Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses

Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses. Herbert J. Batt, ed. & tr. Tsering Shakya, foreword. Lanham, Maryland. Rowman & Littlefield. 2001. xxiv + 269 pages, ill. ISBN 0-7425-0053-5

AS TIBET SLOWLY EMERGES from forty years of stifling communist Chinese control, writers have begun, once again, to publish in the Tibetan language, although some of those writing in Tibetan are, in fact, Chinese. Simply stated, this collection of short stories, edited, translated, an introduced by Herbert J. Batt and briefly discussed in Tsering Shakya's contextualizing foreward, should create a widened horizon for a literature placed under erasure, in the case of Tibetan writers, and a culture "overrun by rational materialism from the West," in the case of Chinese writers. This volume, therefore, is of the utmost importance, since...