Review of Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick

“A quarter century of Communist rule had destroyed far more than it had created.”

— Barbara Demick

There are some things we just stumble upon in life, and this book was one of them. In the past year, I visited the Rubin Museum in New York City on a whim and became enchanted with the history and art that was on display about the Himalaya region.

That little visit, that was only two hours long and I spent quite a bit of time just looking at the shrine room they had set up on the third floor, inspired me to learn more about Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal. I ended up signing for a Nepali class in the summer of 2023; that’s how dedicated I became to all of this. But one day I was wandering my local library and ended up in the nonfiction section, specifically where the house the tiny history section.

In the middle of the books about Japan and Chinese communism lie a copy of Eat the Buddha. I immediately reached for it and added it to the stack of books in my tote bag.

I’m so glad I ended up picking a copy of this book up at the library because I felt like I learned so much from it history-wise. I knew about the conflicts between China and Tibet, and how China claims Tibet, but this book dug deeper into the recent history behind what is happening in the region.

Onwards with the review!

In Tibet, freedom and autonomy has become a distant dream for some.

Eat the Buddha is a deep dive into Tibetan history and the politics that go into the region. We learn a little bit about how China originally became involved with the area, and that Tibetans are physically capable of surviving in the mountains due to adaptation. Demick really focuses in on a specific area of Tibet throughout the book, Ngaba, which was the ground zero for the Chinese communists. We learn they came into the region first during the Chinese Civil War and basically have not left it since.

One of the initial stories we learn about is of one of the princesses that lived with the royal family at the time, Gonpo. Gonpo now lives in exile to India, where many Tibetans have gone to in order to escape the conditions faced by those living in Ngaba.

Going to India means often that one cannot go back, as it’s seen as turning towards the other side. Gonpo’s story is the beginning of a tragedy, as her family was forced to pack everything they could into a couple of bags and abandon their palace. Her family was relocated to China, where they became model citizens, but her father was killed and her mother disappeared. Her sister, too, would end up dead and Gonpo would become one of the only survivors of her family.

But then the Cultural Revolution happened, and Gonpo was sent to the camps in Xinjiang due to her affiliation with the royal family. She met her husband there, a Chinese man, and had several kids. But when she chooses to go home to Tibet, where people still recognize her to this day and cherish her, a second trip leaves her in exile in India. Her husband and children are still in China. Her story is one of many collected throughout the book.

In the current society Tibetans live inside of, crackdowns are common and the people find their lives threatened everyday by their Chinese enforcers. The vibrant culture, which we come to learn about throughout the text, is also at threat.

One girl who gets caught in the protests becomes a casualty despite being only in her early twenties. The local monastery finds a new problem among its monks; they are setting themselves on fire in protest. Death and despair seems to follow everywhere in this region.

We learn the phrase “Eat the Buddha” comes from when the communists first arrived into town. Desperate and hungry, they arrived at the Tibetan temples and ended up eating the sacred butter sculptures and candles used in Tibetan Buddhism, which the locals saw as the equivalent of eating the Buddha himself. That set the stage for what’s to come throughout the book and history, as the Chinese sponsored religion is that there isn’t any.

Overall Thoughts

I thought this was a well-thought out book. It does the intended job it sets out to do: sheds light on a specific area of Tibet and delves deeper into what’s happening there with the government of China and the onslaught of modernization (we get hints of that towards the end of the book).

I genuinely think Demick did a good job with this book, and while might not serve as a guide to Tibetan culture and history as a whole, it does a decent job at setting the scene of what’s happening there now. As someone who knew a little bit going into it, I thought my background helped, but it wasn’t absolutely necessary to understand the full scope of the book.

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