George L. Crane Boeken

In the steady hands of poet George Crane, previously unknown Zen master Tsung Tsai comes off as truly extraordinary. A "poet, philosopher, house builder, scientist, doctor, and when necessary, kung fu ass-kicker," Tsung Tsai would still be wandering about anonymously if it were not, Crane says, for the need of financing provided by an advance on this book. The last of the monks from his Chinese monastery, Tsung Tsai felt he had to return one last time to find and honor his master's bones and rekindle his tradition. Crane recounts their joint adventure, opening with Tsung Tsai's harrowing decades-earlier escape from newly communist China, walking from Inner Mongolia to Hong Kong through a war-torn, famine-struck, psychotic land, nearly starving along the way. Crane, a self-styled hedonist ne'er-do-well, who says that meditation makes him nauseous, sets the stage for an entrancing buddy story back to China with this highly disciplined but carefree Zen master. As their mutual affection grows, Crane absorbs Tsung Tsai's spare but demanding philosophy, which sustains them through the base poverty of northern China, a life-threatening 18-hour climb up and down a treacherous mountain, and a confrontation with a master of black magic. A page-turner and an eye-opener.

Beyond the House of the Lama, now in paperback, traces Crane's adventures as a writer, wanderer, and anarchic but still failing student of Zen. It begins in 1996 at the edge of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, where he and his teacher and friend, Zen Master Tsung Tsai, are forced by a sandstorm to end their quest to find the lost temple at Two Wolf Mountain. It continues with a harrowing, near disastrous attempt to deliver a ratty, 58 foot ferrous cement sailboat to Granada. Setting sail from Key Largo into the heart of hurricane season, with a crew of eccentrics and outlaws, led by the infamous Captain Bananas. They run with a disintegrating sailboat into the perfect squall. The tale ends in the winter of 2003, when after weeks of desert travel, Crane and his companions–––the nomad Jumaand and the young, beautiful Mongol girl Oka, his bed mate and bodyguard–––stand beneath the remote cliffs of Delgaz Khaan in Outer Mongolia's South Gobi. Here, Crane, after burying his long dead father, sets out on a new quest, looking to find what the nomads call Windhorse, "the beginning of the wind," but finds what every nomad knows, that every road is more a direction than a destination.