CHAPTER VIII 



HOLIDAYS AND PILGRIMAGES 



IT is one of the many conventional beliefs of the industrial 

 age, with its railways, steamers and telegraphs of yesterday, 

 its aeroplane routes for to-morrow, that abundant and 

 extended travel, still more world-commerce, are essentially 

 modern affairs, and that our forefathers, in any and every 

 land, were practically all quiet stay-at-home people, knowing 

 little beyond their self-sustaining village or their country 

 town. But, as we look into the past, this too simple idea 

 becomes shaken. Even in the early stone age we find 

 flints unmistakably brought from afar ; and in this or 

 that museum of Western Europe one may see a well-wrought 

 neolithic jade, dug up in its own neighbourhood, which 

 cannot have had a nearer origin than the Kuen Lun 

 mountains in Central Asia. So the shell ornaments, 

 frequently found in early inland burials, have been brought 

 from shores often far distant. Later, again, the amber of 

 the East Prussian shores is found in the excavations of 

 Babylon. That ships of Solomon brought gold from its 

 old workings in South Africa is a familiar suggestion, and 

 likely enough ; and so on over the world. And though to 

 our modern age of commerce and war, it has been the ancient 

 weapon and the buried treasure which have most attracted 

 attention, the religious past has also been steadily advancing 

 its claims to what we now call internationalism. Of the 

 wide and rapid extension of Buddhism throughout India 

 and far beyond, and with return pilgrimages accordingly, we 



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