"Bones of the Master" is by turns an edge-of-your-seat travel adventure and a biography of a one-of-a-kind monk. But what really sets this wonderful book apart is the way it portrays with uncompromising honesty the relationship between the author, George Crane, and his subject, Tsung Tsai, a 75-year-old Zen monk from Inner Mongolia. Theirs is a union not often seen.
Crane is a poet, a world traveller with a long list of odd jobs on his resume, thrice-married and a life-long seeker. He is a self-proclaimed Buddhist who doesn't like to meditate. "I am too fidgety," he laughs. Originally from Chicago, Crane has spent a good deal of his life wandering. He was in San Francisco in the late sixties, Morocco in the seventies and later, when punk was it, he lived in New York City on the Bowery.
"Mostly I hung out in the streets, smoking; talking to bums; and trying, without success, to write that one perfect haiku," Crane writes in his book.
Crane has intensely dark eyes that contrast sharply with his head of silvery hair, shaggy beard and mustache. Tsung Tsai calls him a fox but, because he is so friendly, he seems more like a husky. Recently over lunch in a New York diner the two talked in tandem, finishing each other's sentences like an old married couple -- but they didn't bicker.
Flight from China
Tsung Tsai is a 75-year-old Chan (or Zen) Buddhist monk, a famed calligrapher, a vegetarian. He does not drink. He is the last remaining practitioner from Puu Jih, a remote monastery in Inner Mongolia that was long ago levelled by the Communists. After the Communist takeover, hundreds of thousands of monks throughout China fled their monasteries or disguised themselves as civilians fearing for their lives. Untold thousands were beaten to death under Mao's rule for their religious beliefs. To escape famine and persecution Tsung Tsai walked the length of China, north to south, escaping to Hong Kong in 1959. It took him a year.
Between 1958 and 1962, because of a campaign to industrialize China that Mao Zedong called the Great Leap Forward, 30 million Chinese starved to death. Tsung himself barely escaped being one of them. The book describes in horrifying detail the scenes he encountered on his flight out of China:
"[Tsung Tsai] walked along a dirt road that ran through terraced fields where every blade of grass had been eaten...a wagon filled with bloated corpses was moored in the mud. Tsung Tsai could see strips cut from their shanks...the dying were eating the dead."
Tsung still looks very much like the young man in the passport photo that adorns the cover of the book. It was taken shortly after his arrival from the mainland to Hong Kong. Today, as then, his head is closely shaven and he has the impossibly long ear lobes of a Buddha statue, with a tranquil smile to match. Be-robed and possessing the fluid grace of someone who is forever calm and collected, Tsung can be imposing -- but he is also child-like and sweet.
Dance and Pantomime
How could such an unlikely duo come to be friends and partners in publishing?
This odd couple met in 1987 in Woodstock, New York where they were neighbors. Crane worked part time at a rental center and small engine repair shop. Tsung lived a quiet and hermetic existence in a house he had built himself. Both wrote poetry and enjoyed the flexible schedules their "non-traditional" lives allowed them. Soon after they met they began a translation project with Tsung explaining the meanings of Chinese poems in his own special English, devoid of either verbs or conjugations. Following Tsung's descriptions and his own intuition, Crane would put the words into his own poetic English.
"We played in dictionaries. Danced. Pantomimed. Yammered. He yelled when I didn't understand. I struggled to do the poems justice, to reach that nexus where words and silence met," Crane writes in the book.
This collaboration eventually led to a close friendship. When, after nearly 40 years of living abroad, Tsung decided to go back home to give his master's bones the proper burial they had been denied for so long by China's politics, he also decided Crane should write a book about it to help pay for the trip. Crane, his wanderlust piqued, eagerly agreed.
Abstinence, Simplicity
On the strength of a preliminary draft of a first chapter, Crane and Tsung sold a book about a trip that had not yet been taken. It would be four years until "Bones of the Master" made it into stores.
In those years the two made their trip to China, a pilgrimage for Tsung and a test of endurance for Crane. With great humor and honesty Crane describes his struggle between wanting to blindly follow the monk and his own spiritual scepticism. A non-practicing Jew and self-indulgent bohemian, Crane's credo is pleasure and living life to it's fullest, while Tsung's is abstinence and simplicity.
"'To the seasons, to cooking, to wives and babies, to poetry, to everything impregnating, to-being-drunk-god-damnit-to-growing-old,'" declares Crane one night in a drunken stupor in Inner Mongolia. "This was what I believed in...not the ascetic monk next to me with his celibacy, Buddha breath, and metaphysics. I toasted again, the wine sloshing over and dripping down my sleeve."
Crane's love for the old monk and a desire to know the source of Tsung's serenity keep him in a constant tug of war between doubting and believing. This tension and the observations that arise from Crane's questioning of himself and his companion make the book both meaningful and accessible. The reader feels what it's like to be an average person with a monk as a best friend.
What does it feel like to be the monk?
"Georgie my good friend," says says Tsung Tsai in his peculiar brand of English when Crane is out of earshot. "Good feel. Good mind. Good wisdom. I don't enjoy his smart. I enjoy his big wisdom. Also, good memory, good reader. He copy me down like machine."
