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

by Vicki Mackenzie

  Christianity, her home-grown religion, had never had any resonance for Tenzin Palmo. In fact it posed more dilemmas than solutions. Her fundamental problem was that she could not believe in the idea of God as a personal being. ‘To me, he seemed like Father Christmas,’ she said. ‘I can also remember being particularly puzzled by the hymns. I used to sing at school “All things bright and beautiful, all things great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all", and at the same time I would be wondering, “Well, who made all things dull and ugly then?" It was the same with the harvest hymns, praising God for the sunshine and rain. In that case, I thought God must also have brought the drought and the famine.’ Tenzin Palmo, it seemed, was confronting the problem of ’duality’, good and evil, dark and light, big and small, looking for an answer that transcended the opposites.

  She kept looking, looking for something. She wasn’t sure what. When she was thirteen she tried reading the Koran, she attempted yet again to understand Christianity. It remained an enigma. At fifteen she took up yoga and through that was introduced to Hinduism. That satisfied her somewhat, but only to a point. Once again her stumbling block was God.

  ’The problem was that all these religions were based on the idea of this external being who it was our duty somehow to propitiate and come into contact with. That simply didn’t have any inner reference for me. If it is meaningful for you it absolutely works, but if it isn’t you’re left with nothing. You need to believe in this transcendent being in the first place and have a relationship with it in order to make any progress. If you don’t, like me, there is nothing to get going on,’ she explained. ’I remember entering into a discussion with my future sister-in-law who was a good friend of the family. She was Jewish and was arguing that Jesus was not the son of God. Carrying on her argument I got to the point that there was no God. To me it was like this tremendous revelation. ‘Yeah! That’s exactly how I feel.’

  When she was a teenager she turned to the Existentialists, reading Sartre, Kierkegaard and Camus ‘in a very superficial way’. The trouble here, she found, was that although they were asking all the right questions, and stating the problem about the human condition, they were not coming up with the answers.

  She kept searching.

  At school a teacher read them Heinrich Harrer’s book Seven Years in Tibet, about his journey to the Land of Snows and his friendship with the Dalai Lama. And Tenzin Palmo marvelled that such a being existed in this world. And when she was around nine or ten years old she saw a programme on the temples in Thailand. On one temple there was a frieze depicting the life of the Buddha. She turned to Lee and asked her who he was. ‘He’s some kind of oriental god,’ her mother replied. ‘No, he lived and has a story, like Jesus,’ Tenzin Palmo replied, with conviction. It was only a matter of time before she found out exactly what that story was.

  Chapter Three

  The Dawning – Finding the Path

  The breakthrough happened one day when Tenzin Palmo and her mother were about to go to Germany to spend Christmas with Mervyn, Tenzin Palmo’s brother who had joined the RAF and was stationed there. It was 1961, and Tenzin Palmo was eighteen. She had left her grammar school a year earlier and had started work at the Hackney Library, a nice, quiet job just as her teachers had recommended. It suited her methodical, meticulous mind and great love of books admirably. She had hoped to go to university to study English and philosophy but Lee could not afford it and Tenzin Palmo had consoled herself with the thought that earning money would get her out of England quicker. ‘The homesickness for the East was agonizing at times,’ she said. Needing something to read for her German holiday, she took three books from the library: a Sartre, a Camus and one other which she grabbed at the last moment because someone had just brought it in. It had a nice image of the Buddha on the cover but it was the title, The Mind Unshaken, that caught her eye. In Germany she read the Sartre and the Camus but for some reason had ignored the Buddhist book. In the airport on the way home, however, there was an eight-hour delay and as it was a military establishment with no shops or amusements on offer she had no alternative to relieve her boredom but to open its pages. She had got half-way through it when she turned to her mother and said in a small, surprised voice: ‘I’m a Buddhist.’ Lee Perry replied in her down-to-earth way: ’That’s nice, dear, finish reading the book and then you can tell me all about it.’ Tenzin Palmo was not so phlegmatic. ‘To me, it was astonishing. Everything I had ever believed in, there it was! Much better stated than anything I could have formulated for myself, of course, but nonetheless! That view! It was exactly as I thought and felt. And together with that was this absolutely clear and logical path to get us back to our innate perfection.’

  To be precise, what she had actually found in those pages was the Buddha’s confrontation with the very same conundrum that had so struck her when she saw the people on the bus the universal problem of ageing, sickness and death. ‘The other thing I liked very much was the teaching on rebirth and the fact that there was no external deity pulling the strings. Also, when I encountered Hinduism there was a lot of emphasis on atman (soul) and its relationship with the Divine. When I first heard the word “atman” I felt this nausea, this revulsion against even the word. Buddhism, on the other hand was talking about non-atman! There was no such thing as this independent entity which is “Self” with capital letters and blazing lights. To me this was so liberating. It was so wonderful finally to find a religion, a spiritual path which proceeded from that.’ As with so many other strange predilections in her life, her inexplicable nausea over the word ‘atman’ would be made clear later on.

  But finally she had found it. ‘That book transformed my life completely,’ she continued. ‘I remember three days later walking to work and thinking, “How long have I been a Buddhist? Three days? No, lifetimes."’ She did not know then how right she was.

  Having discovered her path, Tenzin Palmo wasted no time stepping on to it. ‘If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it properly,’ was her motto throughout all her life. This was no easy task in the Britain of 1961. Today Buddhism is booming, with hundreds of books being published on the subject and meditation centres mushrooming everywhere (even Bethnal Green’s old fire station has metamorphosed into an exquisite Buddhist temple, an oasis of calm amidst the noise), but when Tenzin Palmo first stumbled upon the Buddha’s message she was very much on her own. Nevertheless, what she managed to discover she took on board with the zest and naivety of a new convert.

  ‘I kept reading that the main thing in Buddhism was to be without desire, so I thought “Right”. I proceeded to give all my clothes to my mother for her to dispose of and I started going around in this kind of yellow Greek tunic type thing. It went straight down and I wore it with a belt and black stockings,’ she said, laughing at the memory. ‘I stopped wearing make-up, I pulled my hair back, wore sensible shoes and stopped going out with boys. I was desperately trying to be desireless.’

  That phase didn’t last long. Shortly afterwards she discovered the Buddhist Society in Eccleston Square, just behind Victoria Station, founded in 1924 by the judge Christmas Humphreys. Humphreys arguably did more than any other person to introduce the British public to the ways of Eastern spiritual thought. He was a fascinating character who managed to combine a distinguished career at the bench with an unconventional interest in alternative medicine, astrology, ESP and Buddhism. He mingled with such luminaries as C.G. Jung, the Zen Master Dr D.T. Suzuki and the royal family of Thailand, and was one of the first to meet and welcome the Dalai Lama when he was newly exiled. When Tenzin Palmo found her way to the Buddhist Society it was the oldest and largest Buddhist organization in the West. Still, it was a small building with a very limited membership.

  ‘I walked through the door and discovered that all the other people there were not wandering around in yellow tunics! “I’ve gone wrong somewhere,” I thought. “Maybe it was a mistake to give away all my clothes.” I told my mo
ther and she gave me the key to a wardrobe where she had locked them all up. She hadn’t got rid of them at all. She never said a word, she just waited. Really, she was so skilful.’

  At Eccleston Square Tenzin Palmo immersed herself in the treasures of Theravadan Buddhism, the ’Southern School’ which existed in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. She learnt about the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, his brilliant and logical diagnosis of the human condition and its cure: the truth of suffering; the truth of the cause of suffering; the truth of the cessation of suffering and the truth of the path of liberation. It was the distillation of his great revelation under the Boddhi tree when he became Enlightened. She discovered his Eightfold Path:right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right concentration, right meditation, the Buddha’s blueprint for conducting either the secular or meditative life. They were the very foundations of the path. Tenzin Palmo lapped it up. ‘It was like being at a banquet after you’ve been starving,’ she said. Zen, with its riddles and clever intellectual gymnastics, the other form of Buddhism on offer at the time, filled her with despair. ‘I can remember lying in bed sobbing because it was completely beyond me! It was so full of paradoxes. Now I enjoy Zen but if that had been the first book I’d picked up I would never have gone on,’ she said.

  Feeling her way along, she made herself an altar covered in a buttercup-yellow bath-towel and put on it a statue of the Buddha, given to her by a woman from whom she had bought two Siamese cats. It was typical of the way things were coming to her at that time. The statue had been on the woman’s mantelpiece, brought back from Burma by her merchant seaman husband, and when the woman discovered that Tenzin Palmo was a real Buddhist she spontaneously handed it over. In front of her altar she did prostrations, naturally, energetically and with great joy. ‘When I first went into the Buddhist Society and saw a shrine my first impulse was to prostrate. Then I thought, “Oh no, no, no! One can’t do that! Buddhists wouldn’t do such a thing.” So I didn’t but it was very painful not to. Later I saw pictures of people in the East prostrating in front of the Buddha image and I was so happy. I prostrated and prostrated and prostrated. It just felt so right,’ she said.

  Somehow she also came across the Tibetan mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hung’, which calls on Chenrezig the Buddha of compassion, and began to recite it in her own way, with surprising results.

  ‘I didn’t know anything about it,’ she said. ‘I thought you had to say the mantra all the time, so I started saying it continuously, first verbally and then in my heart. Actually it was very like that Russian in The Way of a Pilgrim saying the Jesus Prayer, although I didn’t know about him either at that stage. I just kept saying it in my heart. The effect was very interesting very quickly. Although I was working at the time I found I could function very well while still reciting the mantra in my heart. What it did was to split off a part of my mind so that I had this kind of observing consciousness which was resounding with the “Om Mani Padme Hung”. It gave me space in which I could develop awareness of what was going on rather than being right in the middle of it.’

  But something was not quite right. While she knew without any shadow of a doubt that Buddhism was for her, there were aspects of the Southern School which worried her. Particularly disconcerting, to Tenzin Palmo’s mind, were the Arhats, those great heroes who had attained Nirvana having eradicated for all time all traces of ignorance, greed and hatred. As such they never had to be born again into this world of suffering. They were free! It should have been just what Tenzin Palmo was after, but they never appealed.

  ‘There was no talk about love in all that. I loved the Buddha and would cry tears of devotion whenever I thought of him. I wanted to be like the Buddha but I didn’t want to be like the Arhats. They seemed so cold. Actually I think that was rather an unfair representation and I’m now much kinder to Arhats but then it really worried me. If you have a ginger cake and you don’t like the ginger you’re in trouble. So although I loved Buddhism I didn’t like where the Theravadan path was leading. It was not where I wanted to go. There was something missing but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew at the time was that the Theravadan way wasn’t right.’

  She kept refining her search, seeking the exact path to suite her needs. A few months later she came across a book by Nagarjuna, the famous second-century Buddhist saint and philosopher, and in it found a definition of a Bodhisattva, the ’spiritual hero’ who elects to forsake Nirvana in order to return over and over again to this world to help free all sentient beings. ‘Immediately I knew. That’s what I want! That’s the goal! To do it not for oneself but out of compassion for all beings. The idea of being a Bodhisattva really resonated.’

  The revelation of the exact avenue she wanted to take brought with it, however, one enormous problem. Nagarjuna, the founder of Mahayana Buddhism, the ‘Big Vehicle’, was revered and followed primarily in Tibet. And Tibetan Buddhism in the sixties was almost unknown and what was known was not liked. Stories had filtered out of Tibet, brought by those intrepid travellers who had managed to steal into the Forbidden Country, barred to outsiders – stories of magic and psychic phenomena which had become more fantastic in the telling. Lamas could ‘fly’, could materialize and dematerialize things at will, they could turn themselves into animals or whatever form they wished, they could travel improbable distances in next to no time by a strange trance-like jumping method. In Tibet there were spirits and genies and alien-looking idols with many arms and legs, fangs and bulging eyes. As a result Tibetan Buddhism was dismissed by the largely intellectual members of the London Buddhist Society as shamanistic, esoteric and basically degenerate. Unlike the chaste lines of Zen and the straight dogma of the Theravada, Tibetan Buddhism was simply too exotic, too odd. No one thought it would ever catch on.

  At this point Tenzin Palmo, as a new and keen member of the Buddhist Society, promptly turned her back on Tibetan Buddhism and all it stood for. But it was not to let go. While she was browsing through yet another book she came across a brief description of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism Nyingmapa, Sakya, Gelugpa and Kargyupa. ‘When I read the word “Kargyupa” a voice inside said, “You’re Kargyu.” And I said, “What’s Kargyupa?” and the voice said, “It doesn’t matter, you’re Kargyupa.” And my heart dropped. Being a Tibetan Buddhist was the last thing I wanted to be.’

  Throughout Tenzin Palmo’s story this same voice was to make itself heard again and again at strategic points, guiding her, warning her, steering her in the right direction. She always heeded it, regardless of what her head might be telling her. ‘Actually it’s been pretty hard to ignore – it’s made itself fairly strong at times,’ she said.

  Following the dictates of the Voice, Tenzin Palmo contacted the only person she knew in London who had any knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, who, over afternoon tea, handed her the Evan-Wentz biography of Milarepa, Tibet’s most beloved poet-saint, cave-meditator par excellence and founder of the Kargyupas. It was a riveting tale. Milarepa was a swashbuckling spiritual hero of the eleventh century who had led a spectacularly disreputable youth during which he had practised black magic to avenge his family’s wrongs, killing several people in the process. Finally seeing the error of his ways he had sought out a guru, the renowned Marpa the Translator, who had brought the Buddhist texts from India, beseeching him to give him the Saving Truths. Marpa took one look at the young reprobate standing before him and promptly set him about the Herculean task of building a high stone tower. When the task was completed Marpa surveyed the work and brusquely told Milarepa to dismantle it replacing each stone to the place it had come from. This process was repeated four times until Milarepa, bleeding and almost broken, had expiated his foul deeds and proven his determination. Marpa now bestowed on him the secret initiations and teachings he yearned for.

  Armed with these, a staff, a cloak, a bowl and nothing else, he disappeared into the Mountain of Solitude where, freezing cold and with nothing to eat but nettle
s, his body became skeletal and his flesh turned entirely green. His meditations worked, however, because he learnt to raise the ecstatic mystic heat, keeping him warm in those sub-zero temperatures, and farmers reported seeing him flying over the valleys. When, after years of dedicated effort, he finally emerged to teach, flowers rained down and rainbows appeared in the sky.

  All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow:

  Acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births in death.

  Knowing this one should, from the very first, renounce acquisition and heaping up, and building and meeting,

  And, faithful to the commands of an eminent guru, set about realizing the Truth, which hath no birth or death.

  That alone is the best science.

  His words were recorded by the faithful disciple Rechungpa, who was to have an important part to play much later in Tenzin Palmo’s life.

  When Tenzin Palmo put the book down she was converted. While such esoteric stuff may have been anathema to the respectable and conventional members of the Buddhist Society, Tenzin Palmo was in her element. ‘The talk of the Pure Lands, of spirit realms, of heavens and hells that I found in that book blew my mind. These were levels of existence that I knew about from the seances at home. After all, I was brought up with tables floating around the room! And to me concepts such as Milarepa flying were completely feasible because I’d done the same thing myself as a child when I was sick and went out of body. But these elements were completely lacking in Theravada and Zen. Those paths were so rationalistic it bothered me. No one was mentioning spirit. I have a pretty logical mind and I’m not gullible, but when I come across genuine expressions of higher human potential I take notice,’ she said.