Cave in the snow. A western woman’s quest for enlightenment

by Vicki Mackenzie

  Her feelings of isolation and rejection were compounded by the fact that, as a woman, she was barred from living with the rest of the community and sharing in their daily activities. Consequently by day she would work as Khamtrul Rinpoche’s secretary in the monastery’s office, and by night she would take herself back to the town, where she lived alone. She rented a quirky little room at the top of a dilapidated house, just big enough to hold a bed, a table and nothing else. Her bath was a cold standpipe, her toilet a bucket. There she ate by herself, slept by herself, belonging to neither the lay community nor the monks.

  ‘Later people would ask me if I wasn’t lonely in my cave. I never was. It was in the monastery where I was really alone,’ she said.

  Ironically, her emotional anguish and her longing for affection finally worked in her favour. She explained: ‘One evening I looked inside and saw this grasping and attachment and how much suffering it was causing me. Seeing it so nakedly at that moment it all fell away. From that moment on I didn’t need to reach out.’

  Tenzin Palmo, it seemed, had learnt the lesson of detachment. It was a fundamental Buddhist tenet, deemed essential for getting anywhere on the path to perfection. For how can anyone feel compassion towards all living beings, the Buddha had argued, while in their heart they were dividing them into ‘friend’, ‘enemy’and ’stranger’? Ideally sound it might have been, but detachment was also extremely difficult to attain, for in reality not many human beings actually want to live with that much equanimity. Later Tenzin Palmo was to remark pointedly: ‘People are always asking me how they can give up anger, but no one has yet asked me how to give up desire.’

  Before that breakthrough occurred, things in Dalhousie went from bad to worse. Of all the discrimination that Tenzin Palmo suffered, the hardest to bear was being refused the esoteric teachings and the sacred rituals – the very essence of Tibetan Buddhism, containing the methods that lead directly to Enlightenment. It was what she had become a nun to find. The path to perfection had come within her grasp and then been denied her. The reason, yet again, was solely because of her gender. Women, they said, had never been given access to these sacred truths. And so as the ceremonies and the ritual dances went on inside the temple, she sat literally outside looking in. And when she asked to be taught the secret texts she was refused. Instead she was delegated to Choegyal Rinpoche, one of her guru’s closest disciples, who proceeded to tell her nice, simple Buddhist stories. It was the way they thought a woman, a Western woman, should begin.

  Her frustration was enormous. ‘It was like being at this huge banquet and being given a few little crumbs here and there. It drove me nuts. I could get absolutely nothing in depth,’ she said. ‘If I had been a man it would all have been so different. I could have joined in everything. Really, it was such a male-dominated situation. It was as though I had entered a big male club. The monks were very kind to me, but on a deeper level there was resentment. They regarded having a woman on their turf as a challenge!’

  Tenzin Palmo had hit the spiritual glass ceiling – the one which all Buddhist nuns with spiritual aspirations crashed into. Over the centuries they had had a raw deal. While their male counterparts sported in the monastic universities, engrossed in profound scholarship and brilliant dialectical debate, the Tibetan nuns were relegated to small nunneries where, unable to read or write, they were reduced to doing simple rituals, saying prayers for the local community or, worse still, working in monastery kitchens serving the monks. This was why there were no female Dalai Lamas, no female lineage masters. Shut out from the Establishment, denied learning and status, they were not even starters in the spiritual selection stakes.

  Their sisters in the southern schools of Buddhism had it worse. In Thailand the nuns had to shuffle backwards on their knees away from any monk and never allow any part of their body to touch his meditation mat. Those with big breasts were ordered to bind them up so as not to appear overtly female!

  The root of the problem had gone back to the time of the Buddha (and even before that), when women were regarded as chattle with no rights of their own. In such a climate the Buddha is reputed to have refused women into his newly formed order. Probably, it is argued, because he felt the mendicant life would be too difficult and too dangerous for the ‘weaker’ sex. There were more insidious objections, too. Women, it was held, were lesser beings who were simply not capable of attaining enlightenment. Their bodies forbade it. They were defiled. Shariputra, one of the Buddha’s main disciples, summed up the feelings of his day when he, on hearing of an eight-year-old girl who had reached Awakening, had exclaimed: ’This thing is hard to believe. Wherefore, because the body of a woman is filthy and not a vessel of the Law.’

  This set the tone for the prejudice and discrimination which followed. In Tibet, where the word for woman is ‘inferior born’, it was written that ‘on the basis of her body’ a woman was lesser than a man. Consequently at any religious ceremony the nuns had to sit behind the monks, and in the offering of the butter tea the most senior nun would be served after a monk of one day’s ordination. To compound it all, they were given a lesser ordination than the monks, thereby confirming them in the eyes of society as second-class spiritual citizens.

  The effect of all this on the women, as Tenzin Palmo was now discovering for herself, was crushing. Their self-confidence in their ability to get anywhere on the spiritual path was reduced to virtually zero. ‘Among Tibetan women their main prayer is to be reborn in a male body. They are looked down upon from all sides. It is so unfair,’ Tenzin Palmo commented. ‘I once visited to a nunnery where the nuns had just come back from hearing a high lama teach. He had told them women were impure and had an inferior body. They were so depressed. Their self-image was so low. How can you build a genuine spiritual practice when you’re being told from all sides that you’re worthless?

  ‘At one point I asked a very high lama if he thought women could realize Buddhahood, and he replied that they could go all the way to the last second and then would have to change into a male body. And I said, “What is it about a penis that is so essential for becoming Enlightened?” What is it about the male body that is so incredible?’ she asked, forthright as ever.

  ‘And then I asked if there was any advantage in having a female form. He said he would go away and think about it. The next day he came back and said, “I have been thinking about it and the answer is ‘no’, there are no advantages whatsoever.” I thought, one advantage is that we don’t have a male ego.’

  Urged on by her own unhappiness and the blatant unfairness of it all, Tenzin Palmo began to research the reasons for this loathing of the female body. Her findings were illuminating. ‘The Buddha never denied that women could become Enlightened,’she said. ‘In the early sutras the Buddha talked about thirty-two points of the body which were to be meditated on in depth. The meditator had to visualize peeling the skin off to examine what really was there – the guts, the blood, the pus, the waste matter. The Buddha’s purpose was twofold: to create detachment from our obsession with our own body and to lessen our attraction to other people’s bodies. The idea is that one is much less fascinated when one sees a skeleton stuffed with guts, blood and faeces! However, the writings later change. When you get to Nagajuna who wrote in the first century AD, and Shantideva, the object of contemplation has turned specifically to a woman’s body! The meditator now has to see the woman’s body as impure.

  ’The Buddha was truly Enlightened and saw things as they really were. Others, however, used the Buddha’s insights to serve their own purposes. So, rather than looking at our identification and obsession with the physical, the Buddha’s teachings were used as a means of arousing disgust towards women. If you have a monastic set-up, it is useful to view woman as “the enemy",’ she added pointedly.

  The idea that women were ’dangerous’, wiling men away from sanctity and salvation by their seductiveness and rampant sexuality, was as old as the fable of Eve herself. Tenzin Palmo was having none of i
t: ’Really! It’s not the woman who’s creating the problem, it’s the man’s mental defilements. If the man didn’t have desire and passion, nothing the woman could do would cause him any problem at all,’ she said. ‘Once a lama accused me of being seductive and causing him difficulty. I was aghast. “I’m not doing anything to you, it’s your own mind,” I protested. He laughed and admitted it was true.

  ‘It’s the man’s problem and he blames it all on her!’ she continued. ‘Women are supposed to be these lustful, seductive creatures but when you look at it, it’s absurd. Who has the harems? Do women have courts of men on hand to satisfy their sexual needs? Are men afraid to walk in the streets at night in case women will jump on them and rape them? Look at men in prison and the army, how they behave together! And how many male prostitutes are there? Even the male prostitutes that do exist are there to satisfy other men,’ she said, warming to her theme. ‘It’s all unbelievable projection. Men have this big problem and they put it all on to women because females happen to have a shape which is sexually arousing to them. Women don’t even have to wear seductive clothing for men to be turned on. When I was young and going through the phase of pulling my hair back and wearing big sweaters and no make-up I had just as many boyfriends and admirers as when I dressed up.’

  Adding to her general misery was her challenging relationship with Choegyal Rinpoche, the monk put in charge of teaching her Buddhism. He was an interesting man. A few years younger than Tenzin Palmo, he had been closely associated with all the Khamtrul Rinpoches (and therefore by association with Tenzin Palmo too). Choegyal Rinpoche was not only an acknowledged lineage master, also in his eighth reincarnation, but was an acclaimed artist too. He had had a particularly traumatic escape out of Tibet aged just thirteen, having been captured and then released by a Tibetan ’Red Guard’ who happened to recognize him beneath his disguise. This experience together with the trauma of seeing his monastery with its works of art destroyed made him highly strung and difficult for Tenzin Palmo to deal with.

  ‘Our relationship was both close and exceedingly fraught. Actually I saw him as a Taoist sage living on a mountain painting the moon,’ she said. ‘I got affected by his temperament. He was quite erratic and neurotic, so that I never knew where I stood with him. Frankly, it was one of the most difficult relationships that I have ever had. I felt it had to be karmic, something that had to be resolved in this lifetime.’ She begged Khamtrul Rinpoche to give her someone else to instruct her, but he declined. ‘No, Choegyal Rinpoche is your teacher,’ he insisted.

  Her alienation was exacerbated by the fact that she could neither speak the language well nor read the texts, Snellgrove’s lessons back in London being very rudimentary. ‘I would have to look up every word in the page. It took ages. And nobody spoke English. Choegyal and I would communicate in “Tiblish”. That was the thing with Khamtrul Rinpoche. He wasn’t a hip lama who wanted to attract a large group of Western followers. If you wanted to be with him you had to learn Tibetan and do it his way.’

  Eventually she would be able to hold prolonged conversations in Tibetan and read the texts fluently, actually preferring them to the translations, which, she said, lost nearly all of the poetry and the soaring inspirational flavour of the originals. But for now gaining meaning from the unfamiliar script was a decided ordeal.

  Tenzin Palmo went along with it all for a long time – the discrimination, the prejudice, the put-downs. There was no one to advise her otherwise. She had never heard of women’s lib, never seen any bra-burning, had never read Germaine Greer’s revolutionary words in the Female Eunuch: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’ She had left England long before all that had happened. More specifically, there were no women gurus to turn to for help.

  ‘It was only gradually that I began to think, no, wait a minute, this isn’t right, and to feel very sad,’ she said. It all reached a crescendo at one significant point in time. It was then that Tenzin Palmo made the vow that was to inspire hundreds of women across the world when they later heard of it. The vow to attain Enlightenment as a woman.

  ‘It was a moment of sheer frustration after I’d been rejected yet again on account of being female. I made this heartfelt pledge: I’m going to continue to take female form and achieve Enlightenment!’ she said, puffing with indignation. ‘I was so exasperated by this terrible male chauvinism that was all around me. I thought, “Forget it! I don’t want to be born in a male body under these circumstances.” And so I made this strong prayer; even if I can’t do that much in this lifetime, in the future may this stream of consciousness go forward and take on the transitory form of a female rather than a male.’

  She was not being particularly militant about it. It was simply that the balance of power on the spiritual front had to be redressed. ‘Of course being male or female is all relative, but at this moment we are living on a relative plane and the point is that there is such a great dearth of female spiritual teachers. So at this time being a female is more helpful,’ she said simply.

  The gloom was punctuated by small moments of light. About a year after Tenzin Palmo had been living in Dalhousie, the indomitable Lee travelled out to see her daughter. ‘I wish I could do something meaningful with my life,’ she had written to her. ‘Well, in that case why don’t you sell your house and come and meet the lamas?’ Tenzin Palmo had replied. Lee did just that and duly arrived in Dalhousie, carrying tapes of Bob Dylan in an effort to update Tenzin Palmo with Western culture. She loved everything about India, the way of life, the Tibetans, the Buddhist doctrine, and decided to take Refuge with Khamtrul Rinpoche, thereby committing herself officially to the Buddhist path, as her daughter had done. On the morning of the ceremony, while she was still in bed, she had a vision of Tara, the female Buddha of compassionate action, smiling beatifically at her and handing her a flower.

  ’She had a wonderful time and wanted to live in India permanently,’ said Tenzin Palmo, ‘but she couldn’t take the food, the climate and the lack of comfort so after ten months she went back to England.’

  Life went on. There was the Saturday night excursion to the Bengali sweet shop for the syrupy gulab jamuns and the occasional picnic, which in typical Tibetan style sometimes went on for days and days. There was one famous picnic which started off at three days, went on for ten, and then stretched to twenty. The food might have been very poor but the Tibetans’ capacity for fun was still intact.

  When, one day in 1967, she suddenly got an unexpected windfall of 400 rupees (about £8), Tenzin Palmo made the journey to Sikkim, on the other side of India, to receive her full ordination from the Karmapa, head of the Kargyu sect and a close friend of Khamtrul Rinpoche. It was the formal admittance into the monastic assembly, poetically called ’The Going Forth’ – referring to the going forth into homelessness, which in Tenzin Palmo’s case had already been enacted. She would have liked Khamtrul Rinpoche to perform the ritual, but he had not been formally ordained himself for the prerequisite ten years and she didn’t want to wait any longer.

  The ceremony itself was memorable. During the proceedings the Karmapa leant down and whispered in her ear: ‘You’re the first Western nun that I’ve ordained. You’ve never been married, you’ve never had children, therefore there is more temptation for you to fall. You must be very strong and very careful. We Tibetans believe the founding of any movement or institution is of great importance for the future. In the years to come there will be many, many who will ordain. Whatever happens, you must never give up your ordination.’ The responsibility really struck home.

  When it was all over Tenzin Palmo returned to her room and collapsed into bed. It had been a long day; the ceremony had lasted almost three hours and had been conducted entirely in Tibetan. She immediately fell asleep, only to be awoken by a loud banging on the door and a voice shouting, ‘Usha coming, Usha coming.’

  ‘I leapt out of bed and dashed back to the monastery, thinking someone important was about to arrive. When I got there I found
the Karmapa in a side room, sitting on a high throne with a hat box in front of him. At that moment I realized that “Usha” was the honorific name for “hat” and that the Karmapa was going to perform the black hat ceremony.’

  Tenzin Palmo was about to be privy to one of the most mystic and powerful rituals that existed in Tibetan Buddhism. Said to be made from the hair of 100,000 Dakinis (powerful female spirits), the black hat or crown was regarded as a mystic object of awesome power. It was believed to be self-existent over the head of all the Karmapas, visible to those whose sight was pure enough to see it, and was held to be capable of liberating on sight.

  Now the Karmapa took the earthly replica out of its box, held it up in the air, and placed it on his head. Simultaneously he built up in his mind the true black hat while reciting the mantra of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion, ‘Om Mani Padme Hung’. Tenzin Palmo, sitting at the Karmapa’s feet, was suddenly overcome. ‘I was already worked up emotionally and now tears of absolute devotion began streaming down my face. When it was over everyone went up for a blessing but I couldn’t move. I was empty. People left and I still sat there. The Karmapa put his hands out to me, I got up and went to him. He put both hands on my head and gave me his blessing.’

  The next day she went to look at the old Rumtek monastery, once belonging to the Karmapa, now deserted. In one room there was a hole in the bricks and for some reason, totally unwise in a subtropical place like Sikkim, Tenzin Palmo had an urge to plunge her hand into it. She pulled out a bone artefact made of beautifully carved pieces, strung together like a net. It was identical to the garment worn by the powerful female tantric deity Vajrayogini. Having taken the vow ‘not to take anything that was not freely given’, however, Tenzin Palmo dutifully put it back. Later, when she told Khamtrul Rinpoche about it, he told her that she should have kept it. ‘It was for you,’ he said.