Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness [Hardcover]

Daja Wangchuk Meston (Author), Clare Ansberry (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2007

"I packed a blue Samsonite suitcase with my belongings -- a couple of pairs of jeans and shirts, UB40 tapes, the Swiss army knife I had stolen from my mother, my Tibetan prayer book, and a red plastic Camay soap dish I bought in Dharamsala that had become a good luck charm for me."

With these, all his worldly possessions at the age of seventeen, Daja Wangchuk Meston caught an airliner to America, the unfamiliar land of which he was a citizen, and began his arduous personal journey to discover and mend his long-severed ties to his family, his country, and, in a very real sense, his own identity.

In this moving memoir, the author tells the incredible story of a young man who used his Buddhist upbringing and the love of a good woman -- his young wife -- to learn that forgiving others can play a critical role in healing a damaged soul.

Daja had much to forgive. In the early 1970s, at the age of three, he was taken by his hippie American parents to Nepal and left in the care of a Tibetan family. The Tibetans in turn placed him in a Buddhist monastery where, at the age of six, he was ordained to be a monk. There, in scenes reminiscent of the novels of Charles Dickens, he was ostracized by the other boy monks, who taunted him for his Caucasian physical traits, left so hungry he stole scraps of bread, and slept on a flea-infested straw mat. He was an outsider in an insular monastic world, unable to understand what had befallen him and longing for the warmth of his mother's embrace.

His mother became a Buddhist nun, and caring for a child, she thought, would impede her spiritual journey. Her occasional and brief visits with young Daja became increasingly rare. As he grew up, there were often years without a single maternal visit. His father, unbeknownst to the boy, had suffered a mental breakdown and returned, helpless, to Los Angeles.

The story of Daja's self-generated ouster from the monastery as an adolescent (he pretended to have slept with a prostitute), his eventual migration to his homeland, his lifelong attempt to understand and reconnect with his parents, and his eventual and dangerous work on behalf of Tibetan rights under Chinese oppression make for a compelling reading experience.

But more than that, the story of Daja Meston reminds us of the universal human need for roots and family bonds. It is ultimately an unforgettable story of love, hope, and forgiveness and of a gentle man with an enormous capacity for all three.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this memoir, Meston tells the wrenching tale of being put in a Buddhist monastery as a child by his hippie parents, who had hopes of him becoming a monk. Meston was born in 1970 to a father who was a self-taught artist, and later descended into mental illness, and a mother who hailed from a wealthy Hollywood family and became so enraptured by Buddhist teachings that she became a nun in a Nepalese monastery. At age six, Meston was placed in a large Tibetan foster family before entering the Kopan temple. The only white-skinned boy, he was teasingly called White Eye and Rotten, and soon grew bored by the tedious study and chores. He became rebellious, and was eventually expelled for breaking his vow of celibacy and sent to live with relatives in California. Meston spoke little English, had no formal education, and spent years educating himself (he was eventually accepted at Brandeis). Meston later worked for Tibetan rights issues, traveling to Tibet, where he created a cause célèbre when he leaped out the window while under house arrest to avoid interrogation by Chinese officials. Meston's (and Ansberry's) style is journalistically cut-and-dried and occasionally stifles the emotional turbulence that drives Weston's psychic journey, from abandoned child to lonely immigrant and suicidal prisoner. (Mar.)
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Review

"What a life! Born to a footloose pair of wandering American hippies, raised in a large Tibetan family, and ordained at six as a monk, Daja Wangchuk Meston's quest for his own identity is a kind of modern-day Odyssey. Alive with the sights and smells of a hidden world, resonant with emotional honesty, it is the story of the most epic journey of them all, the one that leads to home."

-- Geraldine Brooks,winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel March and author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden Lives of Islamic Women --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Printing edition (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743287479
• ISBN-13: 978-0743287470
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,090,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finding Forgiveness, March 22, 2007

By 

Mary Akers (Western NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness (Hardcover)

Daja Wangchuk Meston begins his memoir dramatically with a desperate leap from a third story hotel window in a remote area of Tibet. It's a quick glimpse at a man pushed beyond his limits, unsure of his place in the world, and desperate beyond sense. When he jumped, he fully expected to die.

That was in 1999, and the author had been in the custody of Chinese authorities, suffering long days of interrogation with no sleep, accused of crimes against the People's Republic of China for his work on behalf of Tibetan rights.

The memoir then leaves behind that awful, desperate step--a step that shattered his heels and his life (both of which would take years to mend)--and takes us back in time to his first steps as a toddler on the Greek island of Corfu. Daja was born to hippie parents (Feather and Larry Greeneye) who hoped to leave behind the commercialism of their own American upbringing. When he was one, his parents travelled to India on a whim, and then on to Nepal to attend a Buddhist retreat. It was there, in the mountains of Nepal, that the author's father suffered a debilitating beakdown and disappeared, only to emerge from the woods a week later, disheveled and incoherent. He was sent back to the states (alone) and did not see his son again until decades later.

When Daja was three years old, his mother inexplicably delivered him to a local family (Tibetan nobles, living in Nepal) to raise. For three years he believed they were his real family--until they sent him, alone, at the ripe old age of six, to a Buddhist monastery to take the vows of a monk.

A number of privileged Americans have gone (by choice) to monastic retreats, seeking solitude, respite, and peace, but Daja's childhood was far from idyllic. Thanks in part to his pale skin and blond hair, Daja was treated as an outcast both by his peers and adult monks alike. And the indignities he suffered over the next ten years were Dickensian in scope: sleep deprivation, forced labor, lice infestations, constant hunger, humiliation, beatings, dysentery, alienation and isolation.

He was further emotionally orphaned by a mother who chose, herself, to join the monastic life of a Buddhist nun, shaving her head, wearing robes, and leaving the secular world behind (to include the responsibilities of parenthood).

At its core, this is the heartbreaking story of a lost childhood. It is the tale of one man's lifelong search for identity, belonging, and the welcoming arms of family. And it is difficult to read this book and fathom what the young author endured without feeling anger on his behalf. But the adult Meston refuses to stay in a place of anger and self-pity, searching instead for understanding and forgiveness. Fortunately, the redemptive ending brings us full-circle, and--as the title implies--comes back around to peace.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A curious and unique person, April 15, 2007

By 

Susan O'Neill (Andover, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness (Hardcover)

Late in this memoir, Daja Wangchuk Meston writes about musing on the impermanence of life. He decides that, when he dies: "I...wish to be remembered as a curious and unique person." The sentiment is as simple, humble and understated as the tone of this book. And this is a credit to Meston and his co-author Clare Ansberry, because had they indulged in grand and flowery prose, it could only have distracted from Meston's astonishing story.

The author has lived a bucketful of lives in his 37 years, and only lately has he come to fit them together, put them in perspective, and draw from this strange tapestry a sense of his own human value. This is understandable, when you consider that he's a white American born to a mother who became a Buddhist nun and a father who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown, partly raised in a Tibetan family until he was dropped into a Buddhist monastary, where he became a monk at the age of six and lived a sheltered, puzzled, religiously indentured life until, at 17, he excaped by means of a lie and flew back to the US, where he found himself in a California high school, speaking rudimentary English and astonished to discover that the world was not flat... Add to this an early marriage to a wonderful, willful. deeply troubled young woman, a pair of crushed ankles earned by jumping out the window of a hotel room in Tibet while incarcerated by Chinese authorities...

Whew! It's amazing this man is alive. It's doubly amazing that he has been strong enough--and wise enough--to sort through all the craziness and survive.

Comes the Peace is one helluva tale, by turns incredible, heart-wrenching and cautiously triumphant. This book not only tells the story of this "curious and unique person" simply and well, but it gives the reader a gift of empathy, an honest look at our skewed world through that person's eyes. We are premitted to see how it feels to be the odd man out, the minority of one, the new arrival to a life everybody else takes for granted. If Meston had to scramble to catch up, so, when it comes to respecting the cost of such effort, do most of us. There is much to learn here--about attachment, abandonment, family, love, salvation, forgiveness.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. May it fly off the shelves, and may we all appreciate our stumbling humanity a bit more for reading it.

Susan O'Neill, author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of loss and healing, December 6, 2007

By 

Mariel K. Bossert (Chatham, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness (Hardcover)

This exquisitely written book will resound with anyone who has experienced emotional loss, particulaly in one's childhood. The experience of reading this chronicle with the author's capacity for forgiveness is a healing process in itself. I simply had to go to Newton to meet him at his shop, Karma, and was greeted by a man with the most beautiful eyes of amazing depth and a lovely smile. Start this book only when you can curl up and continue non-stop to the end. You will not be able to put it down. What a twist of irony it will be when Hollywood comes calling to make a film of this amazing life!

Mariel Bossert