Eat the Buddha Life and death in a Tibetan town

Barbara Demick

Book - 2020

"Set in Aba, a town perched at 12,000 feet on the Tibetan plateau in the far western reaches of China that has been the engine of Tibetan resistance for decades, Eat the Buddha tells the story of a nation through the lives of ordinary people living in the throes of this conflict. Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick illuminates a part of China and the aggressions of this superpower that have been largely off limits to Westerners who have long romanticized Tibetans as a deeply spiritual, peaceful people. She tells a sweeping story that spans decades through the lives of her subjects, among them a princess whose family lost everything in the Cultural Revolution; a young student from a nomadic family who becomes radicalized in the stor...ied monastery of Kirta; an upwardly mobile shopkeeper who falls in love with a Chinese woman; a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance. Demick paints a broad canvas through an intimate view of these lives, depicting the tradition of resistance that results in the shocking acts of self-immolation, the vibrant, enduring power of Tibetan Buddhism, and the clash of modernity with ancient ways of life. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shocking"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

951.505/Demick
2 / 2 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 951.505/Demick Checked In
2nd Floor 951.505/Demick Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Barbara Demick (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvii, 325 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical resources and index.
ISBN
9780812998757
  • Author's Note
  • Maps
  • Part 1. 1958-1976
  • Chapter 1. The Last Princess
  • Chapter 2. Eat the Buddha
  • Chapter 3. Return of the Dragon
  • Chapter 4. The Year That Time Collapsed
  • Chapter 5. A Thoroughly Chinese Girl
  • Chapter 6. Red City
  • Chapter 7. Exile
  • Part 2. Interregnum, 1976-1989
  • Chapter 8. The Black Cat and the Golden Worm
  • Chapter 9. A Tibetan Education
  • Chapter 10. A Peacock from the West
  • Part 3. 1990-2013
  • Chapter 11. Wild Baby Yak
  • Chapter 12. A Monk's Life
  • Chapter 13. Compassion
  • Chapter 14. The Party Animal
  • Chapter 15. The Uprising
  • Chapter 16. The Eye of the Ghost
  • Chapter 17. Celebrate or Else
  • Chapter 18. No Way Out
  • Chapter 19. Boy on Fire
  • Chapter 20. Sorrows
  • Chapter 21. The Zip Line
  • Part 4. 2014 to the Present
  • Chapter 22. India
  • Chapter 23. Everything but My Freedom
  • Notes
  • Glossary
  • Acknowledgments
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Journalist Demick does for Tibet what she did for Sarajevo in Logavina Street (1996) and North Korea in Nothing to Envy(2010): reveal the lives of individuals struggling against state tyranny and violence. Demick anchors her Tibetan chronicle to Ngaba, a town on the Tibetan Plateau in the former kingdom of Mei. Gonpo, a daughter of the last Mei king, who was deposed by the Chinese in 1958, is at the center of the group portrait Demick meticulously composes, weaving in defining details of everyday life as she recounts harrowing stories of brutality, loss, sacrifice, and love that embody the larger story of Tibet's long fight for freedom. A stellar student who tried to conform to the party line, Gonpo was nonetheless sent to a remote hard-labor camp, surviving to eventually join Tibet's government in exile. Readers also meet intrepid entrepreneur Norbu; the "unofficial historian" Delek; Dongtuk, a monk; and poet, teacher, and dissident Tsegyam. Writing with pristine clarity made possible by complete fluency in her complex material, Demick provides the missing human dimension in coverage of twenty-first-century Tibet, including the legacy of resistance that has engendered tragic protests by self-immolation, and all the anguish and paradoxes of lives heavily surveilled by the Chinese government, yet largely invisible to the greater world.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this heartbreaking and doggedly reported account, journalist Demick (Nothing to Envy) views the tragic history of Tibet under Chinese rule through the stories of people with roots in Ngaba County, the site of the Mei kingdom in the remote reaches of Sichuan province. Demick recounts the region's first violent encounters with the Red Army during its Long March in the 1930s, when starving soldiers "ate the Buddha," devouring Tibetan votive offerings made of barley flour and butter as they fled Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces. Her survey of the Chinese Communist Party's grinding, decades-long repression of Tibetans also includes the odyssey of the daughter of the last ruler of the Mei kingdom, who fled the family's palace during the 1958 crackdown that eventually forced the Dalai Lama into exile in India; the harrowing story of an elderly market stall operator whose young niece was killed when Chinese troops fired on civilians in a 2008 demonstration; and sketches of monks and nuns who set themselves ablaze in protest of Chinese rule. "For the most part," Demick writes, "they were regular people who hoped to live normal, happy lives in China's Tibet without having to make impossible choices between their faith, family, and their country." Demick captures her subjects' trials and sacrifices with superb reporting and razor-sharp prose. This poignant history could do much to refocus attention on the situation in Tibet. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This latest from Demick (Nothing To Envy) replaces the mystery that surrounds discussion of Tibet in the West with candid, heartbreaking stories of real Tibetans who have lived through periods of great tumult in their homeland. The stories are beautifully rendered and walk readers through the events that shook Ngaba, a town in Tibet that became synonymous in the 21st century with tragic self-immolations, and is geographically a difficult place to visit. By showing how people's individual lives unfolded and the hardships and dangers they endured, Demick sheds light on how Chinese oppression led many Tibetans to fight back, sacrificing their lives in the hopes of preserving their culture and their peoples' right to freedom. Readers will be moved by the tragedies and triumphs of these unforgettable individuals and will develop a greater understanding of those who call the "rooftop of the world" their home. VERDICT Taking a compelling approach to documenting Ngaba's history through the eyes of its own people, this wonderfully written book will leave readers with a stronger appreciation for why the movement to support the Tibetan people deserves so much more attention.--Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A portrait of one town reveals Tibet's tragic past. Demick, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who served as its bureau chief in Beijing and Seoul, offers a vibrant, often heartbreaking history of Tibet, centered on Ngaba, which sits at 11,000 feet on the plateau where Tibet collides with China. The author made three trips to the town beginning in 2013, and she interviewed Tibetans in Ngaba and many others living abroad, including the Dalai Lama and an exiled princess, who spoke candidly about the culture, religion, and politics of the besieged region. Tibet has long been vulnerable to Chinese invasion: In the 1930s, Red Army soldiers, after ransacking farms and slaughtering animals, caused widespread famine. Desperate from hunger, they discovered that votive statues in the monasteries were sculpted from barley flour and butter and were forced into "literally eating the Buddha." Demick chronicles decades of incursions, beginning in the 1950s, that resulted in cultural upheaval, economic hardship, and the deaths of about 300,000 Tibetans. Determined to sweep out religion, the Chinese demolished monasteries. Images of the Dalai Lama--or even mention of his name--incurred harsh punishment. Tibetans were herded into communes, where they could not even cook for themselves. Schoolchildren were indoctrinated to believe that the Communist Party "had liberated Tibet from serfdom." By 1968, protests arose, demanding the "dismantling of the communes, the distribution of livestock to the people, and the right to reopen the monasteries." Not surprisingly, the Communists refused, directing militias to intimidate and persecute the activists. The protests, Demick writes, "established Ngaba's reputation for rebelliousness," which intensified in 2009, when Ngaba became notorious for self-immolations, "an unequivocal register of discontent." Although many Tibetans are grateful for the economic growth and technology that the Chinese have brought, the loss has been tremendous. "I have everything I might possibly want in life," one Tibetan businessman told Demick, "but my freedom." Memorable voices inform a penetrating, absorbing history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 The Last Princess 1958 Gonpo could smell the smoke before she could see what was happening. Although she was just seven years old and not well versed in the politics of the day, it confirmed a nagging feeling she'd had for weeks that something was amiss. She was on her way home with her mother, sister, an aunt, and a convoy of servants. They had been away, attending the funeral rituals for her uncle. It had been summer when they set out for her uncle's village, but they'd been away for forty-nine days, the traditional mourning period between death and rebirth for Buddhists. Now it was early autumn, and the evening chill whispered of the snow that would soon creep down from the mountaintops. Gonpo wore a thick sheepskin robe trimmed with fur, but the wind whipped up from underneath her horse and made her shiver. Everybody was on horseback: Gonpo, like most Tibetans, was a seasoned equestrian at a young age. They followed the course of a road that had recently been laid out by Chinese military engineers, though not yet paved, heading due west, into the setting sun. Their route forked off at a stream that led north to Gonpo's home, and as they emerged from behind a thicket of shrubbery, Gonpo could see where the smoke was coming from. From her vantage point atop the horse, she had a clear view of half a dozen bonfires and a corresponding number of tents. As they approached, she could see that these weren't the black yak-hair tents used by Tibetans, but the small white tents of the People's Liberation Army. This was 1958, nine years after Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People's Republic of China, so it was not unusual to see encampments of the Red Army around the countryside. But this was on the family property, and that was surprising. Gonpo had been fighting off sleep on the last leg of the two-day trek, but now she was jolted awake by curiosity and a touch of fear. She was one of the first to dismount, sliding off her horse without waiting for the servants to help her. She ran up to the gate, wondering why nobody had come out to greet the returning convoy. She banged hard on the gate--a slab of wood twice as high as a grown man with a massive lintel across the top. There was no response, so she shouted at the top of her lungs. "Hello, hello. Where is everybody?" Her mother walked up behind her and called out as well. Eventually, Gonpo's nanny came and unlocked the gate. Instead of a warm welcome, the maid leaned over the child as if she weren't there, bringing her face close enough to Gonpo's mother to whisper directly into her ear. Gonpo couldn't hear the words, but she discerned from her mother's reaction that it couldn't be good. Gonpo had seen her mother crying a lot lately; the uncle who died had been her favorite brother--and Gonpo thought maybe her mother was crying again because she was still sad about his death. At least that's what Gonpo wanted to believe, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary--the smoke, the tents, the stone-faced maid. Her instinct told her that this was the beginning of the end of the world as she knew it. Gonpo was raised a princess. Her father, Palgon Rapten Tinley, a name that roughly translates as "Honorable Enlightenment Steadfast," was the fourteenth in a line of rulers in what was known as the Mei kingdom. Its capital was Ngaba, in what is now Sichuan province. When Gonpo was born, in 1950, Ngaba was a nondescript market town where traders came to sell salt and tea and where herders came to sell their butter, skins, and wool. This entire region was a patchwork of small fiefdoms governed by various chieftains and kings, princes, khans, and warlords. The Chinese used the term tusi, often translated as "landlord," to refer to local rulers like Gonpo's father, but the Tibetans called him gyalpo, or king. English-language chronicles from the early twentieth century also refer to him as royalty. That was certainly how Gonpo perceived her family's position in society. As a child, Gonpo was dressed in the floor-length robes called chubas, cinched at the waist. Almost all Tibetans wore similar garments, the quality reflecting their status. Gonpo's robes were trimmed with otter fur. Around her neck she wore ropes of beads, big as grapes--coral, amber, and, most precious of all, dzi, a Tibetan striped agate thought to protect against the evil eye. Otherwise she wasn't a very girlish princess. She was cute rather than pretty, with gapped teeth and a snub nose that gave her the look of a mischievous little boy. Like many young girls in Ngaba, Gonpo had her hair cropped short--a signal that she was not of marriageable age. Her mother and other adult women in the royal family wore long braids, held in place by tassels and strands of coral, so elaborate that they might take servants two days to braid. The family lived in an imposing manor house--technically a palace, though it looked more like a fortress, stout and sturdy, built to endure--located on the east end of Ngaba, just outside the downtown area. The house was designed in a traditional Tibetan style out of rammed earth, dun-colored so that it blended into the landscape during the dry season when the plateau was bare of grass. The massive walls--up to nine feet thick at the bottom--tapered inwards toward the top to provide stability in case of earthquakes; the narrow slits of windows were similarly trapezoidal, framed by wooden latticework. The walls were unadorned except for two protruding wooden balconies on either side--one on the east, the other on the west. The balconies looked elegant, but in fact they accommodated the toilets. Human waste dropped below, where it was mixed with ash and spread on the fields as fertilizer. What the house lacked in modern amenities, it made up for in scale. It measured 80,000 square feet with more than 850 rooms ranging from dungeons, stables, and storerooms on the very bottom, to the rooms of increasing elegance and purpose as they rose upward. There were the bedrooms for the children and their mother, then the king's retinue of assistants and his private officers. The rooms on the upper levels were paneled in wood that masked the dirt exterior. The upper floor was appropriately dedicated to spiritual practice. The rooms came alive with frescos and thangkas, Tibetan wall-hangings, all in eye-popping shades of poster colors. Since Buddhist figures are reincarnated over and over again, they appear in countless manifestations, male and female, familiar and fanciful. There was the Buddha, past and future, and many more of the bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who forgo nirvana to be reborn for the benefit of others. The most prized piece was a statue of Avalokitesvara, or Chenrezig, the bodhisattva of compassion, the patron saint of Tibetans, given to the king by the 14th Dalai Lama, the centerpiece of his chapel. The king was a dedicated bibliophile who had an extensive collection of books and scriptures. Some were printed with gold and silver. The reception room under the scripture hall was large enough to accommodate thousands of monks. On Buddhist holidays, the palace would echo with a cacophony of chanting, cymbals, horns, and conch shells. And the untranslatable mantra uttered by Tibetans to invoke their patron saint, the bodhisattva of compassion, om mani padme hum Daily life inside the palace was measured out by the rituals of Buddhism. The king began every morning in front of a shrine, with repeated prostrations. Standing upright with hands clasped in prayer up over his head, he'd then in one movement extend his body in full horizontal position, prone on the floor, and stand again. The ritual kept his physique lean and his mind clear. It was impossible to distinguish that which was religion from that which was culture or habit. When Gonpo was caught in a lie, she was made to do repeated circumambulations around a nearby monastery, spinning countless prayer wheels, big vertical cylinders of metal, wood, and leather with prayers written on them. Each time you turned them on their spindles it was like reciting the prayer aloud. They were heavy for a child, and the penance forced her to reflect on her wrongdoing. The children--Gonpo and her sister, who was six years older--lived with their mother in separate quarters on one side of the house. Upon awakening, their mother would take the girls to their father's chambers to wish him good morning. They would repeat the visit at bedtime to wish him good night. The family ate most meals together, and their father strictly enforced their manners. Prayers were said before eating. The children waited while the elders ate first. Their father made it a point to clear his plate down to the last grain of rice, reminding his daughters of how hard farmers toiled to produce their meal. He insisted also that the staff get the same portions of food as he did, although they often ate their food later when it was cold. The king was a fastidious man who didn't want his daughters, despite their royal bloodlines, to be spoiled. Although the house was full of servants, the king made his own bed. Excerpted from Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.