Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness

"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. 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 . This poor boy had been psychologically tortured. 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. 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.

This exquisitely written book will resound with anyone who has experienced emotional loss, particulaly in one's childhood. The experience of reading this chronicle with the author's capacity for forgiveness is a healing process in itself. I simply had to go to Newton to meet him at his shop, Karma, and was greeted by a man with the most beautiful eyes of amazing depth and a lovely smile. Start this book only when you can curl up and continue non-stop to the end. You will not be able to put it down. What a twist of irony it will be when Hollywood comes calling to make a film of this amazing life! Mariel Bossert

This story is so unusual. I have never read a memoir like it. Wangchuk Meston has survived such trials of neglect and loss as a child that one wonders how he comes away with any sense of peace. But he does. Perhaps he would never have learned all that he has learned if he had remained a monk. He lives the essence of Buddhism. I highly recommend this book.

Late in this memoir, Daja Wangchuk Meston writes about musing on the impermanence of life. He decides that, when he dies: "I...wish to be remembered as a curious and unique person." The sentiment is as simple, humble and understated as the tone of this book. And this is a credit to Meston and his co-author Clare Ansberry, because had they indulged in grand and flowery prose, it could only have distracted from Meston's astonishing story. The author has lived a bucketful of lives in his 37 years, and only lately has he come to fit them together, put them in perspective, and draw from this strange tapestry a sense of his own human value. This is understandable, when you consider that he's a white American born to a mother who became a Buddhist nun and a father who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown, partly raised in a Tibetan family until he was dropped into a Buddhist monastary, where he became a monk at the age of six and lived a sheltered, puzzled, religiously indentured life until, at 17, he excaped by means of a lie and flew back to the US, where he found himself in a California high school, speaking rudimentary English and astonished to discover that the world was not flat... Add to this an early marriage to a wonderful, willful. deeply troubled young woman, a pair of crushed ankles earned by jumping out the window of a hotel room in Tibet while incarcerated by Chinese authorities... Whew! It's amazing this man is alive. It's doubly amazing that he has been strong enough--and wise enough--to sort through all the craziness and survive. Comes the Peace is one helluva tale, by turns incredible, heart-wrenching and cautiously triumphant. This book not only tells the story of this "curious and unique person" simply and well, but it gives the reader a gift of empathy, an honest look at our skewed world through that person's eyes. We are premitted to see how it feels to be the odd man out, the minority of one, the new arrival to a life everybody else takes for granted. If Meston had to scramble to catch up, so, when it comes to respecting the cost of such effort, do most of us. There is much to learn here--about attachment, abandonment, family, love, salvation, forgiveness. I can't recommend this book highly enough. May it fly off the shelves, and may we all appreciate our stumbling humanity a bit more for reading it. Susan O'Neill, author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Vietnam

I was hooked from the first page. The writing style is captivating and the story is heart felt. I don't know if I would have picked up the book if I wasn't related to Daja, but am extremely glad I did and I am. What I knew of his life before was nothing in the full picture. I learned so much of his thoughts of the world, his family and his life in the Monastary. I am happy for Daja for his current life with Phuni and wish him much peace and happiness. I missed having him in the family (his father's side) when we were growing up. This book is a beautiful tribute to forgiveness and I highly recommend it to anyone. I am buying copies to give as gifts and have gotten great feedback from all I know who have read it.