Rating: 
Summary: Human and soulful
Review: I just finished reading the Bones of the Master. The author is able to weave the emotional, spiritual, social, cultural, and personal aspects in a colorful and exciting tapstry. Crane uses just the right amount of each "ingredient" for his craft. I wish he can let us know how Master Tsung Tsai is doing! Is the shrine for his teacher built? I wish both of them the very best.
Rating:
Summary: This story is a treasure
Review: I love this book. It moved me deeply. It still does.
Rating:
Summary: New Favorite Book....Can't stop telling my students about it
Review: I picked up the book at BArnes and Noble bookstore after seeing it in a catalog. George Crane writes about Tsung Tsai so well that I could actually see his face and movements and hear his accent as I read his words. I sat in BandN for three days drinking tea and reading the book until it was finished. I then bought the book and added it to my personal library. It is fascinating reading.....simple but very descriptive. Allowing the reader enough insight into the monk and inner mongolia while dispelling western myths of a monks life. This should be on everyone's list. I am still tellingmy martial arts students about this book. They all want to read it now.
Rating:
Summary: Bones Transformational
Review: I read Bones of The Master all in one go. Couldn't put it down- didn't. My daughter ate cereal for two days. The writing is spare and strong leaving the story to stand in it's own clear light- and what a story! I fell in love reading this book. In love with a Chinese monk- his incomparable heart and beautiful spirit like a dance of light across a bright stream. George Crane is a poet of the first order and his telling of this tale has changed my life. I have new things in my interior world, new places to go...and for this I will be eternally grateful. This is a book I will read again and again- budda and fox, laughter and ageless silence.
Rating:
Summary: Enthralling
Review: I read this book directly after reading My son, the dalai lama, by Diki Tsering. I couldn't put either down. Crane's style is deceptive. His self-deprecation leaves the reader continually unprepared for his astonishing writing, which is so lucid that, in a very few words, he can create a scene that is visible to the mind's eye. You can smell the smoke, see the pigs, and hear the motorcycle (and taste the vomit after a night of drinking without losing face). My husband likes biography but is not particularly drawn to the East. However, he also was entranced by this experience. I must call it that, rather than a book. As for Tsung Tsai, who could I want to meet more than this spirit, but in the words of Wayne and Garth, "We're not worthy."
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking
Review: I read this book right on the heels of Victor Klemperer's diary, "I Will Bear Witness," chronicling the day-to-day life of a German Jew during the Third Reich. Tsung Tsai lived in China, a world apart from Victor Klemperer, but it seems that the heroism of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances transcends boundaries. As a child, Tsung Tsai watched as the Japanese fed poison to his mother and burned his family. After becoming a Ch'an Buddhist monk in Inner Mongolia, he narrowly escaped the Red Army's destruction of Buddhist lamaseries and literally walked to Hong Kong during the Great Famine. He was picked up, starving and near death, by some boat people who nurtured him to health despite his dangerous monkhood. Then he crossed a Hong Kong border teeming with red Army soldiers, spending the next 40 years in exile as an ordinary citizen of New York. This is the story of his return to China, at age 70, in a spiritual quest to honor his master, whom he had left in a cave on Crow Pull Mountain and who died during the Cultural Revolution without a proper Buddhist burial. His quixotic journey is enabled by George Crane, author, friend, journalist, poet and self-styled Zen Jewdist, who joins him on the trip as his spiritual Sanch Panza, full of Western vinegar. Together they both encounter and reflect the imbalance of China as it teeters between modernity and old customs, between heartless Maoism and a reawakened spirituality, between collectivism and family. Ancient hills echo The vrrroom of a Harley D With polyphony. The determined journey of Tsung Tsai, against real danger and the advice of all concerned, is awe-inspiring. Throughout this book, he becomes its and China's centered soul, giving life a perspective worthy of the Master Himself. He has visited death and has no fear of it. He is concerned only with that which is honorable and morally right. His selflessness is palpable. For example, he gives to the needy all of the equipment he brought to protect him on his arduous mountain climb. And his sense of self is equally palpable. Revered, almost worshipped, as a surviving Buddhist monk, he takes the time to minister to the people, to fulfill their long-ignored desires for Buddhism. Do not miss this book. It will move you. And be sure to read the book to the end, right through the acknowledgements. There you will find that George Crane sent a physician back to China to reconstruct the face of a burned child they had met. As an adept, George Crane has learned from Tsung Tsai just as Tsung Tsai learned from his master. And so it goes, throughout history. We can learn as well, just by reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking
Review: I read this book right on the heels of Victor Klemperer's diary, "I Will Bear Witness," chronicling the day-to-day life of a German Jew during the Third Reich. Tsung Tsai lived in China, a world apart from Victor Klemperer, but it seems that the heroism of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances transcends boundaries. As a child, Tsung Tsai watched as the Japanese fed poison to his mother and burned his family. After becoming a Ch'an Buddhist monk in Inner Mongolia, he narrowly escaped the Red Army's destruction of Buddhist lamaseries and literally walked to Hong Kong during the Great Famine. He was picked up, starving and near death, by some boat people who nurtured him to health despite his dangerous monkhood. Then he crossed a Hong Kong border teeming with red Army soldiers, spending the next 40 years in exile as an ordinary citizen of New York. This is the story of his return to China, at age 70, in a spiritual quest to honor his master, whom he had left in a cave on Crow Pull Mountain and who died during the Cultural Revolution without a proper Buddhist burial. His quixotic journey is enabled by George Crane, author, friend, journalist, poet and self-styled Zen Jewdist, who joins him on the trip as his spiritual Sanch Panza, full of Western vinegar. Together they both encounter and reflect the imbalance of China as it teeters between modernity and old customs, between heartless Maoism and a reawakened spirituality, between collectivism and family. Ancient hills echo The vrrroom of a Harley D With polyphony. The determined journey of Tsung Tsai, against real danger and the advice of all concerned, is awe-inspiring. Throughout this book, he becomes its and China's centered soul, giving life a perspective worthy of the Master Himself. He has visited death and has no fear of it. He is concerned only with that which is honorable and morally right. His selflessness is palpable. For example, he gives to the needy all of the equipment he brought to protect him on his arduous mountain climb. And his sense of self is equally palpable. Revered, almost worshipped, as a surviving Buddhist monk, he takes the time to minister to the people, to fulfill their long-ignored desires for Buddhism. Do not miss this book. It will move you. And be sure to read the book to the end, right through the acknowledgements. There you will find that George Crane sent a physician back to China to reconstruct the face of a burned child they had met. As an adept, George Crane has learned from Tsung Tsai just as Tsung Tsai learned from his master. And so it goes, throughout history. We can learn as well, just by reading this book.
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Summary: Yes, he exists and has just come back from a trip to China
Review: I supposed it's also good to have a Chinese reader confirming the reality of Tsung Tsai. Yes, he exists and has just come back from a trip to Inner Mongolia, trying to get the building project of the little temple going. It's not a done deal yet. I met Tsung Tsai for the first time in May, 1999, in the Bronx. In June, I visited him in his little hermitage in Woodstock when I was on my way to a Chan retreat. He cooked delicious noodle for me and "chided" me for doing a perfunctory job washing the dishes. :-) Yes, George Crane has portrayed a true picture of him--not a "perfect" human being, but a simple man, a great person and a great friend to have. I couldn't stopped laughing when I read of the anecdotes in the book, especially the hard-headed ones. That's him all right! I proofread his collection of Chinese poetry. George's translations are inspiring. Not verbatim and not very accurate, but great! They are imbued as much with his own creative power as well as that of Tsung Tsai's. And yes, Tsung Tsai is very proud of his poetry, "better than Li-Po", that's what he told me. Classical Chinese poetry comes in various forms, and in one of the forms I like, I do think that he is as good as the ancient masters, names like Shu Shi (Shu Dong-Po). He has also told me that he has come back from death many times. Perhaps the readers may also find it interesting that Frank De Maria, an American martial art master in New York, considered Tsung Tsai to be his first teacher in buddhism. That's when Tsung Tsai was still in Henry St, NYC. The last time I saw him, he was asking me questions about Karnaugh Map and was trying to use it in his explanation of the I-Ching. He is writing a book, in Chinese, about "consciousness only (Yogacara)" and I-Ching. I haven't seen any of the work but will definitely get to see it. :-)
Rating:
Summary: Hello Buddha, have an apple
Review: I take many books on my travels as a programming contractor and most of them get taken home after they are read, but this one will stay with me for a long time. Tsung Tsai and George Crane will teach you to believe in wonder again, and perhaps even in yourself. Read this book at least twice!
Rating:
Summary: Cross-Cultural Understanding
Review: I was never moved to write a review for Amazon before, but there are several aspects of this book and the way George Crane wrote it that I found extraordinary. Crane has achieved something that must be one of the most difficult in writing: getting across an authentic cross-cultural understanding of both a person, Tsung Tsai, and a place.
I appreciated that Crane did not clean up Tsung Tsai's English; presenting his words as he really spoke them, along with Crane's misunderstandings,created an immediacy to the story and the interactions between the two friends. Crane manages to make the reader feel that we get to know the real Tsung Tsai; I feel that Crane does this largely through being so very honest about himself, his doubts, and his own reactions to the monk and to events. Crane gives us just the right details to enable the reader to know what it felt like to be in this obscure corner of China.
Crane's writing about Inner Mongolia is so well done that I felt a sense of authenticity of place, people, and events that usually occurs in only the greatest of novels. I stayed up most of the night to read about the climb up the mountain to the teacher's cave; my sense of the mountain and all it meant to Tsung Tsai and his teacher was so powerful that I can sense that meaning just by looking at the picture of the mountain.
As a student of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, it has been easy for me to forget that the Chinese and Chinese Buddhists also endured extreme persecution and suffering. Through Tsung Tsai's story we come to understand this, and also that the religious aspirations of the people continue to be deep and real, even though almost all vestiges of Buddhism have been stamped out. As Tsung Tsai says, "They are hungry for Buddhism. They never forget."
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