Freda spent Christmas 1976 with Ranga, Umi, and her granddaughters, Ami, seventeen; Sohni, fourteen; and Seher, five, in Calcutta. As she promised when she became a nun, she had never severed her close links with her children, keeping up with their news and well-being through regular correspondence, buying them presents, and when her schedule allowed, meeting them at their respective homes. She was always intimately involved with their personal lives. In her later years, however, it seemed she felt a tug to be physically near them more often.
The moment she arrived in Calcutta, Freda fell ill. Her usual winter cough turned into heavy congestion, affecting her heart, and she spent eleven days in intensive care in a nursing home. She admitted it was a near heart attack.
When she recovered, she declared that she felt better and lighter than ever, and got on with enjoying Christmas. She was disappointed that BPL would not be able to join them. “Italy seems to be his home now—he’s very much appreciated there as a guru father figure, and happy. It will be summer before he arrives.”
Instead she contented herself with enjoying her granddaughters’ talents, charms, and beauty. She hoped Kabir, now a film star, would be able to visit, accompanied by his new girlfriend now that he’d divorced his first wife, the flamboyant classical Indian dancer named Protima. “Kabir is back after a great success on TV in Europe. He has now made his first Italian film, Black Corsair,” she wrote proudly to Valerie Grove, from the very active Australian branch of the Tibetan Friendship Group. Guli, now heavily pregnant with her second child, was staying put in Bombay.
“I am looking forward to seeing my daughter again—and shall feel all that much better when baby number two is safely here,” she said. The slight note of caution proved to be another of Freda’s prescient moments.
Freda enjoyed her last Christmas. She helped decorate the Christmas tree and prepared her famous English trifle, but balked at baking a Christmas cake “because of the appalling price of currants.”
New Year 1977 saw Freda making a pilgrimage to Sarnath, where the Buddha taught his first sermon on the Four Noble Truths, and Bodhgaya, in Bihar, where he attained enlightenment. She meditated, lit butter lamps, dispensed sweaters and money to Tibetans and beggars, and then returned to Rumtek.
In early March 1977 one of Freda’s inner alarm bells sounded. Guli was in trouble. She immediately caught a plane and rushed to her side.
“Mummy, apparently, was already very worried about the birth, because she told a friend that she had to be there,” said Guli. “I was induced, eleven days late, and while I was being moved to the delivery ward the labor pains suddenly stopped. The doctor was clearly concerned. Had the drip inducing the labor become unplugged, or had something happened to the baby? When my daughter was born, she wasn’t breathing. The doctor gasped and said, ‘Oh my God.’ The cord was exceptionally long and was wrapped three times around her neck. It was a real emergency. The doctor said it was a miracle that Brinda had not only survived but had suffered no brain damage.
“We were just so lucky. When it was over, Mummy took Brinda in her arms and blessed her. Even though Mummy had been absent for much of my life, I knew she always watched over me.”
No one suspected, except possibly Freda herself, that it was Freda’s life that was in imminent danger. A few days before Brinda’s birth, on Pema Zangmo’s insistence, she had gone for a thorough medical checkup and been given the all clear.
Happy, she left Guli to get on the Delhi train taking her to her next engagement, the World Buddhist Conference being held at the Vigyan Bhavan Hall, Delhi’s premier conference venue. There she settled herself into a luxury suite at the five-star Oberoi Intercontinental Hotel, as a guest of her close friend and devotee Goodie Oberoi, wife of the owner.
March 28, 1977, the day of her death, was an interesting one.
If no one suspected what was coming, Freda herself indicated she knew exactly what was in store. In retrospect Pema Zangmo recalled how Freda had pressed her address book on her, telling her she would need it. She also advised her attendant to bring another nun back with her to Rumtek to help her. Pema Zangmo asked her if she was leaving and if so where she was going. Freda had answered enigmatically, “You don’t know. I know.” She had then gone through her handbag telling her what was important.
Throughout the day many people spontaneously turned up to visit Freda, many of them from the Tibetan Friendship Group that Freda had founded. She greeted them all warmly and told them about her new project to sponsor Tibetan children in top Indian public schools, especially girls, who had less chance of receiving a good education than boys. During the course of the day she curiously handed over all her signing powers and insisted that Pema Zangmo get in touch with Binder, BPL’s nephew, who had grown up in the Bedi family and was now living in Delhi as a well-known political commentator. Nobody then quite knew why she wanted to make contact with him.
At six p.m. Freda and Pema Zangmo went for a walk, after which Freda settled down to some letter writing. She then took out some of her own childhood photographs and those of her children, taken in Lahore, before Partition. At ten p.m. Freda woke Pema Zangmo to give her instructions about certain gifts and money she wanted her to pass on to specific people. She brought out some yellow fabric as a gift for her faithful attendant to make into a nun’s blouse, and told her to practice Dharma faithfully. Freda then dressed herself in her finest robes, telling the curious Pema Zangmo, “I will need them tomorrow.” She then put on a tape recording of H. H. Karmapa, which he had sent her from New York, and sat down to meditate.
Pema Zangmo, who had gone back to sleep a few feet away from Freda, was awakened by the sound of “louder breathing.” She got up and went over to Freda, who was still sitting bolt upright in the meditation position, and tapped her on the shoulder. Freda did not move, nor open her eyes. Peering closer, Pema Zangmo could detect no sign of outer life at all. In total panic she ran out into the hotel corridor screaming for help. A doctor was quickly summoned, who officially pronounced Freda dead. The cause: cardiac arrest. Pema Zangmo noted that her face wore a soft smile.
Gathering all her wits and Tibetan Buddhist know-how of what to do at the time of death, Pema Zangmo became her fiercest self. “Do not touch her. She is in deep samadhi. Nothing must disturb her,” she yelled at everyone present. She knew that although there was no pulse or outer sign of life, internally Freda was far from dead. Her body was warm and not cooling, she was sitting upright, she was in samadhi, the profound meditative state of single-pointed concentration, controlling her most subtle mind toward the final stage of death, the Clear Light and beyond to her next birth. It was the acme of Tibetan Buddhist practice, only accomplished by the most advanced meditators, it was said. Pema Zangmo had no doubts that Freda qualified. The truly adept could stay in this state for days, weeks even, their bodies not decomposing, while they remained in the luminosity of the blissful state of their primordial consciousness, attaining higher and higher degrees of awakening. Those who had taken the Bodhisattva Vow, however, now seized the opportunity to steer their consciousness into a realm or body where they could most benefit others.
Not everyone shared Pema Zangmo’s convictions. Kabir, who had seen his mother in Bombay just a few days previously, now rushed to Delhi to see her in death. “I’m always skeptical about religious mythmaking,” he said. “When I saw Mummy’s body, there was a slight grimace on her face, as though she had been in pain. There wasn’t a look of divine bliss.” He was in total shock. “When I last saw her, she seemed to be in good health. There was absolutely no reason to think she was going to pass away. Looking back, however, I realized she had given me a hint: ‘Life is so fragile. A person can be gone in an instant,’ she had said, which struck me as rather odd,” said Kabir.
Proving that everyone witnesses events from their own viewpoint, Ranga had a still different impression. “Mummy looked totally calm. There was an extraordinary peace emanating from her. It was bloody hot in that room, and Mummy w
as in her robes underneath a fan, yet her skin was glowing,” he said.
In Milan, BPL, Freda’s great earthly love, was utterly devastated by the news. His immediate response was to pour out his grief in a love poem:
The cup of your grace is full, O Lord!
And the cup of my prayers is full, O Lord!
What shall I tell my heart
Till the two cups embrace, O Lord!
Nobody wanted to break the news to Guli, who was still in the hospital with her newborn baby. She heard it from a doctor, who inadvertently blurted out how sorry he was about her mother. The shock was cataclysmic. Guli’s milk immediately dried up, and she contracted psychosomatic arthritis, unable to uncurl from a sleeping position for three months.
On March 29 Freda’s body was taken to Binder’s house in Delhi and laid out on a bed of flowers. The Karmapa was deeply shocked, sent messages of condolences, and strongly advised that her body be taken to Rumtek for cremation. The family, however, decided to cremate Freda in Delhi, on the grounds of the Oberois’ farm. It was a decision Ranga was later deeply to regret.
“It was around 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Delhi, and it would have taken three days to arrange to fly Mummy’s body to Rumtek. We would have had to embalm her for the flight. Kabir, Binder, and I couldn’t do it. Mummy’s body would have bloated and we didn’t want that,” he said. “Mummy was lying on the floor under a fan, and yet after three days there was no iota of change in her at all. On the fourth day we took her to Goodie Oberoi’s farm. When the hearse arrived, I helped pick her up and her joints were all soft. There was no rigor mortis. H. H. Karmapa must have known that she would have made the journey to Rumtek without problems.”
Nevertheless the funeral on the Delhi farm had its own profound meaning. Near the cremation site, next to a wall of bougainvillea, was a sapling bodhi tree, which had been planted there a month earlier at Freda’s suggestion when she had visited the farm with Goodie Oberoi. Goodie had wanted to build a small temple there, and Freda felt it would be auspicious to bless the ground with a replica of the tree under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment.
With fortunate synchronicity Freda’s funeral coincided with the opening day of the World Buddhist Conference. It was postponed until two p.m. so that the delegates could pay their respects to the woman who had been the close and beloved disciple of the Karmapa, who had been the first nun to achieve the highest bikshuni ordination, who had tirelessly helped the Tibetan refugees in the greatest hour of their need, and who had been such a powerful diplomat of Buddhism around the world.
According to Kabir, coaches carrying around a hundred robed delegates arrived—Buddhist monks from across the world, including representatives from Russia, who were attending the Conference for the first time in history. They stood around the pyre chanting and saying prayers. A white cloth was placed on Freda’s body, and Ranga lit the pyre. Rather alarmingly, those standing close by saw beads of sweat appear on Freda’s face.
“It was an amazing send-off. We knew her life had been devoted to the spiritual, but I had no idea how big she was in the Buddhist world until she died,” said Ranga.
Tributes began to pour in acknowledging her many achievements. Her obituary in The Statesman, Calcutta, read:
Mrs. Freda Bedi’s was a dedicated life. One of the few British women who made India their home and participated actively in the freedom struggle, she engaged herself, after independence, in social work and religious studies. Deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy, she embraced Buddhism and chose the austere life of a nun so that she could devote all her time to the people and to her faith.
In religion she attained the highest rank of the Mahayana order, and for her social welfare activities she received a special award in the International Women’s Year for outstanding contribution to the cause of Indian women. She will be remembered especially for her work among Tibetan refugees.
As her son, Kabir Bedi, says, “Her life was an expression of the spiritual in the most human way—living for the causes she believed in.”
More tributes poured in from the ranks of the Tibetan hierarchy. Christmas Humphreys, founder of the Buddhist Society in London, wrote a glowing tribute in their magazine, The Middle Way:
Freda Bedi showed what a Buddhist life should be. For twenty-five years she gave her life with immense and ceaseless energy to all in need of help, whatever their creed or caste or color. She never relaxed or hesitated. If the job was there to do she began it and relied, never in vain, on the needed support to appear. I saw much of the results of her labor when I was myself in India for the Dalai Lama in 1962, and endorse a remark by Mrs. Carlo Robins: “Freda Bedi is an example to all those adherents to any religion who readily regard their religion as being their life and not merely a department of it.” Freda Bedi was a great woman, a great Buddhist and an inspiration to all Buddhists East and West to work unceasingly in the service of mankind.
In his message of condolence to the family, the esteemed master Venerable Ayang Rinpoche, who had taught Freda the mystical rite of the transference of consciousness at the time of death—powa—spoke touchingly and profoundly of what her death meant for many Tibetans, lay and ordained alike:
The sad news of dear Mummy’s death has brought a quivering shock to all of us who knew her in the past and I am sure to those who are still very close to her noble heart. I sat down in deep thought, as our dear Mummy would have done in times of grave situations, and I have decided she has fulfilled her life’s goal . . . she was especially like a mother to the cause of Tibetan Buddhists in particular.
The loss of Mummy, therefore, is not only a great deprivation to you and me or the Tibetans alone, but it is a great loss to the whole of mankind. However, at this time, sorrow cannot bring back the loss, and the best that mankind can do is to follow her noble steps. . . . The same event will take place with everyone and it is important to realize this from time to time and devote some of your time to religious practice.
On April 2, Freda’s ashes were placed in a beautiful engraved urn and flown to Calcutta, and then taken to Rumtek. Sadly it was the very same fight that had been booked to take Freda to visit Ranga and Umi after attending the World Buddhist Conference. Now Kabir and Pema Zangmo carried the remains back to her monastery, where a forty-nine-day puja (prayer ceremony), commanded by H. H. Karmapa, began—the length of time of the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth.
“Maybe she is in the buddha-fields that she spoke about,” mused Ranga in a letter to his father, “but no farther away from any of us than we have always known her to be. She used to say ‘Dear, I can’t stop you from coming to harm, but my prayers can act like an umbrella in a downpour. You get wet, but you don’t get soaked.’ And to this extent, whether in life or death, I do not think she will cease to keep this umbrella over us.”
But Freda’s story may not end there, however.
Two years after her death, in 1979, rumors began to spread that Freda had reincarnated as a Tibetan girl, Jamyang Dolma Lama, the daughter of His Eminence Beru Khyentse Rinpoche, a respected lineage holder enthroned by the Sixteenth Karmapa. Born in Tibet, Beru Khyentse Rinpoche had known Freda Bedi well, and had set up his own center in Bodhgaya.
In 1995, when she was sixteen years old, Jamyang Dolma Lama, now a nun, was officially recognized by her father and other lamas as the reincarnation of Freda Bedi, a.k.a. Sister Kechog Palmo. Since then she has undertaken a nine-year intensive study program at Ngagyur Nyingma Nunnery High Institute, and on February 28, 2015, completed a six-and-a-half-year retreat. Fully qualified to teach, she is destined to take care of her father’s nunneries in both India and Tibet and, like Freda, to travel around the world to spread the Buddha’s teaching for the benefit of all sentient beings.
For some, like Pema Zangmo, there is no doubt that Freda has reappeared on the earth in a new body. “Mummy-la has come back as a Tibetan girl. I have no doubts. She came to see me at my nunnery and I recognized her immedia
tely and her me. She took my hand, gave me a katag (white ceremonial scarf), and cried. She is very beautiful. When I look at her, I see Mummy-la, not the face but the nature is the same. Just before she died, Mummy-la told me to keep in touch with Beru Khyentse Rinpoche, as the connection was very auspicious,” she said portentously, hinting that Freda had already determined her next rebirth.
Freda’s children are more noncommittal. Shortly after her mother died, Guli asked the Karmapa if she had reincarnated. “The level your mother reached, she could choose whether to return or not. Knowing your mother, she would probably choose to do so,” he said, referring to the adept’s ability to choose a specific reincarnation, motivated solely by the altruistic intention to return to this earth purely to help others find the way out of sorrow. This was the bodhisattva’s birth, so different from “ordinary” births, thrown willynilly by the forces of uncontrolled karma.
It was a suitably diplomatic answer to the delicate, frequently controversial issue of reincarnation, often fraught with political and spiritual power play. The Karmapa’s words, however, spoke volumes of the extraordinary life and achievements of the woman called Freda Bedi, the woman who had been a political, social, and spiritual revolutionary, and who had proved conclusively that she cared.
EPILOGUE
WHEN I FIRST HEARD of Freda Bedi on that crisp November morning in 1976, I knew nothing of the woman Lama Yeshe had reverently prostrated to. Now, I have traveled with her via this book through her very extraordinary life and have come to know her through her own words and the generous testimony of others. She has emerged a most vivid, exciting, and complex figure. Starting off on this long odyssey, what I particularly wanted to know was why she earned Lama Yeshe’s most unusual homage. And, in particular, did she deserve to be hailed as a female icon?
The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Page 19