The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi

by Vicki Mackenzie

  Freda’s life in Rumtek took on a new rhythm. Sitting with the Karmapa every day, she became his right-hand woman, liaising between him and outside visitors, especially officials and government representatives, whom she was superbly experienced to deal with. She kept a firm, motherly eye on the four energetic young Regents who were poised to take over from the Karmapa when he died. And, in her own time, she wrote translations of Tibetan scriptures and prayers, oversaw her nunnery, and kept up a copious stream of correspondence to members of her Tibetan Friendship Group all over the world. Occasionally, she managed to slip into silent retreat, to advance her meditation practice and further her spiritual growth.

  The Karmapa had bigger plans for his Western nun, however. Audaciously, he broke with entrenched, centuries-old, patriarchal Tibetan ecclesiastical tradition, which kept nuns on the lower rungs of the spiritual ladder, and urged Freda to travel to Hong Kong and take the higher bikshuni ordination available to Chinese Buddhist nuns. This would bestow on Freda status equal to that of a monk. It was a bold and gigantic step for the Karmapa to take. As a bikshuni, Freda would be allowed to receive all the teachings and initiations that lead to enlightenment.

  The Karmapa knew that only a Western woman of Freda’s reputation, ability, and education would have the confidence to take such a radical step, and more importantly, be listened to by the Chinese Buddhist authorities. The Karmapa was so committed that he wrote to the king of Bhutan asking him to fund Freda for the journey. The king complied.

  To ensure his vision was turned into reality, the Karmapa traveled three times to Hong Kong to talk the matter over and lay the groundwork. In December 1971 Freda made the historic journey to take the full bikshuni ordination of the Mahayana line from the Buddhist Sangha Association headed by Venerable Minh Chi and Venerable Sek Sai Chung. She stopped off en route in Burma to pay her respects to the teachers who had put her on the path, and to seek their blessing for what she was about to do. “I always feel very close to my Burmese teachers,” she said.

  She found Burma poorer and sadder and the people less lighthearted under military rule. Sayadaw U Pandita, however, now an old man, had retained the same charming sense of humor. He asked after her family and gave her the quintessential Buddhist teachings: Cease to do evil, do what is good, and purify the heart. Freda replied that Tibet’s favorite mantra, om mani padme hum (“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”), when fully understood, meant the same thing.

  Landing in Hong Kong she was disappointed that no one was there to meet her. Always short of money and cost-conscious, she was horrified at the cost of the taxi to the Chinese Temple in the New Territories, where the bikshuni ordination was to take place. “Fifty HK dollars—that’s about seventy rupees,” she complained in a communication to her family.

  When she arrived, she found three other women waiting to be ordained, together with the twenty priests required to perform the ceremony, a vast crowd of onlookers, and a television crew eager to record the first woman in 1,100 years to receive full ordination in the Tibetan tradition. Freda fasted and prayed and had her head freshly shaved down to her scalp. She put on the black robes of the Chinese order and took the Bodhisattva Vow again:

  However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them

  However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them

  However immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them

  However incomparable the Buddha truth, I vow to attain it.

  The ceremony started at five o’clock in the morning and lasted for two days. Freda, now sixty years old, heavy, and not used to such physical exertion, found the whole thing exhausting.

  “It was very strenuous and absolutely agonizing for my old knees. We were constantly bowing, up and down, walking, and kneeling—one was quite dizzy. I must have lost pounds. We didn’t stop till midnight—with just half an hour’s rest for a cup of tea,” she said. “Tibetan Buddhism is more contemplative. We sit for hours in the lotus position—and do not move!”

  The climax of the ordination was an extraordinary ritual dating back to the Song dynasty, designed to test the faith and commitment of the initiate: The aspirants burned the last joint of their little fingers as a demonstration of their willingness to surrender their bodies in the service of all humanity. This was how the Bodhisattva Vow was taken at that time. By Freda’s time, the test had taken a new form: Small incense cones were placed on top of the aspirant’s bald head, lit, and allowed to burn down to the scalp. The really hardy aspirant had nine, twenty-one, or one hundred and eight cones—all significant numbers in Buddhism.

  “The abbot explained it was a voluntary offering to the Buddha,” said Freda. “I thought to myself, ‘I am here to take the ordination and if that’s what’s involved, I’ll do it.’ I felt that if I meditated right, I should not feel the burning. The ego in me said it would have been infinitely preferable if there were not so many people and press around, but they had great respect for the monks and nuns and it benefited them to watch, as it increased their faith. But still, it would have been better if we had been alone,” she added wistfully.

  “I grew very absorbed in the ceremony and began meditating strongly on the indivisibility of the Buddha and the Karmapa, who is very Buddha-like.” Her concentration became so great that, she claimed, she did not feel the burn at all.

  “How long it went on for, I do not know. No words can express the effect of the ceremony. There was an incredible feeling of lightness and light. When it was over, I was conscious of a little soreness, but I have to tell you I did not feel pain once. The scars only appeared back in Rumtek ten days later. Getting the ordination is not simply a matter of someone picking up a book and following the instructions. It has to be done by masters who hold the lineage. Since receiving it I have felt incredibly pure and enriched in every way,” she declared.

  Her return to Rumtek was jubilant. The entire monastic community together with the villagers turned out in force, waving banners and showering on her great heaps of katags, white ceremonial scarves to welcome and pay homage to the first bikshuni in the Tibetan tradition. Once again, Freda had become a pioneer. She was written up in the Times of India, with the headline “Well-Known Intellectual Now a Buddhist Nun.”

  Mrs. Freda Bedi, once a writer, professor, and politician is now a Buddhist bikshuni, running an order of nuns. Dressed in saffron [sic] and with shaved head, Freda Bedi retains her warm, friendly style of conversation. She remains the informal intellectual that she was in Lahore, in pre-Partition days, when thousands often thronged to her meetings to listen to a white Oxford graduate denounce British imperialism. She is the only Buddhist nun of her stature in India.

  She rose high in the Mahayana hierarchy through a long process of service. In fact she chose Mahayana mainly because of its stress on service to humanity. Her daily prayer begins with “May I attain enlightenment for the sake of all that live.” This life is in accordance with her childhood dreams of prayer and meditation and her youthful commitment to serve the poor.

  Whether intentionally or not, Freda had set the ball rolling for another revolution—a feminist revolution within Tibetan Buddhism. Two years later, Diane Perry, now known globally as Tenzin Palmo, the English girl from the East End of London who had worked for Freda at the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie and who had become a nun at the age of twenty-one, followed Freda to Hong Kong and became the second bikshuni. It was the beginning of a great groundswell to reinstate the higher ordination for all Tibetan nuns, and give them equal opportunities.

  Today the fight that Freda started still goes on. While the Dalai Lama publicly backs equal spiritual opportunities for women, the male-dominated, conservative Tibetan monastic establishment resists. In the meantime many devoted nuns have found their way to Hong Kong or Taiwan to be fully ordained.

  On the news of Freda’s second ordination, BPL moved to Milan, on the invitation of an Italian woman, Antonia Chiappini, many years his junior, who had been a patient of
his “vibrational healing” in Delhi. He started the Centro Eta Del Acquaria (The Center for the Age of Aquarius), and over time attracted a large, elite clientele. He and Freda kept in frequent, fond touch by mail, and BPL only married Antonia after Freda had died.

  By the beginning of 1972, Freda’s health was starting to fail. She had only five years left to live, but in that time she would perform arguably her greatest work yet—bringing Buddhism to the West.

  The dates listed here are approximate.

  1970. The photograph that still reverently holds a place on the altar of the nunnery Freda founded. The signature reads: “With blessings, Gelongma Mummy.” (Courtesy Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling Nunnery.)

  1972. The historical meeting of the sixteenth Karmapa and Muktananda, arranged by Freda and Didi Contractor. The reunion of Buddhism and Hinduism after centuries of Buddhism being absent from its homeland.

  1975. Freda accompanies the sixteenth Karmapa on his first ever tour of the United States and Europe. Here, they are pictured at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. (Bedi family archives.)

  1976. Freda as a teacher on her tour of the United States and Europe. (Bedi family archives.)

  2010. Freda’s nuns today grouped under the bodhi tree that she had planted as a sapling at Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling Nunnery. Kabir is in the middle. (Courtesy Parveen Dusanj Bedi.)

  1977. The Bedi children all grown up. Left to right: Ranga, Guli, Kabir. (Bedi family archives.)

  1976. The elderly Freda and BPL, standing side by side, both as spiritual teachers. (Bedi family archives.)

  1. Karma means “karma kagyu,” Tsultrim “ethics” or “discipline,” Kechog means “supreme knowledge” or “learning,” and Palmo means “glorious lady” or “heroine.” Put together it reads as: Glorious lady of the Karma Kagyu lineage upholding supreme knowledge and ethics.

  15

  Spreading the Word

  SINGLE-HANDEDLY FREDA had already set the scene for Buddhism to make the historic leap from East to West when she had the foresight to establish the Young Lamas Home School. In 1972, the year of her full ordination as a bikshuni nun, she took another momentous step in that direction by personally agreeing to take the Buddha’s message to South Africa, the first of several overseas “missions” she undertook. Her journey there was significant not least because it revealed the full extent of the spiritual authority invested in her by the Karmapa, as well as the scope of the knowledge and personal realizations that she had attained in her relatively new religious path.

  The invitation had come from Rosemary Vosse, a theosophist descended from Italian nobility, who had met Freda in India. She had literally begged Freda, now known as Sister Palmo, to come to South Africa, which was being brutally ripped apart by the bloody internal war of apartheid, as blacks fought for equal rights and the end to racial segregation. Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), the group that led this fight, was serving a life sentence on Robben Island, a measure intended by the government to cut off the hope he had inspired in his followers. Everywhere, protestors were being beaten and jailed, and a general reign of terror, instigated by the police, hung like a dirty pall over the land.

  It was an invitation Freda could not resist. Any notion of racial inequality and suppression of freedom was an immediate clarion call to her. In fact it was in Johannesburg that her hero, Mahatma Gandhi, had formulated his philosophy of peaceful civil resistance, triggered when he was ordered to move from a first-class carriage to a third-class carriage because he was “colored,” despite the fact that he was working as a lawyer there and had a valid ticket. The result was Satyagraha, his Doctrine of Truth, which he propagated there for twenty years and which Freda espoused when she became a Satyagrahi.

  Her tour was to encompass Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth. It started on an auspicious note. Stepping off the airplane and into the terminal, she saw a delicate pink, green, and yellow butterfly still alive in a wastepaper basket. She gently picked it up and put it in a flowerbed. Freda viewed it as a sign. “It had a significance I can’t put into words, but something extremely beautiful happened as I entered Africa,” she wrote to her family.

  She addressed audiences, large and small, who had come as a result of publicity generated by her Tibetan Friendship Group. She was warmly welcomed, and the press was polite. She spoke from university podiums and temple high seats, telling people about her experience of Gandhi and her own time as the first Englishwoman to offer Satyagraha. And then, when the audience was warmed up, she moved on to even more unconventional themes—reincarnation and the Tibetan tulku system—showing them slides of the young rinpoches she had taught and of her own teacher, the Sixteenth Karmapa.

  “I tried to convey to them something of the wonder of the Tibetan masters, the Dalai Lama, and in particular my own guru,” she said. The university students were especially rapt, she reported.

  Her talks to the Indian community living there and to the small group of Buddhist sympathizers were more profound, and they allowed Freda to share the depth of her knowledge. She gave discourses on both major and minor points of Buddhist philosophy.

  “I was able to give a talk on the realizations of Milarepa (Tibet’s beloved poet-saint). I endeavored to bring out his philosophical approach as well as his beautiful teachings, which were based on the Vajrayana lyrics, which I translated. This talk was taped, as were many others,” she stated.

  More impressively, Freda also revealed that she conferred initiations. This was nothing short of extraordinary. Only the most qualified lamas gave initiations, ceremonies that bestowed on the recipient the power, knowledge, and blessings of the particular buddha invoked. It was exceptional for a newcomer to Buddhism to be conducting this rite, and it was unheard of for a Western woman to do so. This was proof that the Karmapa held her in high spiritual regard.

  “On Easter Sunday I was able to give the Forest Dolma (Tara) initiation, which His Holiness Karmapa had allowed me to confer. It was in a perfect setting, in a forest glade with pine needles all around, and the shrine at the foot of a tress,” enthused the nature-loving Freda. She continued to give the Tara initiation throughout her tour. And then she ventured into the highly esoteric and advanced reaches of Tibetan Buddhism—the Vajrayana or Diamond Path—by conferring the initiation of the buddha of purification, Vajrasattva.

  “I explained how to meditate on Vajrasattva, and say his hundred-syllable mantra,” she explained. “It was a most interesting experience to be giving these teachings, and I do think that if the group carries on with the practice, there will be a quick and wonderful development, because the Vajrayana path is more rapid than the Mahayana path. But all the time I am weaving in the Mahayana. The Vajrayana is the meditation side, the Mahayana, the philosophy,” she went on, indicating the highly arcane and intricate system of Tibetan Buddhism that Thomas Merton, the Jesuit, described as the most complex religion on earth. “It is complex and detailed because it is profound,” said Freda.

  Following her plan to sow permanent seeds of Buddhism in South Africa, Freda established small centers, often in people’s homes, where people could gather to meditate, say prayers together, and study the Buddha’s teachings. She fervently hoped the centers would grow.

  Although she fell instantly in love with the natural beauty of Cape Town, she was utterly dismayed by the absence of black faces in the suburbs she was visiting. This was apartheid at work.

  “I was surprised to see so few Africans about—they are living in outside areas. You do see them in shops and streets, but Cape Town has such a Western appearance. I was not prepared for that. I rather thought it would be like India, where there would be big houses and a lot of simple houses around. Instead it is like being in Switzerland or Holland—there are hardly any black or brown faces visible.”

  Much to her delight, she did manage to introduce one African into Buddhism, when she gave the Refuge ceremony to a gathering at a home belonging to Bruce Ginsberg (later famous for
introducing rooibos tea to the rest of the world).

  “She was a housemaid and was extremely delighted to get it. It gave me some personal satisfaction too,” Freda admitted. “Actually Buddhism is not a conversion religion—and I cannot seek people out to give the teachings to, as much as I want to. We have to wait until people come voluntarily. That is how it should be,” she added.

  Despite being forbidden to proselytize, Freda was nevertheless openly thrilled when she was called upon to officiate at the funeral of a Chinese seaman who had been murdered in Port Elizabeth. Her fame as the only ordained Buddhist in South Africa had spread, much to the gratification of the sailor’s Buddhist family. Freda saw it as yet another sign that her religion would take root in South African soil. Officiating at the cremation ceremony, Freda once again revealed her spiritual credentials when she performed the esoteric rite of powa—the transference of consciousness—a highly accomplished process whereby a “master” steers the departing mind, or soul, through the death process into a favorable future existence.

  “I was able to use the Amitabha Puja for the first time in English,” she elaborated, referring to the ritual of the Buddha of Infinite Light, much beloved of the Chinese. “I also made use of the teachings of powa, which the Venerable Ayang Tulku [an eminent reincarnate lama recognized as a living expert in afterlife rituals] gave me in Mysore. It was miraculous I had it with me. By ‘chance’ I also had a special mandala from Rumtek to be used at the time of somebody’s passing. Whatever I could do, I did, praying for the liberation of his mind into the luminous states of consciousness, which is the buddha-field. I also drafted a telegram to H. H. Karmapa in Sikkim to do special ceremonies for the seaman.