Customer Reviews

Tales of Tibet

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As someone uninitiated in Tibetan Buddhism and literature, I found the stories in Tales of Tibet engrossing; at times troubling and inexplicable. Unlike western stories, which tend toward resolution, or at least some kind of ending, these tales remain elusive, their questions unresolved, and quite often, the end is no end at all. Indeed, in many of the stories, the purpose seems to be to obfuscate, to confuse, to show the reader there are no answers here because there are no answers in life. But the more I read, the more the stories intrigued me. I learned about Buddhist doctrine, which maintains that all our perceptions of ourselves and the cosmos are a dream. This didn't ease my confusion, rather it helped me to accept it.

I also learned a little about the politics of the region. That some Tibetan authors feel strongly that to write in Chinese about their homeland is wrong. One writer likens it to trying to attach a deer's antlers to the head of an ox. The language of the colonizer will result only in distortion. Despite this debate, stories written in Chinese have a much larger circulation, reaching beyond the Tibetan-speaking population with its high illiteracy rate. These 14 stories are translated sensitively from the original Chinese by the author.

During the British invasion of Tibet, a Tibetan abbot tells the British Colonel, who will soon massacre soldiers trying to surrender, that "The earth is not round. It is a triangle, like the shoulder bone of a sheep." In the end, the Colonel loses to the anti-scientific spiritualist abbot.

A young postman risks his life in a snowstorm on the grasslands to deliver newspapers to a village where no one can read. In another story a writer meets his own characters in a colossal palm print, a labyrinth of gullies created when the Lotus Master battled with a demon. These stories are a revelation about a country most of us can only visit in our dreams.