AUTHOR’S NOTE

While Bone Mountain is a work of fiction, the struggle of the Tibetan people to maintain their spiritual and cultural identity is all too real. There is indeed a Bureau of Religious Affairs which deploys a small army of bureaucrats against the practice of spirituality and ritual in everyday life and licenses monks based on their political, not their religious, faith. The lands of Tibet have suffered as severely as its people. It is no coincidence that Beijing’s maps refer to Tibet as Xizang, its Western Treasure House. Sacred mountains have been deforested then leveled for their mineral content, scores of thousands of Chinese miners have displaced traditional farmers and herders and more than a few Tibetans have been imprisoned for trying to prevent bulldozers from despoiling their sacred grounds.

For over a thousand years Tibetan medicine drew from a vast pharmacopoeia of Tibetan herbs and Buddhist teachings to uniquely integrate the spiritual and physical aspects of healing. Sophisticated medical colleges taught noninvasive diagnostic methods and treatments unknown in the West. That rich legacy has been largely annihilated in the Chinese occupation, many of its treasured texts and teachings lost forever. But a handful of medicine lamas did indeed survive by fleeing to India, where they quietly labor to piece together the remnants of those important traditions.

Readers interested in learning more about the struggle of the Tibetan people will find excellent overviews in Tsering Shakya’s The Dragon in the Land of Snows and John Avedon’s In Exile from the Land of Snows. Many powerful autobiographical tales by or about Tibetan survivors have become available in recent years, including Ama Adhe: The Voice that Remembers, by Ahde Tapontsang and Joy Blakeslee, Sumner Carnahan’s In the Presence of My Enemies, David Patt’s A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, Born in Lhasa by Namgyal Lhamo Taklha, and The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk by Palden Gyatso. The forces at work against Tibet’s natural environment are comprehensively reviewed in Tibet 2000: Environment and Development Issues, available from the International Campaign for Tibet. Introductions to the remarkable traditions of Tibetan medicine are offered in Terry Clifford’s Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry, and Healing from the Source by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden. Lastly, readers who wish to further explore how Tibetan Buddhists blend sand and deities would find a valuable starting place in David Cozort’s Mandala of Vajrabhairava.