“Ato had to tell His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He had an interview. We all waited with bated breath to see how the Dalai Lama would react—but the fact that the meeting lasted well over an hour was a sign that their relationship had survived.”
In 1967, Alethea and Ato moved to Cambridge, England, had a daughter, and for years Ato worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital before starting to teach again in Europe and Canada. The next time Alethea saw Freda was in 1974, during one of the Karmapa’s tours. “She was as charming and batty as ever. I suggested she might like to take a bath to freshen up when she arrived. ‘I never take a bath after midday. The Karmapa advised me against it.’ It was a harmless dottiness, but I felt sorry for those people who regarded every statement uttered by a lama as gold plated.”
Ultimately, Alethea, like all those who encountered Freda and her work, had to concede her accomplishments. “One has to admit, however, that Freda made an awful lot happen. She saw very clearly what should happen, that the Tibetans needed to learn about the rest of the world. And she had the zeal of a new convert to bring it off. She had great conviction, and she was right!”
Another source of volunteers came via the international network she had established in Delhi, the Tibetan Friendship Group, through which Freda roped in pen pals, sponsors, and helpers for her tulkus and Tibetan refugees in general.
One such volunteer, John Weir Hardy, a particularly well-connected young man (educated at Eton, England’s most exclusive and expensive private school), wrote glowingly in a newsletter of his experience with Freda:
I left England embittered, having lost faith in humanity. Business life was never my strong point. The Tibetans have cured me of my despondency and have taught me much. They gave me the necessary balance which one must find to go through life and Mummy was able to show me how to benefit from combining the spiritual with the material. Every fleeting second is a world in itself, another facet of a complex people’s way of life, another glimpse into a world which is far more cultured than I have ever met.
And so the progress. Eton is taking much interest in the work and is going to run a major appeal in the hopes of raising about one thousand pounds, most of which will go toward a jeep.
Freda’s Tibetan Friendship Group newsletter was one way that she let the outside world know about the plight of Tibet and what had happened to its people as a result of the Chinese invasion. In her lifetime she wrote literally tens of thousands of letters, usually working late into the night, to societies and individuals seeking funds, goods, skills, clothes, expertise, and anything else that was needed. She used all her skills of persuasion and journalism, making each letter intensely personal to encourage total involvement and therefore willingness to give. Her approach was quintessentially Freda, emphasizing human interest over intellectual argument:
This is Yangchen (picture provided), a little novice girl of Tilokpur, the Mahayana Buddhist nunnery. She is the politest little girl we have. Good manners are a little-considered virtue these modern days, but how comfortable it is to have a pleasant little girl like this. SHE NEEDS A SPONSOR [sic] at $7 a month, or even $5 for food. Her younger sister, Jayong, aged 7–8, is very bright, a darling child.
About a refugee school in Varanasi that she had visited and taken under her wing, she wrote,
There was a great deal of student poverty. They have scholarships, which are meager, but there are always emergencies—clothes to be bought and medicines beyond what can be provided. I wish someone could remember the students at Christmas. The boy that was helped with medicines (gift of Mrs. Mollie Noeltner, USA) still faces the operation and would need at least Rs 400 (about $54) for the heart drugs. Another student looks very TB-ish. Many of the pupils would love student pen friends. They would have to send postage money to the students, though. Even if no great sums were sent, it would give them a sense of companionship and courage.
The tulkus were learning English and their lessons on the modern world with varying degrees of success. Freda’s star student, Trungpa Rinpoche, however, was making exceptional progress, and Freda’s aspirations for him became increasingly ambitious. He had a natural aptitude for English and had taken to reading the poets that Freda presented him with, especially T. S. Eliot. He was keen on history and geography too. Freda decided that he was ready to try to get into Oxford, her own university, where he would receive the finest education the West had to offer. With such credentials he would be perfectly equipped and have the clout to bring the sacred Buddhist teachings to the outside world in a language it could understand.
With the help of John Driver, and Englishman who was also tutoring Trungpa, Freda set about getting a Spalding Scholarship for Trungpa, and succeeded. In early 1963 Trungpa set sail for England accompanied by Akong Rinpoche, to enter into the arcane, privileged, and hallowed halls of Oxford University. It was another epic journey into the unknown, heralding as many adventures, pitfalls, and triumphs as they had met in their escape from Tibet.
For both of them it was a tough entry into a strange world. Following his desire to become a doctor, Akong broadened his knowledge of Western medicine by working as an orderly at Churchill Hospital. It was a rude awakening.
“If I hadn’t had the Buddhist teachings and some understanding of the mind, I would have hanged myself,” he confessed. “It’s quite hard being on a throne one day and cleaning toilets another. Eventually I got to like my work and now I am very grateful for the experience. And the wages helped support Trungpa and myself. I was never any good at study. I was only interested in helping people. In the end I was allowed into the operating theater to watch. I enjoyed that. I learned a lot. I was rather sad that I had to give it up when we moved to Scotland,” he said, referring to their establishing of Samye Ling in 1967, the first Tibetan monastery in the West, in the small town of Eskdalemuir.
As for Trungpa, apart from an excellent education, he acquired a British passport, an Oxford accent, a predilection for dining in formal settings with fine china and candlesticks, beautifully tailored suits, and a liking for English protocol and manners. He put it all to good use in his innovative ministry when he moved to the United States in 1970, accompanied by his very young English bride, Diana Pybus.
13
The Nuns
IT WAS NOT ONLY the bright young tulkus whom Freda was busily gathering up. A handful of nuns were also roaming around the Dalhousie hills, lost and forsaken. Of the 200,000 nuns that had existed in Tibet, only 156 had managed to escape, and they were scattered around various refugee settlements in India with no one to organize or help them.
Their fate was the result of their fiercely patriarchal culture that had always favored the monks’ education and welfare over that of the nuns. The monks had had their mighty, rich, and powerful monasteries, fertile seedbeds of spiritual learning and practice, with brilliantly organized infrastructures. The nuns, on the other hand, had been relegated to small, poor dwellings, and were generally regarded as second-class citizens due to their novice ordination. Consequently, while the monks were educated in the profound scriptures in which Tibetan Buddhism excelled and were taught sacred art and dance and the skill of debate, the nuns were reduced to saying simple prayers and rituals, or serving the monks in the monastery kitchen.
In spite of their reduced status, however, the nuns had proved themselves every bit as sincere, feisty, high-spirited, and enormously brave in their religious devotion as the monks. During the brutal Chinese invasion and destruction of their country’s unique spiritual heritage, the nuns, young and old, armed with nothing but their courage, repeatedly marched on their oppressors. Shaking their fists and, shouting “Long live the Dalai Lama!” many were thrown into jail, horribly tortured, killed, and starved for years on end.
As for their spiritual capacity, Tibet had produced some of the mightiest women meditators of all, the yoginis, who went it alone, living for years in remote, high Himalayan caves, not shaving their heads but letting their hair grow long and wild and r
eemerging so bright that even the male yogis acknowledged their superior attainments.
Always a champion of women, Freda took one look at the few Dalhousie nuns and was moved to help them. Further up the hill from the Young Lamas Home School she found an abandoned villa that once belonged to a British sahib, with a glassed-in veranda and an overgrown garden. It would do splendidly, she thought, and promptly moved the nuns in. She called it the Nun’s Hermitage and immediately set about writing innumerable letters to her vast international network of supporters, seeking funds for robes, food, medicine, and material necessities “to support these nuns in their life of higher meditation and service to mankind.” It was yet another project to manage in her already overflowing self-appointed portfolio, and one that was especially close to her heart.
Well-schooled by Barbara Castle in equality for women during her Oxford days, Freda had big plans for her nuns. Her vision was to build them a permanent nunnery, a separate retreat center, and then an institute for the higher studies that had been denied them for centuries. Such an education would put them on a par with the monks. She understood that saying prayers and doing rituals were not sufficient to reach the highest goal of Buddhism, the realization of ultimate reality that, along with a heart filled with compassion for all sentient beings, brought one to enlightenment. For that, one first needed fluency in extensive philosophical teachings until one grasped the meaning intellectually, and then one had to meditate on one’s understanding until it became a lasting “realization,” embodied as a known reality, having dropped from the head into the heart.
The year was 1963, and such an idea was monumentally radical. Today there is a thriving movement to bring equality to Tibetan nuns, but back then no one had ever thought of giving women such a treasure. No one thought that women could be enlightened. After all, the word woman in Tibetan translated as “inferior born.” A woman’s body was deemed simply unfit to contain the splendor of full awakening, a privilege belonging exclusively to the male. Freda was having none of it. She was decades ahead of her time.
Wasting no time, she found a piece of land near a river in Tilokpur, a small village sixty-two miles from Dalhousie and about twenty-two miles from Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama and his newly formed government in exile. To Freda’s mind it was Buddha-sent. Not only was it peaceful but it was near a cave once occupied by Tilopa (988–1069 c.e.), a renowned Indian mystic, erudite scholar, monk, and Tantric practitioner who founded the Kagyu lineage, of which her guru, the Karmapa, was now the head. Freda could not have been more excited.
Her letter to the Karmapa requesting permission to build her nunnery rang with confidence, and also revealed the extent of the success she had already achieved: “At the time of moving from Dalhousie, the nunnery has collected together and trained in Dharma, handicrafts, and languages, forty nuns of all ages, keeping the tradition of the Tibetan nuns going and giving them confidence to face the future. Twenty-five postulants are also waiting for admission.”
With the Karmapa’s approval, Freda began to build. It was not a success. In spite of her dewy-eyed vision, the site turned out to be utterly unsuitable. Faith Grahame, the English girl who had become her secretary, recalled the disaster in these words: “Being on a sand bank by a river, it was full of mosquitoes. It was also as hot as hell there, and right next door to a school, which made it extremely noisy. There was no water and the nuns had to walk miles in the heat to collect it. It was also full of monkeys, who would attack and steal anything the nuns would put outside. But Freda was sold because Tilopa had meditated there. That was her idealism. She was totally impractical.”
The problem was solved when the grass huts that Freda and the nuns were living in while they built the nunnery caught fire, and were razed to the ground, destroying their belongings and many precious texts that Freda was in the midst of translating.
Undeterred, Freda found another, infinitely more suitable site on a hillside overlooking the original piece of land, and began building afresh. It was a mammoth, exhausting, even noble endeavor, as was obvious from a letter she wrote to Sheila Fugard, poet and devoted South African student, wife of the renowned South African playwright Athol Fugard.
“Our nunnery is something of an odyssey,” she wrote. “We are clearing bricks and mud from the floor of a ruined fort on top of the hill. It seems like a mountain. We are using Tibetan and Indian labor, as well as nuns of all sizes, including me carrying stones for an hour a day. Our little nuns carry pebbles.”
What she did not mention was that there was no road to the new site, which involved Freda and the nuns having to haul the rocks and stones up the steep hillside by hand, often in the blazing Indian summer heat. Freda, now fifty-seven years old and heavier than she had been in her youth, was not the best equipped to handle hard labor. The nunnery, which comprised a gompa (temple), classrooms, sleeping quarters, and a kitchen, was finally completed in 1968. Twenty-seven nuns, under the watchful eye of Freda and an abbot, Lama Thinley Rinpoche, moved in. She called it Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling and dedicated it to her guru, the Sixteenth Karmapa.
Freda had accomplished another first—building the first religious establishment for Tibetan refugee monastics of either gender. The girls had finally beaten the boys to it!
While the Young Lamas Home School for young tulkus was disbanded a few years after Freda opened it, her nunnery still exists to this day. You can find it perched high on its hill with beautiful views overlooking treeclad slopes and within earshot of the river rushing past below. There’s now a road leading to the nunnery, which boasts a fine pair of iron gates decorated with traditional Tibetan motifs. In the courtyard is a bodhi tree grown from a seed that Freda brought from Bodhgaya, a descendant of the very tree under which the Buddha sat pledging not to move until he attained enlightenment. The sapling was six inches high when she planted it, today it is enormous.
In the temple is a large Tibetan statue of the Buddha, which Freda also carried up the hillside, and next to it is a beautifully scripted manuscript in Freda’s own handwriting. It reads, “You who are the very image of Shakyamuni, for the sake of all that lives completed your years in Tibet, the land of snows. Now you have come back to your home, the noble land of India. Remembering you within us raises happiness beyond all vision.”
Beside the Buddha in a glass cabinet is a large photo of Freda in nun’s attire, with eyes raised heavenward, signed “With blessings, Gelongma Mummy.”
Although some of the original buildings are in serious need of repair, Freda’s own small house remains standing, as a shrine to her memory. There is no doubt that she is revered by all sixty-five nuns who now live there.
“We all keep Mummy in our hearts,” said Ani Wangchuk, one of the original Dalhousie nuns whom Freda took in. Just escaped from Tibet, she was in a perilous state, like the rest of her sisters, lacking money, provisions, a roof, or aid of any kind. “As nuns we did not know what to do, so we all went to her. We were very young and special to her. She would hold our hands and say, ‘I will make new robes for you. Don’t worry. I’ll pay for everything.’ She knew the future for us nuns. She knew everything. She bought all this land and built the nunnery, carrying rocks and cement up the hill. Mummy-la was so kind. She wanted this nunnery to be a special place to give the nuns a big education.
“We can’t say for sure if she is Tara, but she is very special, because she knew Buddha in her heart. She lived with us for quite a long time and had many visitors. I wish she were still here. I miss her.”
This was 2014 and among the Tibetans, if not the Westerners, Freda’s name was still being linked with the female buddha, Tara.
Her ambitions also included a craft shop where they could raise money by selling embroidered panels, coffee, and doughnuts to tourists on the road below and, of course, the beloved buffalo! “A good buffalo and two high-milk-yielding cows are needed to fill our needs and sell milk to the village and local restaurant. It will make our diet more nutritious and give us some nece
ssary cash income. Cost of cattle and shed, Rs 3,000.”
It was another one of Freda’s impractical schemes. No one was able to look after the buffalo, and as mentioned earlier, Ranga was summoned to transport the beast to his own home on the other side of the continent. The café-cum-craft shop also came to nothing.
The nunnery itself, however, was running well under the democratic structure that Freda imposed. She felt that the nunnery should be run by a committee of nuns who would administer and plan its development. This was a radical departure from tradition, in which nuns, and monks for that matter, unquestioningly obeyed a strict hierarchical structure. Freda, the socialist, was first and foremost for freedom, in religion as in every other avenue of life. Now, in the new millennium, other Tibetan nunneries are following Freda’s blueprint, but in the 1960s, Freda was a trailblazer. “This is a very necessary development,” said Frida. “I want them to be in charge of their own destinies and gain confidence in their own abilities. The anilas will learn many things when they decide matters for themselves. They are good nuns and will, I am sure, be able to fulfill their responsibilities very well.”
Just when Freda thought that all was settled and secure with her burgeoning nunnery, danger threatened to destroy everything that she had achieved. She learned that plans were being made to relocate the nuns to the new refugee settlement in South India. Like a tigress rearing to protect her nuns and her ambitions for them, she went straight to the top. In a brusque letter to the Dalai Lama himself, she underlined in no uncertain terms what had been accomplished and what she expected him to do.
Your Holiness,
My devotion at your sacred lotus feet.
Various matters concerning the Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling Nunnery in Tilokpur HP have been brought to my notice, particularly the effort made to “rehabilitate” them to a Tibetan settlement in South India.
The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi Page 14
