This fine book will certainly become a best-seller, and maybe even a classic of its genre -- old hippies pairing up with shamans from traditional cultures and collapsing in amazement at their powers.
The desire to go back, to return to a landscape you think of as uniquely your own, is a powerful urge for many people, though the reality may be other than what you expect. So it is for a Ch'an (Chinese Zen) monk who has been exiled for 40 years in the US and decides to revisit his former home in Inner Mongolia.
He opts to take with him a rough-and-ready American freelance writer and poet. They finance the trip by getting a contract plus an advance from a New York publisher. This book is the result.
It's attractive right from the start. Near Woodstock, upstate New York, a winter blizzard has closed the dirt road leading to the writer's shack. In the bright, sunlit morning, the monk appears at his door and suggests that a combination of his ax and the writer's chain saw could clear the road before sunset.
Thus they meet in an atmosphere of snow, blue skies and pleasurable exertion, followed by tea, apples, and talk about Chinese poetry. It's already like a scene from a classic Chinese poem, or the journals of the veteran Californian poet and orientalist Gary Snyder.
The monk, Tsung Tsai, fled from his temple in 1959. Communists had been shooting anyone in Buddhist robes, and though the China through which he had to pass was in the grip of the Great Famine, a direct product of Mao's Great Leap Forward, he had no choice but to go.
The description of Tsung Tsai's journey south to Hong Kong is a miniature epic in itself -- floating down rivers past bloated corpses, and riding on the tops of railway carriages from which other fugitives are swept to their deaths as the train enters a tunnel. He stays in a Hong Kong temple for four years, studying part of the time at a university, until he is granted a visa for the US.
When the two men eventually arrive back at Tsung Tsai's ancestral village north of the Yellow River, they find a superficial cheerfulness masking a profound sadness. Three musicians who come to welcome them haven't played together, and perhaps not at all, for 30 years. In the wreck of the temple where he had lived as a monk, Tsung Tsai finds only a Buddha of pink plastic, and one incense stick in a jelly jar.
The sense of a place whose culture, formerly religious in almost all its aspects, has been destroyed, is very strong. It conforms with what everyone tells you about the mainland countryside -- religious belief has been abandoned, but so too has faith in communism, leaving only an emotional emptiness undisguised by enthusiasm for new economic opportunities.
Inner Mongolia turns out to be an especially rough place. With drunken wedding celebrations in the company of over-perfumed party officials, bicycle baskets containing only goats' heads, stories of fox gods and of plagues of rats and locusts, it's a harsh and particularly unrelenting place.
The two travelers are well contrasted -- the monk cheerful, a trickster, but underneath that, profoundly serious; Crane an easy-going sensualist, happy to succumb to the allure of drink and women, a middle-aged dropout who still retains a taste for words. They make a lively literary pair.
Tsung Tsai's purpose in returning home is to find the remains of his former spiritual master so he can give them a Buddhist burial. The master's grave turns out to be a frozen pit covered with garbage and broken glass. But his retreat had been a cave high on a remote peak known as Crow Pull Mountain, and the expedition up to this site forms the climax to the story.
To the Mongolians the crow is a bird with great spiritual powers, and the adventures that befall the pair as they approach their goal are as mysterious as the most credulous New Ager could reasonably expect.
In many ways the book begins as a lightly spiritual entertainment, albeit one soon interspersed with images of pain and suffering. You feel that Crane's bonhomie will continue to ensure the narrative will never plumb any real depths. What poetry there is remains in the prose rather than the somewhat second-rate poems scattered through the text.
But then suddenly the book moves onto another level. Not only the mountain climb itself, but subsequent, wholly unexpected, events in Hong Kong on the way back to America, prove deeply moving, even shocking. The effect is startling, and you look back to earlier events in the story with a new understanding.
This is a wonderful volte-face. Literary effects successfully brought off, as this one is, are in themselves beautiful. And in addition the book as a whole achieves far greater subtlety and power. It has lifted itself up by its bootstraps into a higher category, and the reader puts it down with nothing but pleasure.
And so, though the monk's quest itself proves nominally unsuccessful, the narrative ends on a triumphant note. The author's own spiritual torpor has suddenly become the issue, and Tsung Tsai's achievements are perceived as being in this life, in the here and now, rather than over the bones of the deceased.
Consequently, Bones of the Master is in its later stages well worthy of the praise of Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, printed on its cover. This other writer given to journeying into the bleak places of the Earth in search of Buddhist emptiness and balm for a hurt soul recognizes a brother, if perhaps a lesser one, and his praise is in the end truly deserved.
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