In her article on "The Making of Epiphany in Tibet," Laurie Hovell McMillin uses the term "Enlightenment Travel" to label the phenomenon of "Westerners" going "East" in search of personal spiritual fulfillment. Her article focuses upon travelers to Tibet, but the vocabulary she uses is helpful for a broader examination of travelers to India, Nepal, and other Asian and South East Asian locations. The travelers in question are guided by an interest in the religious traditions of either Buddhism or Hinduism and an expectation that the spirituality offered by these two traditions is somehow connected with place.
A long tradition of othering and romanticizing the "mysterious East" has contributed to this expectation of a unique and tangible spirituality in Asia, to which Western travelers can gain access provided they only search it out. The literary world has played a large role in this romanticization of the East and its association with spiritual attainment. McMillin cites George Bogle's travel journals from his 1774 trip to Tibet and Bhutan as an early example of the literary tradition of enlightenment travel writing that eventually includes more mainstream works such as Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Peter Matthiessen's Snow Leopard.
Problematizing a strictly critical approach to these enlightenment travelers, however, is another tradition: the tradition of pilgrimage, which perhaps more legitimately (because less tied up with post-imperialist power structures) provides an expectation of connection between spirituality and place. In addition, at least some of these enlightenment travelers are Westerners who have in fact converted to an "Eastern" religion, such as Buddhism, and who therefore feel that they are making a legitimate and important spiritual journey.
Suggested Bibliography
Bishop, Peter. The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, travel writing and the Western creation of sacred landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1933.
Iyer, Pico. Video Night in Kathmandu. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Markham, Clements. Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa. 1879. New Delhi: Manjusri, 1971.
McMillin, Laurie Hovell. "Enlightenment Travels: the Making of Epiphany in Tibet." Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (eds). New York: Routledge, 1999. 49-69.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. New York: Penguin, 1978.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Younghusband, Francis. India and Tibet. 1910. Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1971.