|
Far from Ordinary Life
Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia
by George Crane
Bantam Books, 2000 (hardcover) 2001 (paperback) 304 pages.
Reviewed by Kathleen L. Housley
Call it chance. Better yet, call it providence. Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia by George Crane came to me one day while I was waiting to give a lecture at a local bookstore. Trying to look preoccupied so that I would not have to field questions from attendees before I was ready, I browsed the shelves on comparative religion tucked into the hallway leading into the lecture room. Bones of the Master was the book that caught and held my attention.
Partially it was the tranquil face peering out from the cover, over which there appeared a screened photograph of a sheer mountain precipice, the kind so beautifully portrayed on Chinese silk scrolls. The mass of the mountain on the left and the airy nothingness on the right divided the man’s face into dark and light. The cover design hinted at the beautiful and the dangerous, the accessible and the remote. There was also the intriguing blurb from Peter Matthiessen: “A fascinating, beautifully written account of a great (and delightful) Ch’an master’s return pilgrimage to remote Inner Mongolia after forty years of exile.”
After the lecture, the store manager offered me a book in lieu of payment. I could have had any book I wanted. What an opportunity! At any other time, I could have come up with a long list of books that I yearned to own. But the only book that came to mind was Bones of the Master. And so it went home with me. Now many months later, I am writing this review in hopes it will go home with other people as well.
Tsung Tsai is a Ch’an monk, perhaps the last one on Earth. Ch’an is a Chinese form of Buddhism that became known as Zen after its introduction into Japan. In 1959, the Red Army troops brutally destroyed his monastery. Knowing that his fellow monks had been killed, Tsung Tsai realized that he had to escape to preserve for future generations the teachings of his Buddhist master. His trek across China was appalling. Near death from starvation, he finally reached Hong Kong.
Nearly forty years later, the trek has taken Tsung Tsai to a cabin in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. It is here that he meets George Crane, a writer and on-again-off-again spiritual seeker. Their growing friendship leads in 1996 to Tsung Tsai’s request that Crane return with him to the edge of the Gobi Desert to find the bones of his master.
In a way (and this is why Peter Matthiessen used the word “delightful” to describe the book), Crane plays Sancho Panza to Tsung Tsai’s Don Quixote. Crane’s outlook on life is thoroughly Western, Tsai’s thoroughly Eastern. Their efforts to understand each other are at one and the same time funny and poignant. For example, over a cup of tea, Tsung Tsai tries to explain the meaning of Ch’an to Crane. “What means is I never lose my mind. Ch’an is pure mind. Always keep and you can see east, west, sky, earth, Everything pure. Everything coming you can see. Even can see in shadow. That is Ch’an. Nothing can move Ch’an mind. Understand?” Crane replies “Clear as mud.” Tsung Tsai is delighted with the answer, crying out happily, “Now you’ve got it really.”
What Crane does have is a love for Tsung Tsai. It carries him beyond his inability to understand fully the concepts of Ch’an. It carries him far from his ordinary life, and his writing far from of its ordinary haunts. The result is a book that celebrates compassion, wherever it is found.
Kathleen L. Housley has written poetry and articles for numerous journals including Woman’s Art Journal, New England Quarterly,The Christian Century, and Image. An Affiliated Scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, her area of concentration is the interconnection of religion and American culture. Housley’s first book, The Letter Kills But the Spirit Gives Life, explores the lives of five nineteenth-century suffragists, one of whom translated the Bible and had it printed by Mark Twain’s publishing company as part of her battle to prove the intellectual capability of women. Housley’s most recent book, Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on the Cusp, is available from University Press of New England. Tremaine, a famous art patron, was a Christian Scientist whose interest in abstraction was based on her belief in non-duality.
|
