Smeared Type

Bones of the Master

            My friend Amy recommended me George Crane’s book Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia (The Bones) several weeks ago and even brought me a copy when we met last time. I looked at the cover: the face of a monk over steep, bare mountain ranges, dotted with a few pine trees. I thought it was a martial arts story and put it aside. I had a pile of books on my desk to read. A monk’s journey to Inner Mongolia to look for his master’s bones didn’t sound so attractive to me.

            Over the weekend, after giving two talks on China in one day and attending a full day of interesting but intensive “life design” conference, I wanted to take a break. I picked up The Bones. A few pages into the story, I found myself fully engaged. I didn’t realize it was a nonfiction. The story began in 1959 when Monk Tsung Tsai escaped from imminent persecution and walked from Inner Mongolia to Hong Kong, experiencing/witnessing horrifying hardship, hunger, and death along his way. Most of the narrative, however, was set in the late 1990s when Tsung Tsai, accompanied by the author, embarked on a journey to Inner Mongolia to search for his mater’s bones for proper cremation and burial. Tsung Tsai is a Ch’an (禅) Master, and George Crane, a poet and non-believer. Through Tsung Tsai’s broken English, the philosophy and wisdom of Ch’an were expressed, though, as Ch’an, the essence was elusive and “empty.” The “nothingness” of Ch’an.

            The narrative was very well structured and the language precise and poetic. I would imagine Master Tsung Tsai would have approved it and say “the work beautiful.”  

Many questions remained unanswered though: Why did Tsung Tsai decide to come to the U.S. and settle in the Catskill Mountains, Upstate New York? How did he manage to support himself, even if he lived on noodles and greens? Why did Tsung Tsai request the author to perform the kneel-down ritual to the “Black Master?” Apparently this “Black Master,” once a student of Tsung Tsai, was no longer a monk—he was married and was surrounded by women. Was Tsung Tsai there to save the “Black Master” from his “troubles” versus being “chanted” by the Black Master to change? I could go on and on. Perhaps because I couldn’t understand the “emptiness,” or “nothingness” of the Ch’an, that I was lost. Or perhaps, it didn’t matter. We all live, suffer, and die and need to learn to be unattached to the material world.

I am very intrigued by the story and the Ch’an. I’m about to start my Asian Classics classes at the University of Chicago this week and the focus this year is on China. The first book we will read is Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing (in old spelling: Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching). The story of Tsung Tsai certainly added another dimension for me to the reading. Thanks, Amy.

Jian Ping, author of Mulberry Child: A Memoir of China. www.mulberrychild.com