Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness

Additional Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness Information

With these, all his worldly possessions at the age of seventeen, Daja Wangchuk Meston caught an airliner to America, the unfamiliar land of which he was a citizen, and began his arduous personal journey to discover and mend his long-severed ties to his family, his country, and, in a very real sense, his own identity.

In this moving memoir, the author tells the incredible story of a young man who used his Buddhist upbringing and the love of a good woman -- his young wife -- to learn that forgiving others can play a critical role in healing a damaged soul.

Daja had much to forgive. In the early 1970s, at the age of three, he was taken by his hippie American parents to Nepal and left in the care of a Tibetan family. The Tibetans in turn placed him in a Buddhist monastery where, at the age of six, he was ordained to be a monk. There, in scenes reminiscent of the novels of Charles Dickens, he was ostracized by the other boy monks, who taunted him for his Caucasian physical traits, left so hungry he stole scraps of bread, and slept on a flea-infested straw mat. He was an outsider in an insular monastic world, unable to understand what had befallen him and longing for the warmth of his mother's embrace.

His mother became a Buddhist nun, and caring for a child, she thought, would impede her spiritual journey. Her occasional and brief visits with young Daja became increasingly rare. As he grew up, there were often years without a single maternal visit.  His father, unbeknownst to the boy, had suffered a mental breakdown and returned, helpless, to Los Angeles.

The story of Daja's self-generated ouster from the monastery as an adolescent (he pretended to have slept with a prostitute), his eventual migration to his homeland, his lifelong attempt to understand and reconnect with his parents, and his eventual and dangerous work on behalf of Tibetan rights under Chinese oppression make for a compelling reading experience.

But more than that, the story of Daja Meston reminds us of the universal human need for roots and family bonds. It is ultimately an unforgettable story of love, hope, and forgiveness and of a gentle man with an enormous capacity for all three.

What Customers Say About Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness:

Daja's journey truly inspires hope and gives you a fresh perspective on life, love, forgiveness and reminds us of how short life really is. I loved this book from beginning to end.

Although his specific story is unique there is much each of us can gleam from it. Daja was then invited to speak at our church. I was introduced to this book my someone at my church. Can you forgive someone who has hurt you and can you accept them for who they are and not who you want them to be. I really enjoyed this book. Full of very descriptive phrases for places, emotions and relationships it kept me enthralled. Daja's story made me take a look my relationships with those who have hurt me and those I may have hurt. He signed the book " May this book inspire forgiveness" Yes Daja it has and will.

For instance, he describes his hospital visits and treatment after his fall, but never really describes the extend of his recovery, or even whether he can walk again. I enjoyed it very much. All of a sudden he is visiting his mother in Mexico. As a conterpoint to the other reviews however, I'd like to point out that it could have been a little better written. The narrative is choppy at places where he fails to keep the reader informed of important developments. There are a number of instances like this. Overall, however, he has led a remarkable life and the memoir relates it reasonably well.

This poor boy had been psychologically tortured. "Comes the Peace" shocked me into the realisation that the "compassion and love" that we all associate with Tibetan Buddhism is definitely being violated inside the walls of some Monasteries. Though through his sadness, confusion and loneliness he emerges with an inner strength and hopefully inner peace.This is an important book as it may contribute to shifting the discriminatory and out-dated practises of one of the world's oldest religions. Not only by the "monk police" but by the Lamas and monks themselves.This book was an eye-opening account of an American's boy's experience inside a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Here he was marginalised and tormented for being "white" and different by his peers and whacked over the head by Rosary beads when only a very young boy by the "monk police" for merely talking. Tibetan Buddhism has so much to offer humanity but needs to abolish these contradictory practises and show TRUE compassion towards ALL the monks and not a priveleged few.An amazing and rare account of life inside a Tibetan Monastery from a Western perspective. A must read.

They form the nexus of sheer pleasure one gets through the author's incisive, luminous use of language. As told in his poignant biography "Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness," Meston's young life stretched him out through tragedy, abandonment, abuse, disaster, and near death. Thanks in large measure to the central radiance of his life, his wife Phuni, he and his tale have surfaced in much the same way Ishmael did at the end of "Moby Dick," bobbing up from morbid seas on a figurative and literal coffin. not to mention the random cruelty of so many people he encounters along the way. These people speak to you directly and emphatically in the pages of this astonishing book, and they go on speaking long after the book is closed. They are witnesses, and so is Wangchuk. Like heroes throughout literature --from Oddyseus to Ishmael to Oliver Twist to Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caufield to Christopher McCandless ("Into the Wild")-- Wangchuk Meston carries a burden of hope on a cross of pain.

A major difference between Meston and these legendary figures is that he brings it all back alive --himself. Burrowing away after near death at the hands of the Chinese, the young writer doggedly hammered out his own story, not showing it to anyone and, characteristically, considering it trivial and uninteresting. "If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now." Mark Anthony's invitation to weep over the body of his fallen hero, Julius Caesar, might well apply to the life of Taja Wangchuk Meston, an unwitting hero of the Tibetan people, his family, his friends and just about everybody else except himself. Meston is a born writer and, what is more, a born storyteller. He captures the corporal and spiritual beauty of giant figures like his dynamic, loving, uncompromising wife and his affectingly human, ruggedly spiritual father-in-law Apa, as well as his spiritually driven, emotionally blind mother and his schizophrenic artist father whose hidden beauty comes to shine out of his own painful life. It is a testament to the author's gifts that these and many other people come up against a reader's heart and stay there, like the living shadows that populate all good literature. Readers who do not "cry, weep, and feel a strong sense of faith" --as H.H. He also reminds us that organized religion, including Tibetan Buddhism, can be, and is, wielded like a twisted knot on the backs of the innocents, and that discipline imposed from the outside can very well wound, while inner discipline can bring great healing and enlightenment.

The reluctant hero lived a childhood of deprivation and crushing disappointment only to rise phoenix-like into an uncourted celebrity. You feel compelled to cry out, "This is a book. Aside from his moving, stunning lifestory, the miracle of Meston's book is in the writing.by which I mean the closely observed details and human characters he puts into limpid, gifted prose that comes out just this side of poetry. By turns poignant and majestic, the elements of his life run silent and deep through the convergence of personal, historic, religious, and family forces that simply pour through every page. Run, don't walk, to pick it up and read it." The secret gift Wangchuk found, which he brings back pristine and trembling, is his own (and our)undiscovered, tender strength --something he could not have recognized during his overpowering ordeals. the 14th Dalai Lama does when he hears the life story of the great Tibetan yogin and folk-hero Milarepa-- are probably blocks and stones, or just generally asleep to the stirrings of the human heart.Christopher Swan