‘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 much 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.