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

‘Admittedly men have done some pretty awful things but they have often been aided and abetted by women. If one looks at the situation fairly, the people keeping women down are often other women! It’s not men against women, but women against women. After all, the greatest opponent of the suffragettes was Queen Victoria! If the women stood together what could men do? The whole issue is not a matter of polarizing the human race. It’s more subtle than that.’

Her words had wisdom. If the last several thousand years of patriarchy had been a backlash against the previous millennia of matriarchy when the Earth Goddess had reigned supreme (as many pundits were saying), what was the point of having another radical pendulum swing back again? If a new order was emerging then balance between male and female (as well as East and West) was obviously the best solution. And because she spoke sense the women listened and told her they hadn’t thought of it that way before.

Tenzin Palmo had thought out her own way of bringing about the revolution. A much quieter way. ‘It should be based on open discussion, patience, compromise, lots of equanimity and a soft, warm heart.’ They were the classic Buddhist values. ‘The Buddha said we must love all sentient beings. How can we then set sentient beings up as the enemy?’ Most especially, she advocated a calm, non-strident voice. ‘Of course you can raise your voice but first you have to check your motivation. Is it out of love for other women and their needs or out of anger? If we’re speaking out of negative emotions the result will only be worse,’ she repeated. ‘On the other hand we don’t have to be simpering.’

In her mind she knew what spiritually powerful women looked like. There was her favourite painting, by Piero della Francesca, of the Madonna, standing with her cloak wide open giving shelter to a multitude of people underneath. ’She looks straight out at the viewer. She’s strong, confident, in no way simpering but in no way angry either. There is love there, compassion, and gravitas. She’s a very powerful lady,’ she said.

There was also a young Tibetan woman who had begun to teach on the world stage called Khandro Rinpoche, whom Tenzin Palmo had high regard for. ’She is as sharp as can be, absolutely clear and at the same time completely feminine. I have never seen her angry yet everyone respects her enormously. She has inner authority and when she sits on the throne she sits there with complete confidence, an egoless confidence. There’s no pride there. Along with her precise wisdom she also has a warm, nurturing side. She’s absolutely in control, not at all weak or sentimental.’

She paused for thought, then added: ‘What is our image of woman? To me, it comes down to poise and inner strength. When you have those you have natural authority, and people will automatically want to follow you. These are the qualities that I shall try to encourage the women at Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery to develop.’

And with that Tenzin Palmo continued on her way, moving quietly across the world, collecting alms for a nunnery where it could all be possible.

It has been nine years since I first met Tenzin Palmo in the grounds of that Tuscan mansion and was catapulted into the slow but inexorable business of writing her life story. In that time much has changed. She has lost some of that luminous glow she had when she first came out of the cave, though her eyes are as sparkling and her manner as animated as ever. The years on the road, forever on the move, teaching incessantly, have taken their toll. It has been a long, tough haul. At the time of writing she has collected enough money to buy the land and lay the foundations. By anyone’s standards it’s a tremendous achievement, but for one woman to have to have done it single-handed, without the aid of professional fundraisers, it is extraordinary. Still, there is a long way to go, and so she travels on, gathering yet more funds to boost the coffers for her nunnery. For all the slowness of the process she remains strangely unconcerned, showing no signs of impatience to hurry things along and get the job done. She has no personal ambition in this scheme. At one level she really doesn’t mind.

‘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.