Walking Meditation

Walking occupies a special role within Eastern philosophical thought and daily practice. Throughout Asia, sages and monks have sauntered the countryside for centuries in search of enlightenment. Walking is even accorded a place as one of the “Four Dignities” (key modes of being and integral bodily postures) in China, along with standing, sitting and lying.

Buddhist classics such as the Dhammapada—which literally means the dharma (truth or law) of the foot, path or step—regularly celebrate the virtues of walking as a method and living metaphor for how to conduct one’s life. The work espouses, in particular, the merits of an “Eight-fold Path” for responding to the recurring phenomenon of human anxiety and pain (dukkha). “Walking upon this path you will make an end of suffering,” it declares. 

This embodied language is further extended: “If you find an intelligent companion
 who will walk with you,
 who lives wisely, soberly, overcoming all dangers,
 walk with that person in joy and thoughtfulness.” While adhering to the imagery of a path, the Dhammapada advocates an ethics of both vigilance and diligence: “Good people walk on regardless of what happens to them.”

The most popular Taoist book, Tao Te Ching, similarly counsels “the way” as a route through life that is physically and metaphysically walked. We read, for example, “Gladly then the Way receives/Those who choose to walk in it,” though we also encounter a warning that movement on foot is not always such a straightforward or linear enterprise: “He who tiptoes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.” Still, the Chinese character for the elusive and mysterious Tao 道 consists of two parts—one referring to the human head and the other to walking—thereby connoting a genuine path or journey through the inhabited world. “A person's heart and mind are in chaos,” a Taoist text reminds us. “Concentration on one thing makes the mind pure.
 If one aspires to reach the Tao, 
one should practice walking in a circle.”
  

Within Zen Buddhism, koans—riddling remarks put to practitioners—might inquire, “What is Zen?,” and tack on paradoxical replies such as “Walk on” or “Walk without feet,” in an attempt to propel one towards satori, a sudden insight into the nature of things. At the entrance to many Zen monasteries, too, one often finds a sign with the words, “Watch your step.”  This message, of course, implies one should take care as one walks, but in another sense it advises us to be forever mindful or watchful as we go about our everyday lives. Thus, when a 14^th century monk asked his teacher, “What is the essence of Zen,” the Master responded, “Watch your step.”

Through walking practices, one might even be “carried away” to the point where the goer (doer) passes completely into the going (doing). The walker disappears—is gone, “oned”—with the unfolding or ever-proliferating walkway. During the course of a walk in which one is fully present with the path being followed—the underlying earth, the ambient air, the shifting sounds, and emerging scents—one forgets and hence loses one’s shallow sense of “self,” which dissolves into the progressive movement.

Dogen, the 13^th century Zen Buddhist, even goes as far as to speak of mountains “constantly walking” in his sutras, opening up the possibility that nonhuman and inanimate entities exist, change and move (e.g., fall apart or relocate) in comparable manners to we humans. When we, in turn, walk like a mountain—ying-ing our yang, so to speak—we walk without walking. That is, we move meditatively, with openness and without a trace of self-importance.  In this way, walking grows into a robust trope and metaphor that bears, transfers, and carries practical thought, helping in the process to disclose and communicate the surrounding world to us in its particularity and beauty.  Movement, in short, generates meaning; it gives rise to spatial and temporal significance. 

More directly, there exists kinhin 経行 or walking 

meditation, a Buddhist practice that occurs between periods of zazen 

or seated meditation.  In Japanese, kinhin is formed of two 

characters, one (経) that means “classical works” or “religious 

teachings” and the other (行) that means “walk”.  During this practice, 

individuals walk in clockwise fashion very slowly and deliberately while 

maintaining their hands in shashu (one hand held as a fist and the other 

covering the fist). Movement typically commences with the ringing of a 

bell two times (kinhinsho). As one proceeds, a step is taken after each 

full breath. The walking ends when the bell is rung once (chukaisho). 

For those wishing to try it, here is a helpful video about kinhin:

http://vimeo.com/41058322

An aim of kinhin is to improve mindful awareness of one’s actions and undertakings. Meditative walking provides an appropriate means to exercise or achieve such mindfulness because movement on foot is so habitual, ordinary, and routine to human experience. Walking is commonly an unconscious or pre-reflective activity, and to make it the object of conscious, deliberate and willful attention provides an opportunity for insight and learning. One might conceivably even experiment with this form of ambulation in more exceptional conditions that pose greater mental and physical challenges for maintaining focused concentration, such as walking in heavy rain, walking on ice, or walking with one’s eyes closed. I’ve engaged in kinhin on a number of occasions and found it to be a constructive counterbalance to protracted periods of reflection in a seated position. It also resonates with those persons who enjoy bodily motion or who may be unable or unwilling to sit for a lengthy time.

As Tich Nhat Hanh writes in Resting in the River, "Walking meditation meansto enjoy walking without any intention to arrive. We don't need to arrive anywhere.  We just walk. We enjoy walking. That means walking is already stopping, and that needs some training.  Usually in our daily life we walk because we want to go somewhere. Walking is only a means to an end, and that is why we do not enjoy every step we take . . . So this is a kind of revolution in walking. You allow yourself to enjoy every step you take.”

In the video below, a monk walks serenely at a snail’s pace through the crowded streets of an Asian city.  There is a hubbub of activity all around him. He lifts one foot and places it ever so slowly in front of the other.  He is ringing a small bell.  Our attention is halted, arrested. Perhaps we are torn for a moment from the frenzy of our own lives.  Perhaps we slow down as well and move a little more meditatively or mindfully. As a Chinese proverb puts it, “One step at a time is good walking.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKav_qlVT8

Photos: (i) Man walking in Khajuraho, India (ii) Walking path, Woodlands Cemetery in West Philly (iii) Hindu pilgrims in Benares (Varanasi), India (iv) Walking within a circle, St. Petersburg, Florida  (v) Entering Jain temple, India(vi) Animal tracks, Penn State Brandywine campus  (vii) Woman carrying food, Delhi, India (viii) foot and footprint, Udaipur, India.

Music and Movement

Put some rhythm in your sidewalk stride: D | E F | G | A | B C | D | E F | G | A | B C | D .

There is music in your bodily movement.

(Photo: Washington Square Park, NYC)

Circling the stupa

Today, I recalled a Buddhist monk whom I watched in Sarnath, India—birthplace of this perennial philosophy—circling the oldest and one of the most famous stupas (स्तूप), and earthen relics, on foot. I wondered if he has since paused the churning wheel of time or stayed the cycling of samsara (संसार) to seize a fugitive moment of satori (संस्कृत), an "aha" or "eureka" in the otherwise grinding momentum of the day. Perhaps that occurred when his sandal strap snapped or his belly called out for a vegetable samosa. Who knows. Here he is in his elegant robe and perfect posture. Be sure to greet him if he passes by your local 7/11 or Walmart or when you spot him walking along the highway. Chances are, though, that he might be sporting longer hair, carrying a backpack, or bumming a few coins or a smoke. Sages and monks and wise spirits seem to arrive in many guises.

Side-walking

Like all forms of travel and transit, walking involves a methodos, a way through the world and thus a choice of routes in the environment. There are classic distinctions that can be made in the basic elements of any town or city, and five in particular have been identified by urban thinkers and planners: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Paths are channels along which people move, whether potentially, habitually or sporadically, and where they lack identity or are easily mistaken for one another, the entire image of a place can be called into question. Sidewalks are one of the most prevalent manifestations of the path. As the word itself suggests, side-walks are in one sense the exteriors and margins of the roads, the “suburbs” (so to speak) above-the-curbs of the streets. In another sense, they are the thresholds of storefronts, houses and parks that they ring, directing people to their destinations.

Sidewalks hold a vital place in our towns and cities, literally providing a platform for public life and an artery for regular citizen interaction. Their absence in many suburbs is a sign not only of the decline of walking but of the transformations that occur in exurbia, the domain outside the city landscape. Sidewalks, which are designated legally as public spaces, offer needed transitional realms between the intimacy of the home or the privacy afforded by the porch on the one hand and the frenzy of traffic or the anonymity of the streets on the other hand.

Good sidewalks can be evaluated in terms of their integration into the communities of which

they are part. In fact, it is likely that the peace of a neighborhood is not kept primarily by the police or by local laws that might be promulgated and enforced. Rather, as urban critic Jane Jacobs has argued, it is maintained “by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves [such that] a well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted street is apt to be unsafe.” Following the work of urban sociologists and community planners, there seem to be a number of criteria that can be adduced and defended with regard to developing and maintaining places for walking.

First, sidewalks should be continuous and uninterrupted as far as this is possible in order to ensure the free movement of pedestrians. From the vantage point of local businesses, a regular pedestrian flow irrigates and nourishes the city and town centers and sites of enterprise. In Europe, a positive result of meeting this requirement is that “pedestrianized” areas frequently retain the strongest local economies. In this sense, it might said that where the sidewalk ends, so too ceases the community.

Secondly, sidewalks need to be both clearly defined and safe from the threat of encroachment by cars and other vehicles, which must be repeatedly reminded that they share the world with walkers. According to federal sources, vehicle accidents involving pedestrians are twice as likely to occur in locations without sidewalks or appropriate pathways.

Thirdly, sidewalks, moreover, must provide easy access to the destinations that pedestrians seek. The organization of walkways prior to an understanding of the places where people actually do walk or need to go can lead to problems. This dilemma is evident in parks, on college campuses and other urban locations where sidewalks are often set up in advance of walking patterns, creating a criss-crossing and forking system of used, semi-used and unused paths that can be visually objectionable and practically unmanageable.

Fourthly, sidewalks should have a rhythm that enhances, facilitates and encourages walking and that is related aesthetically to the landscape and surrounding objects and buildings. This requirement suggests that walking may possess a musical dimension (more on this later) that is both spatial and temporal, one that is orchestrated and “played” as one is drawn by the progression of organic and inorganic “notes,” architectural “scores” and visual “riffs” one encounters in the language of the landscape: the arrangement, repetition or syncopation of doors and fences, rows of trees and parking meters, clusters of benches, lines of windows, columns and telephone polls, planters and flower boxes, roof tops and even the regular cracks in the pavement. As we walk, we are propelled forward—as in a song—through expectation and anticipation and toward realization of another moment (place) that is intimately bound with and conveyed by preceding instants (locales).

As urban theorist Mike Greenberg suggests, “If the stride, roughly twenty-five to thirty inches for most adults, is the basic pulse of the pedestrian’s encounter with the city—the beat of the music of the street—then it seems reasonable to propose that the next level of grouping might comprise events that occur at some small multiple of strides, two or three, or at most four.” To this advice we may add a complicating perceptual twist: “A real building is in a state of flux as the people who see and use it are themselves in motion. As one walks along the street, buildings advance and recede, blanch and blush, spin on their toes and play hide-and-seek, reveal their seductive ankles or their proud heads.”

Finally, sidewalks should be built to accommodate effectively the many necessary public objects that are part of daily urban and suburban life such as mailboxes, newspaper boxes, benches, utility poles and bus shelters. This demand, of course, seems to mean that sidewalks should generally be wide-walks (we might say) so that the walker is not further marginalized in the urban environment.

An MIT study—the first of its kind—in which researchers recorded the impressions and later tested the memories of twenty-seven people as they walked one by one around several blocks in Boston (along Boylston Street, through an alley, onto Newbury Street and into the Public Garden) provides some empirical information on the perceptions and attitudes of pedestrians in an urban environment. Spatial form—particularly spatially dominant buildings and open areas (such as a park)—is a major impression that registers on and remains with most pedestrians, followed by the quality and characteristics of the sidewalk or city “floor” and then the details or content of the fronts of stores. (Few walkers commented on the sky, colors, wall materials and textures, upper floor fascades, overhead wires or doorways.)

The spaces best recalled by walkers seem to be those that are either defined clearly or that represent breaks in an overall continuity. Sixteen of the twenty-seven participants in the study remarked on the very accommodating width of the Boylston sidewalk, including its state of repair or occasional rough surfaces, which can jar one out of a regular rhythm. The experimental pedestrians were very conscious, too, of “visual clamor” and multiple street signs, and there was a widespread sense of the dramatic differences between the back alley occupations of seamstresses, for example, and the well-dressed shoppers on Newbury Street, indicating perhaps a sense of class distinctions that are visible in a short and relatively average urban walk. The walkers showed as well some awareness of and concern with the presence or relative absence of trees and revealed pleasurable feelings upon entering the green space of the Public Gardens (in contrast with a general distaste for the alley and an annoyance with auto traffic, though only once they had to cross it).

More generally, the research indicates how walkers are constantly searching for or injecting order into their surroundings so as to make sense of their disparate impressions and to join their perceptions into a coherent picture. To this end, many walkers tend to divide a walk into distinct regions—in this study three in number—and whereas relative newcomers to an urban landscape are not able to discover between-spaces and places, the more experienced native is able to find similarities (though often imagined) between buildings, blocks, streets and neighborhoods.

More on sidewalks soon.

unfolding the phenomenon

What is it to walk? This may be a sensible place to start. While I cannot undertake a detailed description (or close phenomenology) here, a few very general points can be made about the activity:

(a) Walking involves lifting and propelling. The body is taken up and thrust forward by its own energy and ongoing momentum.

(b) Walking entails rolling. From the heels to the ball and toes of the foot, sending us forward (bodily) but also backwards (to the heel) again. In fact, the word “walk” harks back in Old English to “wealcan,” to roll, and “wealcian,” to roll up.

(c) Thus, there is a circularity at work in the walk. This aspect is one that we can grasp as well when pedaling a bicycle, an action that resembles ambulation in certain respects.

(d) Walking involves carrying and self-conveyance. It is, in other words, a form of self-transport. Walking carries us to distant people and places, making them near. But we are also “carried away” in two other corporeal ways: first, by the sights, sounds and smells that we encounter and that direct us toward and through them. The elements in the atmosphere, for example, or the mood—as in the weather or a song—frequently bear and guide us. Secondly, we are carried by the places we walk and that hold us. We might note that the term “place” relates to “plat” (meaning broad or flat, as in “Plato,” who himself possessed broad shoulders and could certainly hold his own). That is, we are supported by the paths, trails or markings we follow in the wild or the side-walks, alleys, and promenades we plod in the city.

(e) Walking generates bodily rhythms and relies on repetition. As we shall see, this is a source of the musical aspects of the practice, too.

(f) Walking can be described as re-frequented falling. We teeter or lurch forward and then catch and collect ourselves before losing complete balance. Watch toddlers and older folks when they walk. They are ever in danger of falling.

(g) Through walking, we bring that which is far-away into the “near-sphere”. In other words, we take a “there” and bring it “here”. In the process, walking helps to constitute, connect and commemorate geographical places.

(h) There is often a precariousness and vulnerability to the act of walking. We are exposed not only to the elements and to sounds or sights around us but to vehicles and potentially other “predators”.

More to follow . . .

How walkable is your neighborhood?

Here is a simple way to find out how walkable your neighborhood or community might be.

Just type your address into walkscore.com and check out the results.

While there are some variables it doesn't (or can't) measure, it is a helpful tool if you are traveling somewhere new, looking to move, or just want to learn more about your immediate surroundings. Here is the web link:

http://www.walkscore.com/

I hope to post more regularly, especially since I will be on sabbatical in the coming year and working on my book on walking.

First Steps . . .

Greetings.

This is a new blog on human ambulation—that is, walking.

I plan to explore this most ordinary but extremely revealing activity in relation to the physical landscape, aesthetics and art, politics, pedestrian practices, the wilderness, urban design, the body, environmental issues, philosophical thought and literature, among numerous other areas.

I hope to focus, too, on sauntering, strutting and strolling in Philadelphia, where presently I live. In the process, I would like to share some of my own stories and experiences from the world of walking. I love to walk and have published a few articles on the subject. I'm also currently writing a book on ambulation and motility, so it seemed like a natural progression to blog about it as well.

Entries will follow soon. Please stayed tuned. Thanks for checking in. And feel free to offer comments, suggestions and other feedback as the blog unfolds.