Zuogong — National Highway 318
On the fourth day, we joined the 318.
The highway is famous for its scenery — snow peaks, high passes, the roof of the world laid out in every direction. Above 4,000 meters, the altitude markers stop meaning much. There are too many passes to count. You stop counting.
What I could not stop watching were the pilgrims.
They move along the edge of the road, unhurried and absolute. Tibetan Buddhists on their way to somewhere sacred — Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple, Tashilhunpo, Samye, Mount Kailash, Yamdrok Lake. The list of holy destinations in Tibet is long. The devotion required to reach any of them is longer.
Some pilgrims walk. Others have chosen something harder.
They prostrate with every step. One full body length at a time — hands pressed together overhead, then lowered to the forehead, the throat, the chest, then the entire body laid flat against the ground. They rise. They take one step forward to where their hands touched the earth. They prostrate again. On clean asphalt. In mud. Through puddles. It does not matter what is on the ground. They go down anyway.
Our car passed them in seconds. I could not photograph the prostrations themselves — we were moving too fast, and some things should not be reduced to a passing shot from a window. What I did photograph were the pilgrims walking upright along the roadside, returning to collect their supplies. They carry their own food. They do not stay in guesthouses. After prostrating a section of road, they walk back to retrieve what they left behind, then begin again.
I have been thinking about a woman I saw ten years ago, outside Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.
She was elderly. A Tibetan grandmother. She was donating one million yuan in cash to the temple.
Someone asked her why.
She said: I don't need the money. I give it, and my sins are redeemed. Then I go home and tend my cattle and sheep.
At the time, I could not understand it. A million yuan. A lifetime of savings, perhaps. Given away without hesitation, without ceremony, without expecting anything in return except the clearing of a spiritual debt she alone could feel.
I think I understand it better now, watching these pilgrims on the 318.
They are not suffering. They are paying a price they have chosen, for something they believe is worth more than comfort. The logic is not foreign — it is simply applied to a different currency.
The guqin sat in the back. The passes came and went. The pilgrims kept moving, one body length at a time, toward whatever they were walking to.
I suddenly thought: the path of learning the guqin is no different from prostrating on this road.
A long road, without end. Every day of practice, every essay written, every time you explain to a stranger what this instrument is — each one is a prostration, a rising, a single step forward.
The pilgrims' destination is a temple, a sacred mountain, a holy lake.
What is the destination for those who play the guqin?
Not fame. Not wealth. It is to let more people know the guqin, hear the guqin, pick up the guqin. To let this instrument — silent for three thousand years — speak again beneath more hands.
This, too, is a pilgrimage.
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