Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist (Concord Library) [Hardcover]

Gretel Ehrlish (Author), Gretel Ehrlich (Author)

Book Description

Series: Concord Library | Publication Date: April 1997

A practicing Buddhist, the author of The Solace of Open Spaces embarks on a pilgrimage to climb one of China's four sacred mountains and finds Buddhist lamas seeking refuge from repression and pandas fighting extinction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As a practicing Buddhist, Gretel Ehrlich set out to climb Emie Shan, a sacred Buddhist mountain in China, to complete a personal spiritual quest. What she came away with was an understanding of the brutal effects of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution on China's Buddhist population, and the politics and bitter realities of the collision between modernity and monastic life. Written in a lively and thoughtful style with plenty of exciting passages, Questions of Heaven chronicles Ehrlich's journey through China and its recent turbulent history in such a personal way that it draws the reader closer to the subject. From her conversations with monks and a heartbreaking visit to a panda refuge, Ehrlich discovers that the ancient Buddhist tradition lives on, though not in the manner she anticipated. Silencing both Buddhism and Taoism changed the complexion of China in unexpected ways, and this journal exposes the subtleties of this shift from the perspective of one who is able to bridge the cultural and political differences with her spiritual attachment.

From Library Journal

At some point in every American Buddhist's life, he or she decides to take a spiritual journey to the East. Ehrlich's journey takes her to the Sichuan Province in China to climb Emei Shan, a sacred Buddhist mountain. Instead of finding a modern Shangri-La, she encounters a land destroyed by crass commercialism, corrupt monks, poverty, lamas, and scholars who are still deeply injured physically and psychologically by the atrocities of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Her descriptions are heartbreaking, especially of her visit to a wretched panda reserve in Chendu where the bears are only kept alive so foreigners will donate funds. Her pilgrimage seems a failure until she meets a musician who has dedicated his life to keeping alive the sacred music of his people, the Naxis. His philosophy, that music is medicine, leads the reader to understand that divinity does not necessarily reside only in holy places but also in the deep faith of good people. This is travel writing at its best. Recommended for all libraries.?Glenn Masuchika, Chaminade Univ. Lib., Honolulu
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; First Edition edition (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807073105
• ISBN-13: 978-0807073100
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,657,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Is there there there?, November 7, 2007

By 

Charles S. Fisher (Woodacre, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist (Concord Library) (Paperback)

Not being a fan of travel books, my comments may be biased. Years ago when I wandered the globe, my desire was to live as a part of the places in which I found myself. I made a terrible tourist. I mostly wanted to go where I could speak the language of the natives and getting a letter home took weeks. The world isn't like that any more, nor maybe has it so been for a while for tourists and travel writers. The four books by Gretel Ehrlich I have read run the gauntlet. "This Cold Heaven", tells of her visits to Greenland between 1995 and 2001. It best conveys a feel of what life is like for, maybe the last generation of, Inuit hunters who use dogsleds. And out on the sled is where Ms Ehrlich most wants to be. It is a beautiful book interspersed with Rasmussen's, diaries and descriptions of his life in the north. The reader gets a sense of how the Inuit world is put together, its roots, some differences between various groups and the challenges it faces, at the edge of the internet age. The greatest changes, to a relatively remote First Nation in Canada I am familiar with, were brought about by television. A kind of passivity set in: no more making music and living by one's body became less central. When dogsled, hunting Greenlanders tell Ehrlich that they just want to give their children the experience of the hunt and that the children will decide in their turn whether they will live that way, I sense she is documenting the last of the dogsled hunts. In my First Nation, the elder who last used dogs is now too old, so four wheelers and snow mobiles are a way of life.

What I lose patience with in Ehrlich's writing is most manifest in her book, "Questions of Heaven." She goes to China in search of Buddhism during the early stages of "getting rich is good." I don't quite understand her purpose except relating the difficulties of travel, telling anecdotes about some Chinese and their experiences from "let a thousand flowers bloom" to the cultural revolution, and her frustrated search. She goes to decayed monasteries which are just beginning to be opened to tourists. She is overwhelmed by the density, filth, poverty, pollution, etc. of China. Had she done some homework, all this wouldn't be such a revelation. In the Tibetan areas, she mentions the existence of Tibetan speaking westerners but does not explore who they are and why they are there even though she says she practices Tibetan Buddhism. The most interesting part of the book are her descriptions of the old man who was tortured during the cultural revolution and survived to resurrect traditional forms of music with a rag tag bunch of people from his valley. She doesn't explain why where he lives is more prosperous and happy than other places she visits.

What I find difficult in many nature/travel writers she pours on in this book. Flowery language describing clouds, hills and landscape doesn't do much for me. I have spent much time out of doors. I could wax poetic about the blood red bark of an old manzanita in contrast to the peeling orange brown of a madrone, or the stages of a slime mold or a clown nudibranch grazing urchins. The silence of the redwoods, desiccated by summer dryness just before the coming rains, filled my yesterday's walk. No signs of animal life but a few dragonflies and a fleeting flock of bushtits. A few days earlier I had used "dead" to describe it to a walking companion, and she was a bit offended. A precontact California Indian would have known what I meant. Ehrlich evens makes mention of it during her recovery in California related in book four. But it takes more than poetic adjectives to convey a scene in nature. Reading lengthy passages of romantic descriptions of nature becomes tedious. I want to know why Ehrlich travels and writes, how the places she goes are assembled, the role landscape plays, their history, their challenges, the differences among their inhabitants, etc. If her book is the journey of an American Buddhist, there is very little critical relating to Buddhism except that either nobody she meets practices meditation, even chanting, or she doesn't inquire about it.

The other two books, "Solace of Open Space," and "A Match to the Heart," fall somewhere in between. The former is good in the beginning, particularly in the descriptions of sheep herding, but becomes spotty after her marriage and life ranching. Ehrlich has really lived in Wyoming. She earned her spurs. But it would be great to know more about the strong, silent herders and ranchers: who are they; what is their inner landscape like; what are the tensions and rewards of working as they do? How does machinery effect their lives? During my brief stint as a cowboy, besides pushing cows between gigantic pastures, and sorting out the non-pregnant ones, I spent days building fences and hours in a four wheel drive pickup bouncing off-road. The chapters on the rodeo and Sun Dance give us far too little information on what these institutions are really like and what makes them tick. Ehrlich is also a tease when it comes to her personal life. We learn of the tragic death of her boyfriend which leads to her to stay in Wyoming, but the stuff of her one affair and her marriage are only hinted at. She is a beautiful woman in cowboy country. There has got to be more to it.

In the last of the foursome, "A Match to the Heart," she is truck by lightening and relates her torturous recovery. It is a touching book. I have a lot of empathy with her struggle. Her descriptions of the deep humanity of her cardiologist are beautiful. But the book also leaves me a bit unsatisfied. The husband who doesn't seem to care, her trip to London, which seemed so inappropriate given her physical condition, the people with whom she connects but also seems distant from---I want to know more about her inner processes, her meditation practice. "A Match to the Heart" has aspects of a travel book, a chapter about being on a boat in the Alaska Panhandle without any sense of why she is there: a paying tourist; a guest of scientists or friends? When Ehrlich is on the way to recovery she lays out a map of the world pondering where next. It is hard to fathom, that she runs off from her Wyoming ranch to far distant travels and undertakes similar jaunts during her absences from Greenland. When she casually mentions these, the style of life implicit in so bouncing around the world seems inconsistent with the sense of place she is trying to convey. I am deeply attracted to what she has to say when she really inhabits the places in which she spends, as they say, quality time. I guess I want more of that from her.
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written, but take it only as a PERSPECTIVE of a foreign, February 6, 2000

By 

W. Tan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist (Concord Library) (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a book about the current state of buddhism in China, this is not for you. The four stars are given to its enjoyable prose, not to the information it conveys.

Well intentioned as she might be, Ms. Ehrlich apparently did not have a chance to understand the current revival of buddhism in China, being a tourist whose knowlege and DREAM about China was only from books and a few exemplary persons she knew. Recent accounts from oversea Chinese pilgrims painted a different picture. I suppose that with the brisk pace in which everything is carried out in China these days, many things can change in four years. Moreover, it would be surprising if the communists do not learn that in order to make these pilgrimage sites attractive to oversea devotees, at least a semblance of religious atmosphere has to be fostered. It wasn't surprising to read of the accounts of monks whose only practice in the evening was to watch TV. Those are the vestige of the turmoil and destruction of the Cultural Revolution. I only feel sorry that Ms. Ehrlich did not have a chance to read the corpus of works, in Chinese, that aptly and vividly delineate the deplorable state of buddhism in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. These deplorable sacrileges no doubt still exist but now there are many young and well-educated monastics who enter the order for authentic and admirable purposes. It is them that carry the standard of the revival of buddhim silently, unknown to the westerners--which is good, in the current political atmosphere.

Ms. Ehrlich also did not (or does she) know that there is now a Buddhist college in Emei and that the abbot of one of its monasteries was a highly revered monk who had just passed away in his 90s (if I remember correctly) last year.

To the contrary of the first reviewer, I do not find Ms. Ehrlich's accounts condescending, I only find some of the accounts inaccurate. There are major and serious problems in China and Ms. Ehrlich's insight of the materialistic obsession of the Chinese and the huge toll it levies on the environment is quite correct, although I am much more optimistic then she was. As I told my friends who complained about the filth and disorder of the Chinatown in Manhattan, what touches me more is the dynamic undercurrent of lives there. As a student, I have toiled for a few months in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant (although not in Manhattan) and have learnt that an outsider who carries too much delusion and expectation lacks the capacity to appreciate life as it is without being too judgemental. Afterall, what is the meaning of pilgrimage? Isn't it simply an amplification of the point of contact between our own minds and the great minds of the bodhisattvas embodied in these mountains? The mountains are in the mind and in essense has nothing to do with how the itinerary is run. A pilgrim with such a "mindset" will always possess the capacity to be touched even in the most arduous and grotesque circumstances.

But then again, I am an oversea Chinese who is yet to set foot on China myself. In that regard, take my words only as a biased perspective and go see for yourselves, although if you are a westerner, that experience might always be one from the outside, sadly...

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pretentious, October 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist (Concord Library) (Paperback)

Questions of Heaven is a book filled with hope and faith: there's hope that any one of us who spends more than 24 hours in China, and has enough faith to shop their manuscript around to publishers will get published, regardless of how pretentious we or our work is or how little knowledge we have of the subject we're covering.

The first shocker about this book is that it's about US$20 for a 120-page hardcover. While certain classic titles lend themselves to this format as possible gifts of keepsakes, this is not one of them. Greater disappointment lies within when the purchaser then actually begins to read the book.

Subtitled "The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist," Ms. Ehrlich feels compelled to use the title over and over again. She came to China in 1995 on a pilgrimage to China's four holy Buddhist mountains, although the book concentrates on her travels in southwest China (where only one of the mountains, Emei Shan, lies, in Sichuan province).

Unfortunately for the reader, Questions of Heaven is Lonely Planet brought to life: it offers the same critical, condescending tone towards local people, their customs, and way of life; it is written from the perspective that travel writer Joe Cummings refers to as "my own private Asia," where everyone else is a tourist, but the author is a traveler, the latest incarnation of Marco Polo. Ms. Ehrlich defines basic Buddhist terms such as samsara (human suffering), but doesn't bother to enlighten us with meanings for more obscure phrases. It's okay for Ms. Ehrlich to sit in judgment of the state of Buddhism in China, because she herself hails from that nexus of Nirvana, the United States.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this book is that it's written like the myriad volumes that appeared in the early 1980s; anyone from actor Charlton Heston to economist John Kenneth Galbraith could spend a few weeks in China and then write a book about it. However, after 20 years and millions of tourists, Ms. Ehrlich still has the audacity to write about Lijiang as if every backpacking foreign student hasn't traipsed through there during their Chinese New Year holiday.

The only redeeming part of this book is the occasional pithy line that Ms. Ehrlich records, delivered dead-pan by someone she encounters. While climbing Emei Shan, she meets a Catholic couple selling Buddhist statues and prayer beads. "We can make money here," they tell her. Then there are the monks who spend their evenings entranced-by television. "We chant twice a day, then we watch television." If it were that easy, then millions of American kids would have already reached Enlightenment.

Maybe in her next life, Ms. Ehrlich will come back as travel writer.