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

The man goes away relieved.

It is not only the people in the audience who are eager to meet her. Established teachers, also facing the challenge of presenting Buddhism to the West, are also curious to assess her worth. Yvonne Rand, founder of the Goat in the Road, is one. As one of America’s leading Zen instructors and an ardent spokeswoman for the feminization of Buddhism, she has an especially keen interest in Tenzin Palmo.

‘I appreciate the fact that she’s a woman and very confident about delivering the essential core of the teachings in a way people can understand. She is a very gifted teacher. She’s also not in any way sentimental, which I like,’ she says. ‘There’s a rapidly increasing number of women teachers and as we collaborate more and more in a non-sectarian way it will lead to more confidence. This collaboration is a highly creative process.’

’She’s not ordinary – I think she came in with a pretty pure mind,’ said Lama Palden Drolma, a Californian woman who earned her title ‘Lama’ after completing a three-year group retreat within the USA under the guidance of the eminent teacher Kalu Rinpoche. She had invited Tenzin Palmo to speak at her newly opened Sukhasiddhi Foundation in Mill Valley, San Francisco.’To me her whole life is inspirational,’ she continued. ‘The fact that she has stayed a nun for thirty years is an achievement in itself. Her dedication is awe-inspiring. In her you can see that the dharma has truly worked She’s warm, natural and personallyI don’t sense much ego there. She’s also an extraordinarily clear teacher, expressing the dharma in a very direct and meaningful way. So many people have wanted to hear her that we’ve had to turn a lot away.’

It’s ironic, therefore, that for all the undoubted success of her teaching programme, the number of followers she has gathered, and the increasing strength of her reputation, Tenzin Palmo remains singularly unimpressed by her newly-found career. She could so easily become a guru, the position is there so obviously in the offing. But it’s a job she simply doesn’t want.

‘I just don’t enjoy it. It gives me no joy,’ she admits candidly. ‘When I’m teaching there’s this little voice inside me which says, “What are you doing?” And so I think it cannot be right. Of course, I meet a lot of lovely people I normally wouldn’t meet. Everyone’s very kind. Strangers become friends. And I learn a lot from being in different situations, answering questions, teaching. Actually, I often think I learn more than the people I’m teaching. I see things in new ways. It’s helpful. But it’s just something that I don’t want to do with the rest of my life.’

In the meantime she continued. There was a job to do, a need to be met. Other women were seeking Enlightenment and she had to respond. Her Bodhisattva vow, ‘to free all suffering creatures and place them in bliss’, demanded it. In doing so she had expanded her scope considerably, from seeking her own liberation as a woman, to helping other women achieve the same goal. Just as she had been among the first Westerners to discover Buddhism, to become a nun and to live in a cave in the snow-bound Himalayas, Tenzin Palmo, aged fifty, was still pioneering – still forging the way ahead, this time on a more ambitious scale. And so without any fuss, and just the occasional sigh, she carried on.

From being a cave-dweller Tenzin Palmo had become a jet-setter. From being entirely stationary she had begun to move across the world at a frantic pace. From being silent she now spoke for hours on end. From living the most simple existence she was now exposed to the full gamut of late twentieth-century life. The world that she had re-entered was a radically different place from the one she had left in 1963 when she had set sail for India. She saw for herself the stress and the insecurity, the job losses and the new phenomenon of homelessness. She read about increased crime, escalating violence and the drug problems. She witnessed her friends pedalling faster and faster in an effort to keep up. She noted governments everywhere swapping the principle of public service for economic rationalism; and now the new luxuries were cited as silence, space, time and an intact ecology. And she experienced first hand the great need for spiritual values in an increasingly materialistic society.

‘People are parched with thirst,’ she said. ‘In Lahoul there was a richness to life in spite of all the hardships. Here people are hungry for some real meaning and depth to their lives. When one has stopped satiating the senses one wants more. That’s why people are aggressive and depressed. They feel everything is so futile. You have everything you want, and then what? Society’s answer is to get more and more, but where does that get you? I see isolation everywhere and it has nothing to do with being alone. It’s about having an alienated psyche.’

More specifically to her own story, by the mid-1990s the Western world had got over the first flush of its love affair with Buddhism and was beginning to take a cooler and more mature look at the complex, exotic religion which had come among them. That it had taken the Occident by storm was no longer in dispute. Thinking people of all ages and from all walks of life throughout Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had been awed by the profundity of its message and drawn by the quality of the lamas who had delivered it. As a result Buddhist centres, specifically Tibetan Buddhist, had mushroomed all over the globe. But now the honeymoon was over. The early disciples, after thirty years of investigation and practice, began to see a more realistic – and human – face of the religion which had been transplanted into their soil. Flaws emerged, discrepancies arose and while Eastern mores may have forbidden outright criticism of its established religion and spiritual figureheads, the West, with its right of free speech, had no such scruples. By the time Tenzin Palmo hit the world circuit, certain aspects of Buddhism were being loudly and publicly challenged – and with them, by implication, Tenzin Palmo’s chosen way of life.

The first object held up for scrutiny was the guru – regarded as the Guardian of the Truth, Infallible Guide and, in Tibetan Buddhism, as one with the Buddha himself. ‘Guru is Buddha, Guru is dharma, Guru is sangha also,’ went the prayer. The reasoning was logical. The Buddha mind was absolute and all-pervasive but the guru was here on earth in the flesh. The Tibetans had an analogy. The Buddha was like the sun, all-powerful and shining on everything, but still unable to make a piece of paper burst into flames. For that you needed a magnifying glass, a conduit to channel the energy, hence the guru. Even so, it was a precarious position for any human to maintain, let alone a man set down in a distant land among foreign people and strange ways. Inevitably several gurus quickly fell off their pedestals amidst a clamour of publicity.

Tenzin Palmo’s old friend and mentor, Chogyam Trungpa, whom she had met when he first arrived in England from Tibet, led the way, with a series of scandals which came to light mostly after his death in 1987. Trungpa, it was revealed, had not only frequently sat on his throne reeking of alcohol, he had engaged in several sexual relationships with his female students as well. It did not matter that he was not of a celibate order, the confusion which ensued was widespread. Many students tried to emulate him by also taking to the bottle and several of his female partners claimed their lives had been destroyed by his philandering. This notoriety was followed horribly quickly by the news that his chosen successor, American-born Thomas Rich, who became Osel Tendzin, not only had AIDS which he had kept secret but had infected one of his many unknowing student lovers.