Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The Chinese call this life “the kingdom of ten thousand things,”
which is what Gary Geddes fell over when he arrived in Pakistan in 2001
to pursue a seemingly focused line of research into the travels of
Huishen, a fifth-century Buddhist monk. Huishen had fled to China to
escape persecution in Afghanistan and in AD 458 sailed to the Americas,
where he stayed 40 years before returning to China to tell his tale.

This much is documented in the past, but along the road that Huishen
may have trod, our contemporary searcher finds himself constantly up
against the present: a refugee camp in Pakistan, a wheelchair workshop
in Kabul, 9/11 images on a Chinese television, desecrated museums, lost
libraries. Today’s reality forces its way into what was to have been a
lighthearted trek into an odd piece of history; everywhere he goes,
Geddes finds people who want to tell their tale, even a Tibetan monk in
a whisper.

Geddes, the author of Sailing Home (2001), introduces himself on his
travels as a poet. He is also a man of inexhaustible curiosity who gloms
onto every bit of knowledge, every unexpected insight, and every flash
of beauty that floats his way. On a container ship crossing the Pacific,
he takes on an exhaustive tour of the engine room. In Mexico, there are
discoveries of Buddha-like figures and toys. In the Queen Charlotte
Islands, there is the story of an Asian monk. The odyssey is a
convoluted and entertaining mix of research and distraction, adventure
and reflection, sadness and beauty. All seen with a poet’s eye.

Through his travels Geddes digresses, detours, and discusses, while in
his research he suffers dead ends, contradictory stories, missing
papers. Yet he never deviates from his belief that his search could lead
to convincing proof that Asians visited the Americas in pre-Columbian
times, a belief strongly held by a few academics on this continent and
vociferously opposed by many. Readers hoping to recover a felicitous
passage must make their own search.