by Ruskin Bond
And then there was the most unusual object of all, a traditional meditation box. This was a square wooden structure measuring 2 feet 6 inches by 2 feet 6 inches and raised slightly off the ground to insulate the meditator from rising damp. It was where she would spend the greater part of her life. Over the years she developed a remarkably close attachment to it: “I loved my meditation box. I’d wrap myself in my cloak and be perfectly snug there, out of the way of drafts,” she said enthusiastically.
When it was finished the gaping, jagged hole in the mountain had been transformed into a pretty little house with a crooked rocky roof, so quaint it could have come out of the pages of a fairy-tale book. It instantly dispelled any notion of clichéd cave-living.
“It was a very pukka cave,” Tenzin Palmo admitted. “The few people who saw it were always very surprised how neat and cosy it was. It was small, certainly. There was no room to dance! Although when I did my long retreat I did do Hatha yoga there. Yoga was great in counteracting all the sitting I did and in helping with the problems with my spine,” she said, referring to the back problems which had plagued her since birth. “But the cave was so small I had to do different postures in different parts of the cave, depending on where there was room.”
Didi Contractor was one person who witnessed the cave. A large, gray-haired woman now in her late sixties, she had come to India from California many decades earlier and had led a colorful life in an extended family with her Indian husband. She had met Tenzin Palmo during one of her visits to Khamtrul Rinpoche and had stayed in touch. As an interior designer (responsible for such famous landmarks as the Lake Palace in Udaipur), she wanted to throw a professional eye over Tenzin Palmo’s unorthodox living arrangements to make sure she was safe: “The climb up was horrific, especially over the loose scree. I looked down on the tiny houses in the valley below and thought, ‘If I fall I’m strawberry jam.’ Tenzin Palmo, who escorted me, however, bounded up like an antelope. When I finally got there I was reassured. The cave was very secure and safe. The walls were thick—although I did arrange for her to have double glazing put on the windows. Most importantly, it was south-facing, which meant it got the sun for the whole day which was essential in winter. My God, it was tiny though. There was just room for me to lay my sleeping bag down beside her meditation box. That was it,” she said, from the mud-brick house which she had built herself just below Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama and his government in exile.
With the cave finished, Tenzin Palmo moved in and began her extraordinary way of life. She was thirty-three years old. This was to be her home until she was forty-five.
* * *
Her quest may have been purely spiritual but before she could get down to grappling with the immaterial she first had to conquer the eminently mundane business of simply staying alive. For the bookish, otherworldly, and decidedly unrobust woman, this was a challenge.
“I was never practical. Now I had to learn to do umpteen physical things for myself. In the end I surprised even myself at how well I managed and how self-sufficient I became,” she admitted.
The first priority was water.
“Initially I had to get my water from the spring, which was about a quarter of a mile away. In summer I’d have to make several trips, carrying it to my cave in buckets on my back. In the winter, when I couldn’t get out, I melted snow. And if you’ve ever tried to melt snow you would know how difficult that is! A vast amount of snow only gives you a tiny amount of water. Fortunately in the winter you don’t need a lot because you’re not really washing either yourself or your clothes and so you can be very economical with the water you use. Later, when I did my three-year retreat, and could not venture beyond my boundary, someone paid for a water pipe to be laid right into the cave’s compound. It was an enormous help,” she explained.
Next was food.
There was of course nothing to eat on that sparse mountainside. No handy bushes bearing berries. No fruit trees. No pastures of rippling golden wheat. Instead she arranged for supplies to be brought up from the village in the summer, but as often as not they would not arrive and Tenzin Palmo would be reduced to running up and down the mountain herself carrying gigantic loads. “It took a lot of time and effort,” she said. For the bigger task of stocking up for her three-year retreat Tshering Dorje was put in charge:
“I would hire coolies and donkeys to carry up all that she needed,” he recalled. “There would be kerosene, tsampa, rice, lentils, flour, dried vegetables, ghee, cooking oil, salt, soap, milk powder, tea, sugar, apples, and the ingredients for ritual offerings such as sweets and incense. On top of that I employed woodchoppers to cut logs and these were carried up as well.”
To supplement these basic provisions with a source of fresh food Tenzin Palmo made a garden. Just below the ledge outside her cave she created two garden beds in which she grew vegetables and flowers. Food to feed her body, flowers to feed her soul. Over the coming years she experimented to see what would survive in that rocky soil. “I tried growing all sorts of vegetables like cabbages and peas but the rodents ate them. The only things they wouldn’t touch were turnips and potatoes. Over the years I truly discovered the joy of turnips! I am now ever ready to promote the turnip,” she enthused. “I discovered that turnips are a dual-purpose vegetable. You have the wonderful turnip greens, which are in fact the most nutritious of all vegetable greens and absolutely delicious, especially when young,” she waxed. “No gourmet meal in the world is comparable to your first mouthful of fresh turnip greens after the long winter. And then you’ve got the bulb, which is also very good for you. Both of them can be cut up and dried, so that right through the winter you’ve got these wonderful vegetables. Actually I was waiting for the book One Hundred Eight Ways to Cook Turnips but it never showed up,” she joked.
She ate once a day at midday, as is the way with Buddhist nuns and monks. Her menu was simple, healthy, and to ordinary palates excruciatingly monotonous. Every day she ate the same meal: rice, dhal (lentils), and vegetables, brewed up together in a pressure cooker. “My pressure cooker was my one luxury. It would have taken me hours to cook lentils at that altitude without it,” she said. This meager fare she supplemented with sourdough bread (which she baked) and tsampa. Her only drink was ordinary tea with powdered milk. (Interestingly, the traditional tea made with churned butter and salt was one of the few Tibetan customs she did not like.) For dessert she had a small piece of fruit. Manali was renowned for its apples and Tshering Dorje would deliver a box of them. “I’d eat half an apple a day and sometimes some dried apricot.”
For twelve years this was how it was. There was no variation, no culinary treats like cakes, chocolates, ice creams—the foods which most people turn to to relieve monotony, depression, or hard work. She professed she did not mind and as she logically pointed out: “I couldn’t pop down to Sainsbury’s if I wanted anything anyway. Actually, I got so used to eating small quantities that when I left the cave people would laugh seeing me eat only half an apple, half a slice of toast, half a quantity of jam. Anything more seemed so wasteful and extravagant.”
And then there was the cold. That tremendous, unremitting, penetrating cold that went on for month after month on end. In the valley below the temperature would regularly plunge to -35° in winter. Up on that exposed mountain it was even bleaker. There were huge snowdrifts that piled up against her cave and howling winds to contend with too. Once again, Tenzin Palmo made light of it. “Just as I suspected, the cave proved to be much warmer than a house. The water offering bowls in front of my altar never froze over in the cave as they did in my house in Tayul Gompa. Even in my storeroom, which was never heated, the water never froze. The thing about caves is that the colder it is on the outside the warmer it is on the inside, and the warmer it is outside the cooler it is inside. Nobody believed this when I told them, but the yogis had told me and I trusted them,” she insisted.
For all her avowed indifference
, the cold must have been intense. She lit her stove only once a day at noon and then only to cook lunch. This meant in effect that when the sun went down she was left in her cave without any source of heat at all. Somehow she survived. “Sure I was cold, but so what?” she stated, almost defiantly, before adding in a somewhat conciliatory tone, “When you’re doing your practice you can’t keep jumping up to light the stove. Besides, if you are really concentrating you get hot anyway.” And her comment begged the further question of how far she had got in her ability to raise the mystic heat, like Milarepa had done in his freezing cave all those centuries ago, and the Togdens, who had practiced drying wet sheets on their naked bodies on cold winter nights in Dalhousie. “Tumo wasn’t really my practice,” was all she would say.
Endurance was one thing, however, and comfort another. The pleasure of a hot bath, a fluffy towel, scented soap, a soft bed, crisp sheets, an easy chair, a clean lavatory—the soft touches that most women appreciate and need—she had none of. This desire for physical ease was said, by men, to be one of the biggest obstacles to women gaining Enlightenment. How could they withstand the rigors of isolated places necessary to spiritual progress, they argued, when by nature they wanted to curl up cat-like in front of a warm fire? In this, as in many things, Tenzin Palmo was to prove them wrong.
Her bath was a bucket. She washed sparingly, especially in winter when water was scarce and temperatures reduced body odors to zero. Her lavatory in summer was the great outdoors—her privacy was guaranteed. “In the winter I’d use a tin and later bury it.” None of this bothered her. “To be honest I didn’t miss a flushing toilet or a hot shower because I’d already been so long without those things,” she said.
Compounding her asceticisms was the total absence of any form of entertainment. Up in that cave she had no TV, no radio, no music, no novel, in fact no book which spoke of anything but religion. “There was no ‘luxury’ I missed. Life in Dalhousie had prepared me admirably. I had everything I needed,” she repeated.
Arguably, the most radical of all her deprivations was the absence of a bed. It was not that the cave was too small, it was simply that Tenzin Palmo did not want one. She intended to follow in the tradition of all serious meditators and train herself to do without sleep. According to the sages, sleep was nothing but a tragic waste of precious time. If we spent eight hours of every day asleep, that amounted to a third of our life which, they calculated, if we lived until we were seventy, added up to some twenty-four years of voluntary unconsciousness. Time which could be spent striving for spiritual betterment in order to help all living beings. Knowing this, the yogis disciplined themselves not to fall asleep but to use the refined levels of consciousness induced by meditation to bring about both mental and physical refreshment. It was agreed that the quietness and solitude of a cave was the perfect place to practice such a feat, for even the best of them would have been hard-put enduring sleeplessness while living in the midst of a busy town. But sitting up all night in their remote hideaways they learnt to see that whatever images arose from the subconscious, be they in the waking, semi-waking, or sleeping state (should they nod off), were nothing but projections, “mere appearances” from their own minds. It was, they said, an invaluable exercise.
In actuality this meant that for as long as Tenzin Palmo was in the cave she never fully lay down. Instead she spent the night, every night, sitting upright in her meditation box. “The idea is that you’re meant to stay sitting up in order to meditate. It’s good for the awareness,” was all she would say on the matter. “If I really felt I had to I would curl up inside my meditation box, or flop my legs over the side.”
And at such moments you wondered how much of Tenzin Palmo’s capacity to endure these prolonged physical hardships was due to her unadorned childhood in the East End of London, her mother’s stoical genes, or some innate predisposition for high-altitude cave dwelling—as the Tashi Jong lamas had recognized.
Not least of all her austerities was the isolation. As she had anticipated, even longed for, she was quite alone. Occasionally during the summer she would see a shepherd or yak herder. Sometimes the nuns from Tayul Gompa or a friend would visit for a day or two. Following the pattern she had established she would ensure that every year she saw Khamtrul Rinpoche for further guidance on her retreat. Very rarely she would leave for a few weeks to attend some teachings. But mostly she was completely by herself for months every year, cut off by the snows, and for the last three years she saw and spoke to literally no one.
Tenzin Palmo more than coped: “I was never lonely, not for a minute. It was nice if someone visited, but I was perfectly happy not seeing anybody. In that cave I felt completely safe. And that’s a wonderful feeling for a woman to have. I never used to lock my door or window. There was no need. The cave was on the road to nowhere,” she said. Interestingly, however, a male friend she lent the cave to once while she was away on a summer errand did not find the cave experience so easy. He left after two days, spooked by the solitude. “Me, I found it the easiest thing in the world,” she said.
If human company was rare, animals were everywhere.
Any woman of fainter heart or flabbier backbone might well have been unnerved at the array of beasts which prowled around and even entered her cave. But Tenzin Palmo was never frightened of any animal and they, in turn, were never afraid of her. It was yet another unusual facet of an already unusual woman. “Animals are drawn to Tenzin Palmo—but what is interesting is that whereas usually, when there is that kind of attraction, the feeling is reciprocal, with Tenzin Palmo she is completely detached,” commented Didi Contractor, the friend who had visited her cave when Tenzin Palmo first moved in.
“I like animals and I respect them but I am not St. Francis,” Tenzin Palmo said crisply. Nevertheless, her encounters with the animals around her cave bore a strong resemblance to the tales told of the brown-robed friar in his cave in Assisi.
Like St. Francis, she too had her “brother wolves.”
At night she could hear them on the roof above her head making their long, mournful sounds. They roamed around the mountains, looking for food, seeking their mate, baying at the moon. Tenzin Palmo, sitting in her cave, knew they were very close and did not stir an inch.
“I love wolves,” she said simply. “For a long time I listened to them howling, which was wonderful. In the mornings after it had snowed I used to see their paw marks around the cave, but I never saw them. Then one day I was sitting outside on the patio, soaking up the sun, and five of them came by. They stood very close, just a few yards away. They were beautiful, not mangy or bedraggled as I had imagined. I thought they would look rather like jackals, but they were extremely handsome with those strange yellow eyes and sleek brown coats. They seemed very well fed, though heaven knows what they found up there to live on. They just stayed there and gazed at me very peacefully. I was so happy to see them. I smiled back and sent them lots of love. They stood there for a few minutes more and then left,” she reported.
She also came close to encountering the rarest and most beautiful of the wild cats, the snow leopard. When Peter Mathiessen wrote his haunting book The Snow Leopard about this near mythic beast only two Westerners were ever thought to have seen one.
“I once saw its prints outside the cave and on the windowsill,” Tenzin Palmo said, her voice rising with excitement at the memory. “There were these big pug marks, very strange, with a kind of hole in the middle. I drew it and later showed it to two zoologists and they both immediately said it was snow leopard, which apparently has a distinctive paw.” While the elusive snow leopard might well have seen Tenzin Palmo, much to her sorrow she did not ever see it.
More exotic and enticing still was the completely bizarre set of footprints that she found one morning in the snow running along the boundary wall. She looked at them in puzzlement:
“Everyone says there are no bears in Lahoul but the first year that I was there I di
scovered these huge footprints outside the fence. They were much bigger than a man’s but looked similar to a human’s with an instep. You could see all the toes but they also had claws. It looked like a human print with claws. And these footprints came all the way down from the mountain and had got to where the boundary was and the creature was obviously very confused. I think this must have been its cave. You could see from the tracks the prints made, it was wandering around and then it went up again.”
Could it possibly have been the mythical Yeti? Had Tenzin Palmo inadvertently moved into a Yeti’s den?
“I don’t know—I never saw the footprints again. But the Tibetans are familiar enough with the creature, whatever it is, to have a name for it, and tell stories about it. Lamas also talk about it so I don’t see why it should not exist,” she said. Further support for the actual existence of the Yeti came in 1997 when Agence France Press reported that “bigfoot” tracks had been found in Shennonjia National Nature Reserve, in Hubei province, by China’s Researchers for Strange and Rare Creatures: “The head of the committee said a research team found hundreds of footprints 2,600 meters above sea level. The biggest footprint is thirty-seven centimeters long, very similar to that of a man but larger than that of a man’s, and is different from the footprint of a bear or any other identified animals,” the story read.