Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

by Barbara Demick Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Overview

A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to Envy

“A brilliantly reported and eye-opening work of narrative nonfiction.”-The New York Times Book Review

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Sehgal, The New York Times ¿ The New York Times Book Review ¿ The Washington Post ¿ NPR ¿ The Economist ¿ Outside ¿ Foreign Affairs

Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong's Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter-to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. 
 
Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of Demick's subjects, among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti, an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance, and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese, or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence, or do they fight?
 
Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one's culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shocking.

Editorial Reviews

SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

This audiobook is a riveting and unforgettable listening experience. Barbara Demick recounts the invasion of Mao’s army into Tibet, the resistance, the brutal oppression, the exile of the Dalai Lama, and the self-immolations of Tibetan monks. She deepens that history with a focus on the townspeople of Ngaba, in particular a former princess, an activist, an entrepreneur, and a nomad. Cassandra Campbell further enriches Demick’s prose with a clear and engrossing narration suffused with sensitivity and expressiveness. Campbell rolls through the Chinese and Tibetan names and places without hesitation, and she employs pacing and tone that capture the gravity of the Tibetan situation, the horror of the self-immolations, and the grief of family members left behind. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Anne Fadiman

…a brilliantly reported and eye-opening work of narrative nonfiction…The chapters on the self-immolations are the heart of Eat the Buddha—the terrible climax for which Demick has prepared us through her recounting of more than 60 years of religious repression and human rights abuses. There's a good deal of exposition, all of it essential, but whenever possible, she presents Ngaba's brutal history through the stories of individual characters, the technique pioneered by John Hersey in Hiroshima…Demick, who used the same technique to excellent effect in her previous books…knows what she's doing.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

In [Demick's] latest, the masterly Eat the Buddha, she profiles a group of Tibetans with roots in Ngaba County, in the Chinese province of Sichuan, which bears the gory distinction of being the "undisputed world capital of self-immolations"…Demick covers an awe-inspiring breadth of history—from the heyday of the Tibetan empire, which could compete with those of the Turks and Arabs, to the present day, as the movement for Tibetan independence has faltered and transformed into an effort at cultural and spiritual survival.

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/27/2020

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)

From the Publisher

Outstanding . . . a book not only about modern Tibet but one that helps explain the current, poisonous moment in China.”—Financial Times
 
“[Demick’s] method is programmatic openness, deep listening, a willingness to be waylaid; the effect, a prismatic picture of history as experienced and understood by individuals in their full amplitude and idiosyncrasy.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
 
“This remarkable book offers a unique insight into Tibet's plight, allowing the reader to understand what it is like for its people to be tossed about in a political storm they neither want nor understand.”—Daily Mail

“You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet. Her work is fair-minded, chilling, awe-inspiringly rigorous, and as vivid as cinema.”—Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

“Barbara Demick has produced an elegiac narrative of a frontier town that is a hotbed of resistance on the Tibetan plateau. With novelistic depth and through characteristically painstaking research, Demick offers a poignant reminder of the enduring power of memory to illuminate untold histories.”—Tsering Shakya, author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows

“Barbara Demick’s new book is essential reading for anyone interested in China and Tibet. The reporting is rich, the writing is beautiful, and the stories will stay with you. I couldn’t put it down.”—John Pomfret, author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom

“Deeply and meticulously researched, Eat the Buddha tells the story of the beautiful area of eastern Tibet . . . Demick is to be given highest honors for her unflinching account, and her readers will be rewarded with a transformative encounter with the real lives of some extraordinary people.”—Robert A. F. Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor Emeritus, Columbia University

“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.”—Booklist

Library Journal

06/01/2020

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

SEPTEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

This audiobook is a riveting and unforgettable listening experience. Barbara Demick recounts the invasion of Mao’s army into Tibet, the resistance, the brutal oppression, the exile of the Dalai Lama, and the self-immolations of Tibetan monks. She deepens that history with a focus on the townspeople of Ngaba, in particular a former princess, an activist, an entrepreneur, and a nomad. Cassandra Campbell further enriches Demick’s prose with a clear and engrossing narration suffused with sensitivity and expressiveness. Campbell rolls through the Chinese and Tibetan names and places without hesitation, and she employs pacing and tone that capture the gravity of the Tibetan situation, the horror of the self-immolations, and the grief of family members left behind. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-05-14
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169266535
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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