It’s difficult to come up with a star rating for this book. Do you rate it highly as a tale of raw human endurance and the utter refusal to succumb in the face of terrible suffering and injustice? Maybe you rate it highly because in the main, Ani Pachen does not portray herself as a heroine, or impute to herself tactical / strategic / war fighting skills she very clearly did not possess. To the contrary, she is pretty short on “warrior” skills and that is painfully evident in the narrative, and she is extremely forthright about that, where a less honest person might have succumbed to a false and misleading glamorization. Nor does she portray herself as having a particular amount of understanding of the variant of Buddhist teachings that make up her faith. In short, she is profoundly open about her shortcomings, and I think that is one of her greatest strengths, and one of the greatest lessons of this book: survival and resistance in the face of oppression and injustice has to be done with the you that you have, flaws and weaknesses and all.
And so, I gave this book a four and a quarter star rating, on that basis. She was a tremendously strong and resilient woman, who never gave up when it would have been easier to have done so, and never stopped trying to better her spiritual practice, in spite of 20 years of unjust and tortuous imprisonment for daring to try to resist Chinese occupation and destruction of her homeland.
Do I have some mental reservations? A few. I do find at times in the book a sort of credulous supernaturalism that to me is missing the central point of Buddhist teachings - treating “Lord Buddha” as if he were not a man, but a supernatural being who can grant favors and protection - very much in a mode that is analogous to what we see in various Abrahamic faiths. This also manifests in various appeals to various sub-deities to “protect me” from eg discovery, or in the tales of rainbow colored slicks on rivers when holy corpses are disposed of therein. And it manifests in the elevation of the Dalai Lama into another quasi-supernatural being in a way that cannot help but make me think of the extreme reverence some catholic people have for the pope. There is throughout a great deal of superstition and anthropomorphism which is passed off as of cosmic significance: thus, to pick one example, Chinese signal flares fired off after one of Pachen’s friends has been shot by Chinese soldiers pursuing Pachen’s group are not flares, but that person’s spirit.
As a person, a fellow human being, I can understand that the human spirit craves inspiration and something to believe in when injustice and oppression are all around. But to me there is, nevertheless, something mean and threadbare and not especially Buddhist in the simple supernaturalism - not all that different from abrahamic belief in “holy relics,” like the toe bones of saints and nails from the “true cross” and so on. I understand the draw and the appeal. No compassionate person of any belief would kick away a crutch or a life raft from someone who requires these things to survive. And yet it strikes me as the sort of supernatural nonsense that prevents effective action. I cannot help but think Pachen should have been trained a whole lot better, if she was going to be a warrior - I can understand that her father did not raise her as a son and that, presumably, he did not think that such things as tactics and weapons employment principles were appropriate for her female embodiment.
And yet: such things aren’t relevant or needed - until they are. The shockingly poor performance of Pachen’s people against Chinese soldiers is understandable given the lack of training and one can certainly admire the attempt they made all the same, in the way one might admire the Polish cavalry that went on horseback against formations of German tanks in 1939, to predictable consequences. Yet the sense of waste and futility is strong. Ancient religions and supernaturalism and superstitions are part of what imbue the world with meaning for some people. But if all they train you for is endurance of oppression - beatings, torture, “struggle sessions” and so on - rivers full of the bodies of those who’ve been murdered or starved to death by oppressors, the ruins of monasteries and the looting and destruction of a people - then there is an emptiness there, a complacency that enables the very injustices that are the main subject of the book. In short: Endurance is an important virtue, but it cannot be the only fruit of a spiritual practice - at least, not if one refers to oneself as a warrior. In that limited but important sense, the title of the book, describing Pachen as a warrior nun - is a bit of a misnomer, in spite of the absolutely tremendous amount of physical and moral courage she showed over a period of decades.
But having said all of that, Pachen has a lot of spiritual insight if you, like me, are a Buddhist practitioner, and I have made note of many examples of it in this book. I have benefitted from getting to know her and hear some of what she had to say. I think you might, too, if you read this book, and I hope you will.