Tenzin Palmo

Speaking of Buddhist nuns in the Himalayan caves -- here's a story on Ani Tenzin Palmo, who's the real deal.

In a cave no more: Buddhist nun on world fund tour

After 12 years meditating in a Himalayan cave, Tenzin Palmo promotes women's communities.

 

Ani Tenzin Palmo, a 64-year-old Buddhist nun , is traveling the world to raise funds to build a religious community for women in India.

What is the sound of a Buddhist nun sitting alone for 12 years in a Himalayan cave?

"Quiet," Tenzin Palmo recalled last week.

"Never boring. And very beautiful."

The phone line from Vancouver fell silent for a moment.

"I wasn't planning to do 12 years," she continued. "But it was the ideal place to practice" meditation. "So, I just stayed there."

"There" was a space both tiny and vast . . .

Tenzin Palmo's cave near the Tibetan border was so small she slept sitting up, her legs folded beneath her as in meditation.  Beyond lay snowcapped mountains and mist-filled valleys sweeping to infinity.

"It was the perfect environment for carrying on one's spiritual practices," said Palmo, 64, who has since become a leading transmitter of Tibetan Buddhism to the West and a star in some eastern Buddhist countries. . .

When she climbed down from her "perfect environment" in 1988, however, she returned not to a welcoming community of nuns, but of monks.  It was no surprise.

Born Diane Perry in London in 1943, Palmo had become a Tibetan Buddhist at age 18 and moved two years later to study in northern India.  She soon discovered how few nuns are in the 1,200-year-old Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

"Everything I read in those days was about monks, monks, monks," she recalled with a laugh.

Worse, women who did commit to Tibetan religious life typically found themselves kept uneducated and "waiting on the monks" as cooks and housekeepers.

Perry - who had wanted to be a nun since age 10 "even though I didn't believe in God" - was undeterred.

She shaved her head and took ordination in 1964 - one of the first Western women ever to do so - and later served as assistant to her teacher, before heading to her snow cave in 1976.

But after she returned, she discovered the winds of feminism reaching even the high Himalayas.  Her lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, asked her several years later to create a separate religious community nearby for women. . .

Since then, she has been traveling the world to raise funds for what has become the Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India, which opened the first of its many doors in 2000.

The site, about 40 miles from Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama, houses 52 women, she said, but "we are building for 130."

"She's important because she's absorbed the great teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and communicates them through a Western mind," said Christopher Sohnly, a member of the Shambhala Center's visit committee, which invited Ani Tenzin Palmo to Philadelphia. Her efforts to promote women's religious communities have also made her "a pop star in places like Taiwan," Sohnly said.  She was the subject of 1999 biography, Cave in the Snow, by Vickie MacKenzie, and published Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Lessons in Practical Buddhism, in 1999.

Link story here.

Comments

[scruffysmileyface]

Wow. Now there's someone to admire. A pop star in Taiwan? Interesting.

I can't even imagine 12 years. She even beat Damo by 3 years!

[Buddhist Jihad]

She would have stayed longer, but the Indian govt. refused to extend her visa. A real practitioner, real person.

[Yoda]

Story of Tenzin Palmo is beyond amazing! Thanks for making us aware of it.
Interesting that se took full ordination as buddhist nun in 1964. Untill now I thought that first westerner to do so was Robert Thurman (father of Uma) also in 1964. True he later gave up the monkhood. That would mean that Ani Tenzin Palmo has huge roll in history of tibethan buddhism in the West.

Btw, are you sure that reason for her to left the cave was Indian govt.? That would be beyond shameful coruption on their side for billion reasons. I don't even want to go into that.

[Buddhist Jihad]

I don't know that they singled her out, particularly, and I don't think it was corrupt, just bureaucracy. I think they were in a period of trying to get rid of Westerners. It can be quite tricky trying to stay in some countries. Friend of a friend, so I heard about her while she was still practicing there, and then when she had to leave.

Those practitioners are a generation ahead of me, and there were quite a few people ordained at that time, a lot gave back their vows, some did not. There's a certain amount of hype, not necessarily Bob Thurman's doing. "First" this, "first" that gets emphasized, and it may not be accurate, or much to the point. There were a number of people from early on, and he was certainly one of them. Ball started rolling after the Dalai Lama arrived in India in 1959. People met him, things changed, lives changed. China's loss, the west's gain. Over the next ten years, more and more practitioners left Tibet, settled in India and Sikkim, Nepal. Then a second wave as teachers left India and came to Europe and America.

[Buddhist Jihad]

Good source is "How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America" by Rick Fields.

[scruffysmileyface]

There are true buddhas walking among us, aren't there? Now, I say this because, from the little I've been able to read so far, Tenzin Palmo is one of those woke-up folks. What I'm seeing here is the opposite of what I talked about in "Made-up Junk." I have to be careful, though, not to allow myself to think this or that about someone because of a particular act, like meditating in a cave. It's more like, because of what she so clearly learned in the cave, and later taught in Europe.

Truly a pleasure to learn about such a person.

[scruffysmileyface]

Love the blog's new look, by the way.

[Buddhist Jihad]

Glad you like it. I added the booklist because I was inspired by yours. How did you add all the other stuff? I'd like to add other stuff. I've been having a hard time with typepad, it seems to have a mind of its own.

[Yoda]

Tenzin Palmo is all news to me as is the history of Western buddhism and it's key figures. I focused my interest on buddhist history of spreading of Dharma from India to Tibet and later on to Mongolia. Specially on interactions between Dalai Lamas and Mongolian khans.
But hey, I'm from small European county called Croatia you all probably never heard about and even we here have important person in buddhist world. It's Lobsang Norbu our president of Croatian Buddhist Society, student of Sera Je elite tantric university in India and personal friend od HH Dalai Lama, also president of intertnational buddhist society called Prajnadeep seated in Bodh Gaya.

P.S. blog's new look is great. I plan to start my own blog soon but I'm afraid it wouldn't have english version...
Cheers!

[scruffysmileyface]

Zdravo, Yoda!

Of course, everyone's heard of Croatia! It may be small, but it is certainly a historically and culturally important country. I've never visited there yet, but I've got friends in nearby places.

[scruffysmileyface]

Buddhist Jihad, most of the stuff on my blog comes from Typepad, which is why I use it instead of Blogspot. Just better functionality. Although a lot of is is also available on other hosts.

In Typepad, the lists running down the margins (links, etc) are "Typelists" and can be configured in a number of ways. There's also "Widgets" which I believe can be used on hosts other than Typepad.

I actually kinda think I have too much stuff on Tengu House, and I'll probably be getting rid of some of the little gadgets soon. I think the tattoo kanji can go, as well as the Amazon.com wishlist. Just don't need them. I also might consolidate my fiction and nonfiction lists, because two lists just takes up too much space.

[scruffysmileyface]

Almost forgot - the banner across the top of the page is of my own creation. I started with a pic that I took in Taiwan, looking down toward the coast from the town of Jui Feng, up in the mountains. Then I converted it to B&W and used Excel to insert the Chinese for "Tian Gou Jia" or "Heaven Dog House (or family)" and of course the English. I thought it was kinda cool. I was really taken with the way mountains look in Asia, which is much more dramatic than in the US, and wanted to use that somewhere.

[Buddhist Jihad]

So the photos are inserted as typelists? How did you create the banner? I've been trying to fiddle with the my banner, with no luck. Can't even get it to break into paragraphs. Am I fiddling in the wrong place? Not meaning to pester you with cybertrivia.

Yo, Yoda. Croatia is famous, glad to hear there's dharma there.

[Yoda]

Whoa Nelly!! This is a surprise... Famous you say!? Let me guess- NBA basketball players?
Zdravo to you to scruffysmileyface.

[scruffysmileyface]

I did have some difficulty getting the banner to "take." I remember discovering, by way of trial and error, and error and error and error, that I had to insert the pic into a Word doc, and then save that Word doc in My Documents as "Banner1". Then I used the Configure page (I think) to insert the banner, fiddling with dimensions etc the whole time.

Mind you, when you insert a banner - at least when you do it the way I did it - you end up negating your intro para, and I haven't figured out a way to add text to the banner as yet.

The pics of Taiwan running down the left side, there's a specific place in Typepad for that. Go into your main Typepad welcome page, and there are five tabs running along the top. They are: Home, Weblogs, Photo Albums, Typelists, and Control Panel. Go to Photo Albums and click on "Create a new Photo Album". Sorry I don't know how to do it outside of Typepad. I was never able to figure it out on Blogger.

[Tibetan Calligraphy Student]

Wonderful news.