Bones of the Master, a Journey to Secret Mongolia

                                          

     There was a group of 6 of us at Joan's house on another beautiful fall day, besides Joan were Margie, Marylib, Saran, Mary and Libby.  All of us who had read the book felt that the relationship between the author and the monk was one of the most interesting parts of the book.  There was a certain synergy but disconnect that made their friendship charming and juxtaposed with different cultures.  George Crane was a flawed curious likeable person, and he was certainly self-deprecating. Tsang Tsai was a loveable monk with limited English and strong determination.
     The history of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was only touched upon but enough to feel what Tsang Tsai had gone through in his long journey to the US.  Marylib felt the relationship between Georgie and Tsang Tsai captured her the most.  Margie loved the book but felt that the last chapter was an enigma...why was it added at all.  There was a certain disingenuous quality about the subject matter. Joan and Libby also loved the relationship as it unfolded with the journey.
     Saran felt that the monk's life was a sort of contradiction in that on the one hand, there was lovely opportunity for self-realization;  on the other hand, the trip back to Inner Mongolia was seemingly selfish.  Saran also mentioned that the monk relied on other people almost exclusively, but that he also gave things away to those in need, things he had been given for the trip.  Tsang Tsai, which means "ancestor wisdom", was always a "trophy guest" in his and Georgie's travels, in every home, back to Mongolia.
     Libby, who heroically read most of the book in 3 days after not knowing the group date had been changed, felt that the photos in the book added so much to the story and she said she referred to them frequently.  She also read a passage in the book which made the most impression to her, on page 162:
     "The history of the place could be seen as a dialectic between nomadic Mongols raiding from the north, conquering vast areas of China, and the Chinese pushing them back......I was more aware of the integration of the Han Chinese with Mongol sensibility than with the Mongols themselves.  Tsang Tsai himself, village life, the frontier feel....seemed to speak to me of Chinese who had become at least partially Mongol rather than the Mongols becoming Chinese.  The Mongols, I liked to think, had retreated into the outback with their essential  nomadic wildness intact.
     "This was no doubt an illusion.  I was caught in the poetry of the place, a poetry that, like the poetry of the American west, lent an appealing grittiness to the exploitation, racial prejudice, ecological devastation, and cultural arrogance inherant in colonization--all of it subtly inculcating itself into the landscape and society until it was assumed, taken for granted, virtually invisible."
     For many of us that day, we felt that this quote was the point of the book and so well said by the author.  That journeys of this sort, 40 years later, never find the world as it was, if it ever was that way.  It can only really be an inward journey.
     Many of us enjoyed the Buddhist philosophy in the book, especially the poems, and especially the one on page 147.  There was a personal search for a sense of place.  Yet, in the end, the journey "all seemed unlikely, a fool's quest, but the best kind, the only kind worth pursuing."