Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia, by George Crane

Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia

Lately we've sold quite a few copies of this book (including to people buying multiple copies to give away to their friends). It seems to be appealing to people on different levels in different ways, from adventure to history to inspiration to travelogue. I haven't read it myself so all I can relay right now is that it seems to be getting traction all of a sudden.

Bones of the Master, c. 2000, is by George Crane and is published by Bantam. It is illustrated with black and white photographs.

From the publisher (via Barnes & Noble):

In 1959 a young monk named Tsung Tsai (Ancestor Wisdom) escapes the Red Army troops that destroy his monastery, and flees alone three thousand miles across a China swept by chaos and famine. Knowing his fellow monks are dead, himself starving and hunted, he is sustained by his mission: to carry on the teachings of his Buddhist meditation master, who was too old to leave with his disciple.

Nearly forty years later Tsung Tsai - now an old master himself - persuades his American neighbor, maverick poet George Crane, to travel with him back to his birthplace at the edge of the Gobi Desert.

They are unlikely companions. Crane seeks freedom, adventure, sensation. Tsung Tsai is determined to find his master's grave and plant the seeds of a spiritual renewal in China. As their search culminates in a torturous climb to a remote mountain cave, it becomes clear that this seemingly quixotic quest may cost both men's lives.

UPDATE and CAUTION: My husband has started reading this, and he's finding the early going has some graphic language and detailed descriptions of gruesome death and suffering - not at all what he expected from what customers told him or the jacket copy implies. So far, everything is more or less within context and he can see why some people find this book so powerful (and, of course, we're hoping that by the end of the book the author will relay hard-earned wisdom or something - and, in fact, already David feels the author is transforming into a better man than at the beginning of the book), but David's suggesting this post really needs to have warning flags attached.

On the other side of that, some of the vignettes he's sharing with me are priceless. The adventure of getting a large crated Buddha through JFK airport, for example; or the monk getting a phone only to repeatedly answer it by saying he was too busy to talk and hanging up without finding out who it was, for instance.