Tricycle | Awake in the World

In 1959 a young Ch'an monk named Tsung Tsai escapes the Red Army troops who destmy his monastery and flees from the edge of the Gobi Desert to Hong Kong Hunted, starving, and knowing that his fellow monks are dead, Tsung Tsai is borne up by his mission: to canyon the teachings of his elderly master, who remained in his mountain to cave high above the monastery. Almost thirty years later, during a snowstorm outside Woodstock, New York, Tsung Tsai meets up with his irreverent American neighbor, a libertine poet named George Crane. In the first part of Bones of the Master, Crane mixes his own witty and lyrical prose with Tsung Tsai's wondelfully eccentric rendition of English to retell the monk’s escape from Communist China. Subsequently, Tsung Tsai persuades Crane to accompany him on a return pilgrimage to Inner Mongolia to find his teacher's bones and to provide a proper burial for his master.