On the road in India
Photo by author

When I was a kid, we were often told that experiences like eating spinach and cleaning our rooms would “build character.” I went to India a second time for much the same reason; I wanted to be tested in ways my American life wasn’t testing me.

Of course, I put it in different terms, but it was much the same. The Four Protections taught by Shakyamuni Buddha include “recollecting the loathsomeness of the body,” a troubling idea. Certainly in India I observed much that could be called loathsome; corpses floating in the Ganges, sidewalks yellowed with urine and spittle, emaciated beggars. I’d think of American life, the clean structures that are designed to make conditions pleasant for the body. We can keep ourselves cool in the summer and warm in the winter, make any food saltier or sweeter based on what our bodies prefer, keep ourselves clean and smelling pleasant. And it all adds up to a culture that’s, well, “loathsome” isn’t the word I’d use for it, but perhaps banal, unsatisfying.

I told my brother Jeremy about this and he said, “You know, our grandfather rode a horse to school.” A different time in American history would be a lot more efficient at building character.

But what was my brother really implying about the different time our grandparents lived in? Our grandfather rode his horse because he had to, and that implies complications in life that we might not even think about. His vehicle needed to be fed and watered and shod, its mane brushed and its saddle-blanket cleaned. It required maintenance, even on the days he didn’t need it.

If you wanted to try riding a horse daily, you could, as a sort of personal experiment or challenge. But even if you did, you would still have the knowledge that you could back out of the challenge and the only consequence would be your own disappointment.

We’ve invented a term for this — “Roughing It.” Actually, that term was invented by Mark Twain for a book of travel essays about the American West, and it’s something lots of Americans aspire to. The website Stuff White People Like has a section on camping white-style. “As with everything in white culture,” the page kindly informs you, “the more simple it appears the more expensive it actually is.”

We’re driven by a deep inward fear that our civilized life has made us soft. It hasn’t built character. Maybe it’s the nagging doubt that we’re not entitled to the privileges and comforts that come with a middle-class existence. Or a test, a kind of experiment that will prove our inherent moral character and strength of will. We sometimes talk about it in inflated terms, as if it’s a “trial by fire” or “wandering in the wilderness” rather than taking a minivan to a campground for a weekend.

But because the nature of “roughing it” puts us on a different grid, one populated by other “it-roughers,” you’ll inevitably meet people who are better at it than you are. You’ve chosen a level of discomfort to endure, but you’ve probably brought something with you that makes it a little easier, and you’ll hear how much more rewarding and awesome it is to deny yourself these comforts and conveniences.

In planning a trip to India, entering the culture of adventure travel, you’re bound to encounter people who play a game of one-up extreme adventure. “You rode from Jaipur to Lucknow on a bicycle? That’s cool. It reminds me of the time I walked from Amritsar to Darjeeling wearing only one shoe.” The India travel forums online show that even first-timers aim for the hardcore. “I want to pack light, like super-light, like go with only the clothes on my back. Think I can do it?”

Maybe I’m exaggerating, and certainly in my own travels I make concessions for my own wimpiness. And yet I’m not immune to that impulse. I made a point in my second India trip to take a trip in every class of India Railways car. From the spacious cabins of First Class Air Conditioned to the hard benches of Second Sitting, I decided I would try them all. In some ways, this came about in the same way as the hardcore trials that veteran travelers brag about. I thought I’d be a better person through those legs of the trip that brought on the pain.

I tell myself it’s more of a Middle Path, seeing both sides of travel, but even that’s hyperbole. The Buddha’s Middle Path came to him after years of self-starvation and deprivation. Even after the Buddha realized happiness didn’t come from self-punishment, he still traveled from Vulture Peak to Varanasi on foot. Compared to that, making the trip on a hot, crowded train car with hard seats still counts as an amenity, a modern convenience.

In some ways, turning off the conveniences, or at least turning them down, connects us to the lifestyle of other times and places. We might hope to emerge with a better understanding of the lifestyle of those people who can’t afford these amenities, or a better understanding of pre-industrial history. Or we might feel renewed appreciation for the lifestyle we return to.

But maybe these hobbies actually further the divide between the affluent and the dispossessed. Millions of people (according to some estimates, over one billion) live in shanty towns and tent cities. I imagine it would be unwise to walk into a tent city and tell its residents, “I know how you feel — every summer I spend Memorial Day weekend sleeping in a tent, and it’s so difficult!”

It takes a certain kind of affluence to pursue deprivation as an entertaining pastime. It’s the luxury of masochism. You see it in the “trustafarians,” those young people who get significant funding from their affluent parents, but choose to cultivate an image of bohemian poverty. In one way, perhaps it’s liberating — rather than buying sensible shoes so that you can get a job so that you can afford more sensible shoes, you just let yourself be. But if you take it as a sign of authenticity or cachet, if you think you’ve shown greater moral character by proving that you can go on a four-week trip with only one change of clothes, it’s not.

It’s a little ironic that the “drop-out” culture of the 1960s and after took much of its inspiration from Indian spiritual leaders. Kerouac spoke of “Dharma Bums,” and a wacky freespirited 1990s sitcom character appeared in Dharma and Greg as a foil to her predictable, bourgeois husband. For Hindu laypeople, there’s a different sense of “dharma”; it means a person fulfills the duty of their birth. To fulfill one’s dharma, in this view, one must be a participant in society. Somehow, the heart of the hippie view of “dharma” was that you don’t have to grow up, you don’t have to follow your parents’ path, spend your life earning a salary, staying married to one person of the appropriate sex and similar socioeconomic status and working your way toward the suburban dream.

The problem with the hippie mindset, from a Zen perspective, is it swaps one kind of egotism for another. A person realizes they don’t have to be bound to the master of suburban standards, but then they start chasing a fantasy of “finding myself,” obeying whims and impulses as the standard of living. In working hard to prove that I’m not a square, I have to work really hard to prove that I am hip. It replaces one kind of consumerism with another. Instead of buying a good experience, I try to prove that a really bad experience is what I want, because I’m that hardcore.

Neither comfort, nor the denial of comfort, is liberating, and neither one really builds character. Both of them can drive you crazy. You reach a point where proving you’re one type of person or another becomes unmanageable, and if you don’t have the ground of equanimity, you end up lost.

Going with anti-comfort can be intriguing and enlightening. It can make you question how much you need the amenities you live with at home. I wouldn’t suggest stopping it — that is, if you can see it for what it is and nothing more. You slept under the stars. Don’t let it go to your head.

Bija Andrew Wright
Bija Andrew Wright is a Zen Buddhist teacher who studied under P'arang Geri Larkin at Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple in Detroit. He now lives in the Detroit suburbs with his partner, Steve. You can find him online at ZenBija.com or Twitter.

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