This Introduction explains the characteristics of Western Buddhist travel narratives as a genre and their value as a source of religious insight. These stories are autobiographical accounts of a journey to a Buddhist culture. They often describe a transformative religious experience, “unselfing,” when a person’s sense of self is radically altered. The Buddhist concept of no-self helps authors interpret this kind of experience, and it also provokes and enables such events. No-self is a challenging idea for Westerners trying to understand and reconcile it with their culture’s understanding of the self. Autobiographical accounts, in particular travel narratives, disclose crucial features of self-transformation and interpret the meaning of no-self in diverse ways and in contrast to theoretical and philosophical forms of discourse. The structure and topics of the book’s chapters are outlined.

In five sections, this Conclusion correlates the features of Western Buddhist travel narratives with understandings of no-self. It reflects on what stories can show that is obscured by theories and explains the distinctive value of autobiographical narratives for interpreting no-self and experiences of unselfing. The theory developed builds on the ideas of Steven Collins, Ann Taves, John Hick, and others. Western narratives are compared to an eighteenth-century Tibetan autobiography as interpreted by Janet Gyatso. A fourth section reflects on why travel narratives often portray experiences of unselfing. Finally, a theory is proposed that links experiences of unselfing with autobiographical writing as related aspects of religious transformation. Self-transformation is the central theme of contemporary spiritual autobiography and the deepest religious concern at work in Buddhist thinking about no-self. Western Buddhist travel narratives offer crucial insights and wisdom about these matters.

The third chapter is concerned with a foundational moment in the history of the archive. The poetic ‘road’ to Hyperborea, there, rather than cult or sanctuaries, serves as the focus for looking at the earliest records of the Hyperborean nexus in archaic epic. A first section looks at trajectories from Hyperborea. The second section analyses Pindar's construction of a journey to Hyperborea in Pythian 10 and Bacchylides' instrumentalisation of Hyperborea in Ode 3. Both readings aim to shed some light on how the two poets composed their worlds with material that was already in place. The rest of the chapter proceeds to examine the nature of this earlier material. The third section looks at the scene of the Iliad (13.1–9) where Zeus turns his gaze towards the men of the distant North, and it sets out the evidence for other relevant early epic texts. The fourth section looks more closely at the fragments of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women where the circular travels of the winged Boreads bring them all the way to ‘the well-horsed Hyperboreans’. The fifth section revisits in some detail the fragments of Aristeas of Proconnesus' epic narrative of a journey to the distant North, the Arimaspeia.

This essay examines how Mary Seacole’s autobiography-cum-travelogue, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), uses revisionary mimicry to engage the tropological schema of colonial and imperial discourses. Seacole artfully deploys recodings and revisions that generate a nascent poetics of colonial identity and subjectivity. Her narrative unfolds as a drama of self-construction that locates the individual colonial subject within the nexus of mid-Victorian ideologies of industry, adventure, gender, race, and nation. It reverses the trajectory of imperial travel narratives as it relates the struggle to move from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands complicates contemporary attempts to define it as counter-discourse, as it is permeated by contradictions and ambiguities that highlight the problematic nature of hybridity in Seacole’s own self-construction. Wonderful Adventures is thus marked by the implicit tensions of Caribbean colonial relations despite Seacole’s apparent erasure of the politics of the post-Emancipation British Caribbean.