Marco Polo

From Venice to Xanadu

By Laurence Bergreen

“Do not be afraid,” Maffeo and Marco urged, “for we did not come your harm at all but only for good and the improvement of your condition.”

They returned the next day, slowly ingratiating themselves with the locals, “asking them about their business,” until they came upon the answer to the riddle. These secretive and suspicious people were, after all, Christians, “for they had books, and these Masters Maffeo and Marco reading in them began to interpret the writing and to translate from word to word and from tongue to tongue, so that they found it to be the words of the Psalter”—the Book of Psalms.

Astonished by this discovery of lost Christians in China, they asked how they came by their faith. “From our ancestors,” the locals replied.

Inspecting one of their temples, the merchants saw “three painted figures, who had been three apostles of the seventy who had gone preaching through the world; and they said that they were those who had taught their ancestors in that religion long ago, and that that faith had already been preserved among them for seven hundred years”— that is, since the sixth century—“but for a long time they had been without preaching and so were ignorant of the chief things.” Their curious allusion to three apostles refers, perhaps, to Peter, James, and John, who accompanied Jesus on particularly exalted and disturbing occasions, such as the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The origins of this isolated sect’s faith were lost in time, yet Marco acknowledged their connection.

(Bergreen 2007, 231)

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 expansion 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.