‘My life is in the hands of the Buddha, dharma and sangha, literally. I’ve handed it over. Whatever is necessary for me to do to benefit all beings, let me do it. I don’t care,’ she admits. ‘Besides, I’ve discovered that if I try to push things the way I think they should be done everything goes wrong.’
Having surrendered to the Buddha, the practicalities of her life curiously seem to take care of themselves. People are only too pleased to have her company for as long as she can be with them – offering her plane tickets, their houses, food, transport, money, so that all her physical needs are met. This is how she says it should be. ‘A true monastic lives without security, dependent on the unsolicited generosity of others. Contrary to what some Westerners might think, this is not being a parasite, this is going forth in faith. Jesus also said, “Give ye no thought unto the morrow what ye shall eat and what ye shall wear." We should have faith that if we practise sincerely we won’t starve, we will be supported not just materially but in every way.’
And so, living out her faith absolutely, Tenzin Palmo stands in a strange counter-flow to the rest of twentieth-century society with its emphasis on acquisition and satisfaction of desire. She has no home, no family, no security, no partner, no sexual relationship, no pension plan. She has no need to accumulate. She still owns nothing except the barest of essentials – her robes, some texts, a jumper, a sleeping-bag, a few personal items. Once she splashed out and bought a luxury, a neck pillow for travelling, but lost it soon afterwards. ‘It serves me right. I was getting far too attached to it,’ she comments with a laugh. Her bank balance remains as meagre as ever, Tenzin Palmo refusing to touch any of the donations intended for the nunnery – even for travelling to raise funds. She is as meticulous as ever regarding money given for religious purposes. For all her penury she remains as sanguine as ever, money having no interest to her. She’ll happily open her own purse and given whatever she can to whoever asks her. She’s following the life of renunciation that she has always wanted and in doing so demonstrates eloquently that restraint and simplicity can bring happiness and peace of mind.
Travelling in various parts of the world with her I witness an alluring but enigmatic figure, a mixture of curious contradictions so that you can’t quite grasp her. She is eminently practical, down-to-earth, plain-speaking, and at the same time other-worldly and fey, her eye focused on a horizon too distant for most of us to see. She is content to wait for hours, days even, without complaint, for people, planes, events, so that you think she is passive and easily swayed. But no one can be more determined nor put their foot down more strongly when an issue is at stake that she cares about. She will bluntly tell anyone why they should not eat meat, sigh heavily when the conversation turns to Thanksgiving turkeys, scowl openly at a row of fishing books displayed proudly on a bookshelf. And woe betide anyone who crosses her on theological issues; then the full force of her formidable logic and rhetoric is galvanized, leaving her opponent winded and running for cover. She is infinitely kindly yet you tread warily, for in spite of her humility there is something awesome about her. And sometimes, when she looks at you, maybe after you have said something you thought significant, she can make you feel like a very small child indeed.
There are other anomalies. For all her efficiency and the demands of her teaching schedule, her pace is slow and there is an uncommon air of leisure about her. Somehow she seems to have bypassed that 1990s lore that decrees that busy is better, and that unless we are working a sixty-hour week, and going to the gym in our spare time (in order to perform better at work), we are wasting our time. She pays no heed to today’s lore that to sit and simply stare out of the window is a sin. And so, in stark contrast to the emotionally stressed and physically exhausted people who flock to her, she remains an oasis of tranquillity. As such, she teaches that ‘being’ is often better than ’doing’ and that taking time out to be still and think is often a better investment for future productivity than cramming every waking moment with feverish activity.
Her most outstanding characteristic, however, remains her overt and spontaneous sociability. For all her mounting status and the thousands of people she has met, she has not tired of human company. Her circle of friends is immense, and once anyone has entered into her domain they are never forgotten. She keeps up with childhood friends and with nearly all her family, including her brother Mervyn and his wife Sandy, who was at school with her. She is warm and welcoming to all, especially to those who come in genuine search. Her warmth is genuine, her concern for the litany of problems she hears real, her ability to listen and give advice unflagging. Yet you know in your heart that if she never saw you again she really would not miss you. And her lack of emotional need is disconcerting, for the ego likes to be flattered, wants to be wanted. From her, however, you’ll never get it. This is her hard-earned ’detached engagement’, which allows her to wander freely in the world without the entanglement of close personal relationships.
‘I don’t think it’s a bad thing,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean that one doesn’t feel love and compassion, that one doesn’t care. It just means that one doesn’t hold on. One can be filled with joy to be with someone but if one is not it doesn’t matter. People, especially family, get upset if you are not attached to them but that’s only because we confuse love and attachment all the time.’
She still sees the young Khamtrul Rinpoche whenever she is at Tashi Jong, in the lush hills of north India. He is now a solemn and rather shy teenager. She teaches him words of English and tries to infiltrate Western books into his strict and, in her opinion, too isolated world. Now that her great mentor, the previous Khamtrul Rinpoche, has gone, she feels her guidance coming from another source. ‘I think I am being led by the Dakinis,’ she says, referring to those powerful female spiritual forces with whom she has always had a particularly close association.
There have been changes in the wider feminist Buddhist field too. Since 1993, when she and the other women at the Dharamsala Conference confronted the Dalai Lama with the sexual discrimination they had faced, the nun’s lot has started to improve a little. One team of accomplished nuns has begun to tour the globe making sand mandalas of the Kalachakra deity in the cause of world peace – a task traditionally undertaken by monks. A new nunnery, Dolma Ling, has opened in Dharamsala, where the nuns are learning the art of debating. It is a huge leap forward, the intellectual business of dialectics being customarily regarded as the exclusive domain of the monks. At one point last year the nuns plucked up enough courage to debate in the courtyard of the Dalai Lama’s temple itself, in front of the monks. They stood there, small, young, enthusiastic figures stamping their feet and clapping their hands in the ritualized gestures of point scoring – and Western onlookers testified that the sight brought tears to their eyes. And the matter of introducing full ordination gets closer and closer. The Dalai Lama has sent emissaries to Taiwan to investigate the Chinese Bhikshuni tradition, with the hope of making it available to Tibetan nuns. After 1,000 years it is about time.
Still, there is a long way to go. There are as yet no women sitting among the massed ranks of robed figures in the Great Temple. Depressingly, the new influx of recognized reincarnations of the former masters and lineage holders are all boys – thereby promising little hope of a breakdown in the patriarchal hierarchy. And the average Eastern man in the street will still gawp in frank disbelief at the very suggestion that a woman can attain Enlightenment.
Over the years Tenzin Palmo, the nun, has risen to legendary status, with younger Western nuns staring in awe whenever she comes among them. She is an icon. A woman who proved them wrong. A woman (and a Western woman) who survived in a cave, all alone, for twelve years, engaging in serious meditation without cracking or diminishing her purpose. A woman whose subsequent words of wisdom are an inspiration to people, lay and ordained alike. As such, Tenzin Palmo continues to be a role model and a torch-bearer for spiritual women everywhere.
Her plans for the future, as muc
h as she will allow herself to have any, revolve around a single theme, the one she has had all her life, to gain Enlightenment. With this goal still set firmly in her mind, she intends, once her task of building the nunnery is done, to go back to the cave. As such she will have come full circle. Leaving the world, returning to it, and then departing once more to live in solitude to follow the inner life. For all the brave new assertions that Enlightenment can be achieved out in the world, she feels that the cave is still relevant in our modern world, and that is ultimately where she belongs.
‘I would like to gain very deep realizations,’ she says softly. ‘And all my teachers, including the Dalai Lama, have said that retreat is the most important thing for me to do during this lifetime. When I am in retreat I know at a very deep level that I am in the right place doing the right thing,’ she says.
And so she continues to be rare. As Richard Gere, the actor and committed Buddhist, put it recently: ‘Most of us Westerners would get brain cancer if we went into caves. We are such active people that our karma has to work itself out. Not many of us are far along enough to have spiritualized our mind streams sufficiently to handle a cave.’
Although she has undoubtedly travelled far along the spiritual path, she declares she still she has a long way to go. ‘I’ve hardly even started. There are a lot more barriers I have to break through in my mind. You see, a flash is not enough. You have to repeat and repeat until the realizations are stabilized in your mind. That is why it takes so long – twelve years, twenty-five years, a lifetime, several lifetimes.’
She will not return to the same cave in Lahoul, however. Her body is too old to withstand the extreme physical hardship of living 13,200 feet high in the Himalayas, she says. Nor can she trudge up mountains carrying fifteen kilograms of supplies, as she did before. In any case, her old home in the mountain no longer exists. After she left in 1988, none of the nuns or monks of the area had the will or the courage to move in and carry on where Tenzin Palmo had left off. Consequently the cave was pulled apart – the door and windows being carried down to the town to be used again and the stones scattered back over the hillside where they had come from. The overhang re-emerged and for many years it looked as though no one had ever sat, and gardened, and prayed up there. Years later, however, the cave briefly came back to life through another determined Western woman. In 1995 a German nun called Edith Besch refound the spot made famous by Tenzin Palmo and built the cave up again - on a much grander scale. A room was added and the front wall built out. There was even a separate kitchen and an outside toilet. Edith only managed one year in the cave, however, before being taken ill with cancer and dying in a monastery in the valley below, aged just forty-three. The local people attested that she had been notoriously hot-tempered when she arrived, but after twelve months of retreat had emerged serene and patient in spite of her sickness and had died a peaceful death. The cave, it seemed, had worked its magic once again.
For Tenzin Palmo her next cave will be more metaphorical than actual. ‘More likely it will be a little retreat hut in a place which is quiet and peaceful but not so remote. Maybe a small hermitage on someone’s land where it is not so difficult to get supplies. This place could be anywhere, although certainly not England! I still do not feel at home there. It might well be the East – I have always had the feeling that I will die in the East,’ she mused.
The location is irrelevant. Wherever it is, she has only one purpose in mind: to continue pursuing the path to perfection in the body of a woman.
Acknowledgements
I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to: Robert Drew for his invaluable encouragement; Monica Joyce, intrepid fellow traveller; Ngawang for hauling me up to the cave; David Reynolds for believing in me; Ruth Logan and all the Bloomsbury team for their tremendous effort; Andrew Doust for brushing me down when the going got tough; and, of course, Tenzin Palmo, who so generously allowed me into her life.
Author’s Note
If you would like to make a donation towards the funding of Tenzin Palmo’s Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery, please send a cheque or Postal Order payable to Tenzin Palmo c/o Vicki Mackenzie at Bloomsbury Publishing Pic, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
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A Note on the Author
Vicki Mackenzie was born in England, and as the daughter of a naval officer spent her childhood gaining an eclectic education in various parts of the world. After graduating from Queensland University she joined the news desk of the Sun in Sydney as a cadet reporter. She soon moved on to Fleet Street, where she became a features writer – first on the Daily Sketch and then on the Daily Mail. She went on to write for the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Express, the Mail on Sunday and many national magazines. For several years she was also a contributor at the Australian Consolidated Press bureau in Fleet Street.
In 1976, on a whim, she attended a month-long meditation course run by two Tibetan Lamas in Nepal. This ignited a deep interest in Buddhism which resulted in her writing the best-selling Reincarnation: The Boy Lama and its sequel, Reborn in the West: The Reincarnation Masters.
She now divides her time between Australia and England.
This electronic edition published 2011
Copyright ©1998 by Vicki Mackenzie
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Map on page ix by Neil Hyslop
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eISBN: 978-1-40882-812-0
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Bloomsbury Publishing Pic
First U.S. edition published in 1998 by Bloomsbury Publishing
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Footnote
Cave in the snow. A western woman’s quest for enlightenment Page 24