Marco declares that he himself “carried some of this earth to Venice with him and healed many with it.” Marco the merchant did not assume the mantle of healer naturally. While it is entirely possible that he returned to Venice with a sample of the magical soil, there are no reports of his employing it to cure others, nor was it listed among his effects. More likely, his amanuensis Rustichello or a pious translator of the manuscript added this flourish to portray Marco as a man of faith.
HE WAS, IN FACT, BECOMING more spiritually inclined. No longer did Marco Polo dismiss the hundreds, and then thousands, of images of Buddha he encountered—wooden statues, stone carvings, illustrations—as idols. Now he plunged into the history of this singular figure in an attempt to fathom the Buddha’s mysterious appeal.
The first stirrings of Buddhist sympathies in Marco may have come from his contact with the Mongols, who were succumbing to Buddhism in ever-increasing numbers. They had originally encountered it from their neighbors to the west, the Uighurs, but the Uighurs’ version of Buddhism issued not from India but from Tibet. Steeped in magic rituals, this form spread east along the Silk Road to Cambulac and reached Kublai Khan, who endorsed it, as he did the other major belief systems in his empire. In India, Marco encountered a more ancient form of Buddhism, and he found it intoxicating. Ever the chameleon, he altered his persona once more: Marco the Mongol became Marco the Buddhist.
MARCO SET HIMSELF the task of educating his Western audience about the Buddha’s significance. The traveler’s portrayal of his encounter with Buddha conveyed a suggestion of destiny, as if Marco had come all this distance to meet the great teacher who would bestow a sense of purpose and clarity upon his wayfaring. The Buddha’s coming of age resembled Marco’s, and the Venetian merchant naturally identified with the spiritual journey of the Indian sage. Marco offered an account of the Buddha’s life that was drastically simplified, yet heartfelt rather than dismissive or condescending. He provided his earliest audiences with their first exposure to the Buddha and the Buddhist mystique.
Marco called the Buddha by an unusual name: Sagamoni Burcan, “the Divine Buddha.” The first part is his transcription of S’akyamouni, a Sanscrit term meaning “the religious saint of the royal family of S’akya.” The second part comes from a Mongol term, burkhan, meaning “god,” “divine being,” or “saint.”
“This Sagamoni was the first man to whose name idols were made,” Marco explains, proceeding to describe him as “the most holy and best man who ever was among them.”
Marco continues: “He was the son of a great king, both rich and powerful. And this his son was of so good life that he did not wish to hear any worldly thing, nor did he wish to be king. And when his father saw his son did not wish to be king…he was [in] very great vexation at it. He offered him a very great offering, for he told him that he would crown him king of the kingdom and he should be lord of it at his pleasure.
“His son indeed said that he wanted nothing. And when his father saw that he did not wish to rule in any way in the world, he had so great vexation in it that he nearly died of grief. It was no wonder, because he had no more sons than this one, nor had he any to whom he should leave the kingdom after his death. The king after deep thought…made him move into a very beautiful palace and gave him thirty thousand very beautiful and winning maidens to serve him, and commanded them to play with him all day and all night, promising the one who would be first to induce him to lie with her that she would be his wife and queen.”
The maidens did as ordered. They played, danced, and sang. They “served him at table and made him company all day.” And still the son refused to be moved to “any act of self-indulgence” and continued to lead a virtuous life and retain his singular innocence. “I tell you,” Marco says, “that he was so delicate a young man that he had never gone out of the palace of his father in his youth nor had ever seen a dead man nor any other who was not sound in his limbs, for the father let no old and no decrepit man go before him.” That state of innocence could not endure.
“Now it happened that this young man, having leave of his father to go out with a very fine company, was riding one day along the road through the city and then he saw a dead man whom they were carrying to bury, and he had many people following. He became all dismayed at it. So he asked immediately of those who were with him what thing it was, and they told him it was a dead man.
“‘What?’ said the son of the king. ‘Do all men die?’
“‘Yes, truly,’ they said.
“Then the young man said nothing and rode on very thoughtful. After this, he had not ridden far before he found a very old man bent down with age who could not walk and had no teeth in [his] mouth, but had lost them all through great old age…. The youth said, ‘How from youths do they become old and bent like this?’ To whom the servants answered, ‘Sir, all those who live long in this world must become old like this man and then die.’ And then, when the son of the king had well understood about the dead and about the old, he went back to his palace frightened and all astonished.”
Marco recounts this story with more conviction and precision than he brought to other spiritual episodes. Of all the legends he heard during his travels, the story of the young son’s response to the death and decay of the world around him had the greatest resonance. He continues: “He went off to the mountains very great and out of the way seeking still the rough and wildest places and stayed there all the days of his life very uprightly and chastely, and led a hard life, living on roots and herbs and wild fruits and made very great abstinence, just as if he had been a Christian.”
For Marco, this account of the privileged young son’s life marked the point of contact between East and West, between the Christian faith and the Buddhist worldview. More than that, it prompted him to dare to elevate the central Buddhist system to the same level as Christianity, as heretical as that idea would seem in Venice. Nevertheless, he hammers the point home: “For truly, if he had been Christian he would have been a great saint with our Lord Jesus Christ for the good life and pure that he led.”
Marco pauses, and then brings the story to its conclusion: “When this son of the king died, he was carried to the king, his father. When he saw him dead, whom he loved more than himself, there was no need to ask if he has vexation and grief; he almost went out of his senses. He made great mourning, with bitter lamentation of all the people. Then he had an image made in his likeness all of gold and precious stones and made it honored by those of the land with the greatest reverence and worshipped as their god.”
A change in the narrative’s pitch signals that although Marco was willing to embrace the Buddha, he remained skeptical concerning the doctrine of reincarnation: “They said that he was God, and they say it still, and also that he was dead for eighty-four times; for they say that when he died the first time that he became a man, and then he revived and became an ox, and revived and became a horse, and thence an ass, and so they say that he died eighty-four times, and every time they say that he became an animal, either a dog or other thing, but at the eighty-fourth time they say he died and became a god; and him the idolaters hold for the best god and for the greatest that they have.”
MARCO’S VERSION of Buddhism was heavily influenced by the Mongol interpretation of the Buddha as a potent source of magic. But Marco also put a personal slant on the Buddhist traditions he encountered in India, seeking both an idealized father figure who would not abandon him as his own father had done years before, and a cynosure who transcended the carnality and mortality of Kublai Khan. Ever elusive, the Buddha filled this exalted role, and appreciation of Buddhist precepts liberated Marco from his past.
In the realm of the Buddha, nothing was shocking or blasphemous—a change in perspective that marked the first revolution in Marco’s consciousness since his illness in the poppy fields of Afghanistan. This time, his enlightenment was entirely natural, yet bewildering. He verges on confessing that, for once, language is inadequate to explain his expansio
n of consciousness. In India, his powers of description lag behind his experience. No longer does he relive his adventures for the benefit of his readers, performing the task of imagining for them. Instead, he offers sketches for an uncompleted canvas. He seems to be soul-searching and thinking aloud rather than re-creating his experiences for one and all. All the glorious battles and alluring concubines on which he had lavished attention fade in significance before the spiritual journey unfolding before him and his newest, and greatest, discovery: himself.
IN HIS ACCOUNT of Ceylon, Marco had referred in passing to a steep, inaccessible mountain at whose peak stood a “monument” to Adam, or so he had heard from both Christians and Muslims. But after paying lip service to this traditional interpretation, he immediately moved on to the Buddhists’ interpretation of the “sepulcher.” No matter who was commemorated in this remote location, all faiths agreed that it consisted of the “teeth and the hairs and the bowl”—that is, the food bowl—of a venerable figure. Marco carefully noted that he did not agree with those who insisted Adam’s remains would be found there, “for our scripture of the holy Church says that he is in another part of the world. The decision of this I wish to leave to others.”
In 1281, Kublai Khan learned from Muslims who had visited this mountaintop that the remains of Adam could be found there. “He says therefore to himself that it is necessary for him to have the teeth and the bowl and the hair.” This wish, no matter how unrealistic, was in keeping with Kublai Khan in his dotage. As he did on many other occasions, “he sent an embassy to the king of the island of Ceylon to ask for these things.” It was just the kind of expedition that Marco himself might have been selected to join, if at that point he had not been maneuvering to go home, and he describes it with an insider’s appreciation.
Three years later, the emissaries reached their quarry. As Marco relates, “[They] exerted themselves so much that at last they have the two molar teeth which were very thick and large, and again they had some of the hair and the bowl in which he [the revered person] used to eat. The bowl was of very beautiful green porphyry. When the messengers of the Great Khan had these things of which I have told you, they set themselves on the road and go back to their lord. When they were near to the great town of Cambulac, where the Great Khan was, they made him know that they were coming and bringing the holy things for which he had sent them.” Kublai received the items gratefully, and paid particular attention to the bowl, having heard that if food for just one person was placed in it, “five men would have enough from it.” Seeking proof, he ordered it filled with a portion fit for one, and then declared that it did, indeed, feed five—or so Marco says. He tells the story of the magical bowl with obvious skepticism, although he refrains from labeling Kublai Khan as credulous, even while raising the possibility.
WHEREVER MARCO TRAVELED along India’s coast, the “fervent heat” tormented him. “The sun is so hot that one can scarcely bear it there,” he complains. “Even the water is so hot that if you were to put an egg into some river when the sun is shining brightly on it, it would be cooked before you were gone at all far, just as in boiling water.” Despite the oppressive climate, merchant ships from the four corners of the earth converged to trade.
Exotic and terrifying creatures populated the region, and they were “different from all the others in the world,” according to Marco. There were “black lions” (probably panthers); beautiful “parrots” as white as snow, with red beaks and feet (Marco apparently had another bird in mind, for which he lacked a name); peacocks larger than any to be found in Venice; hens bigger and better than any he had ever encountered; and fruit, the likes of which he had never seen, and which he could not name. For once, the variety of flora and fauna rendered Marco Polo speechless.
Melibar.
Upon reaching this “great kingdom to the west,” Marco posts an urgent warning concerning the scourge of pirates. He denounces them as “great robbers of the sea” and describes their modus operandi, apparently from anxious personal experience: “Most of the ships of these evil corsairs are parted hither and thither to wait for and find ships of the merchants who pass by.” He says that they are so adept at catching their prey that “no merchant ship may pass that is not taken, for they go together in companies of twenty or of thirty ships of these corsairs and form a great line on the sea.” Anchored about five miles apart, “twenty pirate corsairs control over one hundred miles of open water with this strategy.”
The hunt went on day and night. “As soon as they [the pirates] see any merchant ship they make a light of fire or smoke for a signal, and they all collect together and go there hard and take everything.” The cargo consisted of items as varied and valuable as copper (used for ballast), silk, and pepper, spikenard, cloves, and other spices concealed aboard the unlucky ships. As a merchant, Marco realizes that his colleagues “know well the way of these evil corsairs and know well they are bound to find them,” so “they go many together and so well armed and so well prepared that they have no fear of them when they find them, for they defend themselves bravely and very often do them great harm.”
Occasionally, the pirates ensnared one of the merchant vessels, taking the goods aboard but sparing the lives of the men, whom they taunted by saying, “Go home to gain some other goods, so you will give them to us again!”
Goçurat.
Here the pirates were even more “cruel and evil” than elsewhere. Cringing with empathy for the victims, Marco tells how they “seize the merchants and beside taking the goods from them, torture them and put a ransom on their persons; and if they do not quickly pay the ransom, they give them so great torments that many die of it.”
Nothing that Marco had seen, not even among the Mongols, notorious for their savagery, affected him as deeply as the reports of the torments inflicted on merchants by Arab pirates. Waxing increasingly indignant on the part of his fellow merchants, he describes the lengths to which the merchants would go to prevent their tormentors from succeeding. If they are carrying pearls and other precious stones, he says, “they swallow them that they may not be snatched from them by the pirates,” and thus manage to keep some of their goods.
But the pirates are “infected with evilness,” Marco warns, “for you may know that when these wicked corsairs take some ship of the merchants and find no stones and pearls, they give them to drink a certain drug called tamarind and seawater, so that the merchants go much below and pass or vomit all that they have in belly.”
A long-lived, massive tree, the tamarind is distinguished by graceful, feathery dark-green foliage that withdraws by night. Lost in this profusion are the tamarind’s flowers, which harbor abundant cinnamon-brown pods that are as long as a banana and contain acidic flesh and soft seeds. As they mature, the pods fill out, the juicy, acidulous pulp turns brown or reddish-brown, and the seeds harden. Tamarind is used as a staple in Indian food and medicine, and the pirates described by Marco made it into a powerful purgative. The seawater the merchants ingested caused them to vomit, bringing up some of the items they may have swallowed, while any items that had passed farther down the alimentary canal mixed with the tamarind bulk and passed out in the stool.
“The corsairs have all that the merchants pass collected and have it searched to see if there are pearls or any other precious stones,” Marco explains, with mingled sympathy and disgust. “The merchants can in no way escape without losing everything if they were taken.” Either way, the pirates claimed their loot and inflicted a humiliating lesson on the merchants in the process. “Now you have seen…great malice,” Marco snorts, as he considers these maritime thugs.
Tana.
Marco implies that he has visited the place, without insisting on it. His casual handling of his sources of information becomes increasingly apparent as he traces his course through India, relying ever more heavily on secondhand information. Whether or not he stretched a point to include it in his travels, Tana suited his theme: the dangers of piracy to merchants and the India t
rade, otherwise so profitable. Here pepper and incense abounded, as did buckram and cotton. “Great trade is done there and ships and merchants go there in plenty,” he informs his public, “and the merchants who come there with their ships bring and carry in with them several things; these are gold, silver, and brass, and many other things that are necessary to the kingdom from which they trust to profit and gain.”
Here, too, pirates infested the waters, earning another rebuke from the Venetian: “Many corsairs come out from this kingdom, who go about the sea doing great harm to the merchants.” Oddly, they plied their nefarious trade in collusion with the king of Tana, in exchange for horses, which his kingdom needed. “The king has made this agreement with the corsairs that they are pledged to give him all the horses that they take.” At the same time, “all other goods, both gold and silver and precious stones, belong to the corsairs.” In the face of this corruption, damaging to merchants throughout India, the Venetian could only lament, “…this is an evil thing, and it is not kingly work.”
Socotra.
Marco’s yearning for the sea, and, by extension, the voyage home, prompted him to sail across the Indian Ocean to the island of Socotra, at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden.
Part of an archipelago of much smaller islands, Socotra seems to stand alone as it rises out of the sea on massive coral banks. Home to an ecosystem that had been isolated for millions of years, the island held many biological rarities. The Venetian had just entered a biologist’s dream in which about one-third of the plants and animals surrounding him were found there and only there; the unique specimens included land crabs living at more than two thousand feet above sea level, rare birds, and a profusion of exotic reptiles. The most celebrated of the island’s flora was the Dragon’s Tree, whose astringent resin was used to treat wounds. So impressed was Marco by the island’s flora and fauna, its giant lizards and fanlike Dragon Trees standing in isolation against the infinite sky, that he came to declare it “the most enchanted place on earth.”
Marco Polo Page 34
