku replicas may consist of just a set of eighty-eight stones under each of which soil from one of the Shikoku temples has been placed; such pilgrimages, which enable people to ‘walk’ the route in a few minutes, are known as sunafumi ‘stepping on the soil (of Shikoku)’ pilgrimages.
Many pilgrimages in Japan are copies in regional or miniature versions of major pilgrimages, such as Shikoku, often, in this case, with eighty-eight stone statues or wayside shrines representing Shikoku’s eighty-eight temples.
Many islands in Japan’s Inland Sea have their own smaller-scale versions of the Shikoku pilgrimage, often with local miracle stories and tales of Kōbō Daishi apparitions. While the Shikoku pilgrimage may take six weeks or so to walk, such smaller-scale island pilgrimages would usually take just a few days.
At Kaiganji, a temple in Shikoku, there is one such small-scale version that replicates in microcosm the physical structure of the Shikoku pilgrimage. In a route one-kilometre long, one visits all eighty-eight temples—which are spaced out in proportion to how they are placed on the actual route—one walks on their soil, and one passes statues and tableaux depicting popular stories from pilgrimage legends.

Miniaturized versions of pilgrimages could reawaken previous pilgrimages.

Performing such miniaturized versions not only stands in for the main pilgrimage for those unable to do the longer journey, but also, as priests at Kaiganji told me, it enables those who had done the Shikoku pilgrimage previously to remember and reawaken their experiences there—perhaps even inspiring them to do it again.

Replicated pilgrimages in the Christian tradition

Themes of replication are also found in Christian contexts. In 1061 a widowed Anglo-Saxon noblewoman saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham in Norfolk, England, in which Mary asked her to build a replica there of Jesus’s family house at Nazareth. This transplantation thus enabled people to ‘visit’ a distant holy Christian site within their own locality. Walsingham became the centre of a Marian cult that developed into one of the most prominent English pilgrimage sites until it was suppressed during the Reformation. It was revived in the late 19th century and, in the guise of Our Lady of Walsingham, has become a major English pilgrimage site for Catholics and Anglicans.
King Lalibela’s rock churches in Ethiopia constructed to symbolize Jerusalem are another example of this localized reproduction of the universality of major pilgrimage sites.
Lourdes is another site that has been replicated worldwide, allowing people unable to go physically to Lourdes to share in its reputed spiritual and healing benefits.
During the 19th century, Lourdes replica grottoes developed in the USA for the benefit of American Catholics unable to travel to Europe

Immigrants replicated their pilgrimage traditions.

Diaspora communities also may take their pilgrimage traditions with them.
The Japanese who emigrated to Hawaii in the late 19th century to work in the sugar plantations, for example, constructed small-scale Shikoku replicas there.
Hindu communities in the UK and USA have built their own versions of prominent Indian pilgrimage sites in their new countries of residence.

Pilgrimage sites could be transferable and reproducible to be more accessible.

In such terms, pilgrimage sites can be transferable and infinitely reproducible in ways that bring their universality to people far distant from the ‘real’ physical site.

Virtual pilgrimages

This transferability is now even emerging online in the guise of virtual pilgrimages through which people can ‘visit’ pilgrimage sites on the internet.

Many pilgrimage sites have long histories.

The popularity of pilgrimage is not just a modern phenomenon. Many of the pilgrimages that have been mentioned have long histories of attracting pilgrims.
Santiago de Compostela was one of the most important sites of medieval Christianity and received pilgrims from all over Europe.
in 18th and 19th century Japan pilgrims to the Ise shrines in some years numbered in the millions.

The popularity of pilgrimage sites fluctuated throughout history.

This does not mean that the same pilgrimages have flourished across the ages or that popular pilgrimage sites will always remain so.
Canterbury Cathedral, with its shrine to St Thomas Becket, was a major magnet for pilgrims in the era after Becket’s murder there in 1170. However, competition, notably from Marian shrines such as Walsingham, meant that by the 16th century Canterbury’s income from pilgrims was less than a twentieth of what it had been in the 13th.
while Lourdes’ emergence certainly increased pilgrimage activities in France, it also drew pilgrims away from other French Marian shrines.
The Santiago Camino certainly attracts large numbers of pilgrims nowadays, just as it had previously flourished in the medieval period. In between, however, things were rather different, with pilgrim numbers falling until, by the mid-19th century, it had become virtually moribund before strenuous efforts by church and other authorities helped revive it.
the Shikoku pilgrimage has fluctuated in popularity over the centuries
Shikoku in the late 1940s and who told me that the temples were rundown with virtually no pilgrims. It was not until organized pilgrimage bus tours started to develop in the early 1950s that the pilgrimage underwent a revival leading to the crowds mentioned earlier.

Some pilgrimages died.

Pilgrimages not only wax and wane in popularity; they also die out.
A recent study in the Netherlands identified over 600 pilgrimage sites within this relatively small country—testimony to the ubiquity of pilgrimage—and showed that some 250 were still extant. The others appeared, in effect, to be defunct.
Local research there on the Japanese Inland Sea island of Awaji shows that at different eras various pilgrimage routes have flourished there, but that in so doing they have often displaced other pilgrimages in terms of popularity and caused them to fall into disuse.

The rise of popularity in one pilgrimage site could increase pilgrimages but also draw out people away from another.

When new pilgrimages arise or as particular sites experience rapid growth, they may increase the general number of pilgrims around the world. They may also, however, draw people away from other sites and cause their decline and even demise, for the world of pilgrimage is an arena of fluctuating fortunes, in which large numbers of pilgrims at one site in one era need not mean continued success across the board.

Secular pilgrimages

‘secular’ or ‘nonreligious’ pilgrimages: places that have no official religious affiliation but whose visitors may refer to themselves as pilgrims and who perform actions that resonate with what goes on at places such as Lourdes, Santiago, and Shikoku.
Public memorials associated with death and grief, such as the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, for example, can fall into this category.
Places linked to the worlds of popular culture, especially when linked to celebrity deaths and memorials, may be viewed as sites imbued with special meanings by fans and devotees. Graceland, Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis, USA, is one such place, visited annually by millions, many of whom leave offerings and messages to the ‘King’ at Graceland’s gates and at his grave while viewing their visits there as pilgrimages.

Existing pilgrimage sites could be adopted by emergent traditions.

another aspect of contemporary development: how existing sites may be adopted by newly emergent traditions. These include places such as Glastonbury, in England, and Sedona in the USA—the former historically a Christian pilgrimage site and the latter important in Native American religious culture—both of which have more recently become centres for New Age devotees, who make pilgrimages there while claiming to eschew any formal religious affiliations.

Pilgrimage tourism contribute to the growth and maintenance of pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage is also a major industry, promoted not just by religious authorities to increase faith, but also by commercial concerns such as tourist agencies and transport firms. Such commercial involvement and the infrastructures it provides—from good transport and accommodation facilities to information provided by guidebooks and, nowadays, online services that help pilgrims plan their journeys—are important factors in the growth of pilgrimage.
while pilgrimage may have had a strong devotional element, it also clearly contained tourist elements from early on. It also developed support structures not just to help pilgrims in their enterprise but to enable people along the way and at the places to which pilgrims flocked to benefit materially from the practice.
During the 14th and 15th centuries the Holy Land pilgrimage trade was so beneficial to the Venetian economy that city authorities established a tourist office to aid pilgrims and head off their not-infrequent complaints that might damage the city’s reputation and put off future pilgrims.
To ensure safe travel, to put pilgrims’ minds at rest, and to provide them with their needs such as lodgings and food when travelling or spending time at sites, an infrastructure of services has developed around most pilgrimage centres. This has contributed to the popularity of pilgrimage sites, by publicizing them and making them more readily accessible to greater numbers of people than ever before.

pilgrimage tourism

Sometimes labelled as ‘spiritual tourism’, ‘religious tourism’, or ‘pilgrimage tourism’
the apparent commercialization of pilgrimage and its transformation from a seemingly ‘spiritual’ activity into one centred around markets and tourism.

Commercial motives in pilgrimages have existed throughout history

One should not, however, think that such developments or commercializations are simply products of the modern day any more than one should think that pilgrims were necessarily only interested in spiritual issues in earlier eras.
Contemporary criticisms reiterate much of what has been said about pilgrimage in the past, but the reality is that commerce, entertainment, tourist behaviour, and the ready engagement with them of pilgrims have been elements in the structure of pilgrimage over the ages. They have, indeed, been means through which shrines have been able to sustain themselves economically and through which those who help lodge and support pilgrims are able to make a living. They often also provide pilgrims with diversions that help them deal with the intense emotions of pilgrimages as well as motivating them to travel in the first place.

Examples of commercial motives in pilgrimage from history

Complaints about corruption and commercialism, the clusters of souvenir shops around shrines, and the behaviour of visitors, who appear to be little more than tourists, reverberate across history.
In medieval times, Christian pilgrims and priests alike grumbled about exploitation and mercenary behaviour by the merchants who transported them to the Christian Holy Land, while religious authorities often spoke disdainfully about the unruly behaviour of pilgrims.
Pilgrims to Ise in 18th and 19th century Japan were well known for their readiness to make use of the town’s many bars, brothels, and souvenir shops; indeed, a satirical poem of the era even suggested that it was these activities, rather than worshipping at the shrines, that primarily motivated pilgrims.
From its early days the attractions of Lourdes included not just its grotto and healing stories, but the shops, entertainment facilities, and modern sights that grew in the town. From the outset, too, complaints were levelled at the commercialism and cheap souvenirs of Lourdes.

In many places pilgrimage was the only means of travel in the past.

In earlier eras, indeed, pilgrimage was often the only means whereby people could travel at all.
In feudal societies, such as those of medieval Europe or Japan, mobility was greatly restricted and the idea of travel for its own sake, going on holiday, and simply getting away temporarily from one’s home environment were not in themselves socially recognized activities.
Pilgrimage often was the only legitimate reason that could be given for travelling
people, in order to see new places and escape from the restrictions of their local environment, in effect had to become pilgrims.
The Japanese government regime from the 17th to 19th centuries restricted travel severely, but, fearful of offending the gods, they allowed people to travel when it was for religious purposes. That in turn encouraged would-be travellers to portray themselves as pilgrims.

The earliest package tours were pilgrimages.

The origins of the tourist trade are closely associated with pilgrimage, for it is generally considered that the earliest package tours were developed in the medieval era, when overland pilgrimage routes to the Christian Holy Land had become fraught with danger.
By the late 13th century few made such overland journeys. They did, however, have alternative means of getting there—Venetian merchants, who controlled the Mediterranean sea-lanes and had good commercial relations with Middle Eastern authorities, offered all-inclusive, return-trip tours from their city-state to the Holy Land, with guided tours around the sites and sometimes with sightseeing stops in Egypt as well.

Medieval pilgrimage package tours in Japan

In Japan, pilgrimage package tours can be found from the medieval period, while by the 17th century a flourishing tourist-style industry had developed around prominent centres such as Ise, whose guides travelled around the country recruiting pilgrims, bringing them to the shrines, and providing them with lodgings and access to shrine rituals.
Such services were the precursor of modern tourist package tours, a point evident also in the role of the sendatsu or pilgrimage guide. The term means ‘someone who stands/goes in front of’ and hence guides a pilgrimage group, a role continued to this day both in Japanese pilgrimage contexts and in the spectacle of Japanese tour parties led by guides carrying flags.

Pilgrimage tourism made pilgrimages more accessible.

They have made pilgrimage more accessible to greater numbers of people, and especially to segments of society that were far less well represented in the pilgrimage world in earlier ages.
The vast majority of Shikoku pilgrims prior to the 20th century, for example, were young and male; very few were elderly or female, for the lengthy route required several weeks of walking in difficult terrain with few facilities, and was difficult for all but the hardiest or for the most desperate.
Nowadays, the advent of bus tours and better facilities has made pilgrimage accessible to a far wider number of people, and now not only do women outnumber men, but those over sixty form the largest single group of pilgrims.

Pilgrimages have common patterns.

there is a readily discernible coherence and commonality across traditions.
there is enough common ground across the spectrum for us to talk of pilgrimage in universal terms, as a common human phenomenon spanning cultures, religions, and continents.
When I look at pilgrims in Japan, I note their similarities to others elsewhere—whether in donning particular clothing to mark them out as pilgrims, as do Muslims during the hajj or pilgrims who, on the Santiago Camino, wear the scallop shell sign of St James, or in the acts of prayer they perform or the benefits they might seek from their pilgrimages.
After having performed many pilgrimages in Japan, some (including Shikoku) many dozens of times, they branched out by visiting Buddhist pilgrimage sites in China and then went on a pilgrimage to Buddhist sites in India. Thereafter they went to European Christian sites such as Lourdes and Assisi, viewing their visits there as pilgrimages because, they told me, while they were not Christians, they were pilgrims. Even though they knew nothing of the languages or the cultures they were visiting, they had not felt out of place; they were in the familiar and recognizable world of pilgrimage.

Literature notes

Chapter 1