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

by Vicki Mackenzie

  Freda Bedi was indeed a fascinating character, now a legend within Tibetan Buddhist circles. She too had led a colourful life. Born and brought up among the English upper classes, she had scandalized society by marrying an Indian she had met at Oxford before returning to the subcontinent to live with him. She followed this by taking up arms against her own country to fight the British in the independence movement, and was duly imprisoned for her pains. On her release, a heroine to her newly adopted country, her career took another dramatic twist when she was dispatched by the Central Social Welfare board to work with the newly arrived Tibetan refugees who were pouring into India in the wake of the Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959. Once ensconced among them, Freda had been so caught up by their plight and the potency of their message that in middle age, married and with five children (one of whom is Kabir Bedi, the famous Indian movie star), she had become a nun, the first Western woman ever to do so, taking the name Khechok Palmo.

  ’She was definitely a character – a strange mixture of Indian and English county. She never completely shed her roots. Everyone called her Mummy. I loved her very much,’ commented Tenzin Palmo. ‘The thing was she was very good at initiating ideas and excellent at getting money. At that time Tibetans were not yet organized, did not know English or about aid agencies and how to apply for help. Freda Bedi on the other hand was extremely organized and excellent at presenting her case. She got a lot of money. Her main fault, however, was that instead of buying property, which was very cheap then, and getting herself established, she dribbled the funds away on buying things like bedlinen, towels and this and that. She was not very practical. After a few years the land prices had sky-rocketed and the aid agencies were giving to others and she lost out. Still, the nunnery that she started is still going and so many Tibetan teachers who came to the West, like Trungpa, got their basic English at her school. So in fact she contributed a lot.’

  Dalhousie was a beautiful place, spread over a number of hills covered in stately pine trees and inhabited by gangs of raucous monkeys. It had been established as a hill station by Lord Dalhousie in 1854, and by the time Tenzin Palmo got there it was full of decaying officers’ clubs, Anglican churches and English brick houses with high ceilings, large verandas and gardens filled with roses and dahlias – now relics from the Raj. At 7,000 feet it not only provided blessed relief from the searing summer sun, but also commanded breathtaking views of the Indian plains on one side and the Himalayan foothills on the other.

  Tenzin Palmo had managed to time her journey to arrive at an interesting moment in history – the point where some 5,000 Tibetans had congregated in Dalhousie, making it the major refugee centre in India. Later they decamped and went to Dharamsala, to southern India and other settlements, but in 1963 they were there in their masses, valiantly re-establishing replicas of the great monasteries that had flourished in their homeland, Sera and Drepung, and trying to resurrect at least the remnants of their unique culture. ‘It was a lovely place then. There were no cars and it had a very special atmosphere. In the morning and the evening all the Tibetans would be out doing kora around the hills,’ Tenzin Palmo remembered.

  Interesting it may have been, easy it wasn’t. The Tibetans had witnessed unspeakable atrocities. They had seen their mighty monasteries sacked, their monks and high lamas tortured; they had been traumatized by the dangerous journey out; they were destitute, displaced and in a pitiful state. ‘They were desperately poor and the conditions they were living in were dreadful. They had tents made from flour sacks which of course were hopelessly inadequate and they were trying to make their butter tea from lard. The Indian heat was also terrible for them after the crisp coldness of Tibet. Many of them got sick and died.’

  The situation that she found herself in was not much better. She was put first on to the covered veranda of the nunnery that Freda Bedi had started for Kargyu nuns, and then into a little room by herself. ‘It was cold, freezing cold, and when it rained, it rained outside and in. It was so wet in fact that I had to sleep under the bed. And then there were the rats. They were everywhere. They were also enormous and would eat everything, including cloth and my prayer beads. They used to keep me awake at night by jumping on me. Actually I didn’t mind the rats as much as the spiders. I remember there was one huge spider with little glassy eyes. That was far worse.’

  Every day she walked round the hill from the nunnery to the quaintly named ‘Young Lamas’ Home School’, which Freda Bedi had set up in one of the abandoned but magnificent former English houses. It had many rooms, was perched right on the edge of a hill and was surrounded by a beautiful garden. (The first of the Dharma Bums, the American poet Allen Ginsberg, had been there just before Tenzin Palmo, gathering the inspiration which would launch a cult.) Tenzin Palmo was given two jobs, acting as Freda Bedi’s secretary and teaching the young lamas basic English. Her pupils were not ordinary lamas, however, they were the tulkus, the recognized reincarnations of previous high spiritual masters, in whose hands lay the future of Tibetan Buddhism itself. Choygam Trungpa was among the many future eminent teachers in the West who learnt their first lessons in rudimentary English here.

  In spite of the spartan living conditions, Tenzin Palmo loved it, as her letter to her aunt back in England reveals:

  My dear Auntie Joan,

  Many, many thanks for your 2 letters, really I loved receiving them once I could decipher your handwriting knowing Tibetan script helped! …

  I am now teaching some of the beginners’ class all morning. There is the youngest lama of 12, a lama of 25 who is so sweet and a very good lama but rather hopeless at English, and also there is a lama of 22 who is really so gorgeous and was working on road-making for 2 years before coming to the school so his physique is wow! Added to this he is very intelligent and is learning very fast. It is like a village school with lots of classes going on in the same room – rather noisy but great fun.

  We have 2 cats and a small Tibetan dog at the school and we also have a dog named Shu-shu whose mother and brother were both eaten by leopards. We love her very much but she is most definitely lacking in social graces having a marked appetite for cow dung and passing Indian shins. She sleeps on my bed and when asleep is a lovely dog. Anyway, she has character, we tell ourselves

  …

  At the moment the nuns are holding their evening puja.

  The storm has cut our electricity off so there is only the flickering lights of the butter-lamps for them to see by. It really looks like Tibet now. From my little room I can hear the sounds of the bells, drum and chanting very clearly. It is very beautiful. We often go to the lamas’ pujas because it is really very good and their symbolic hand movements are lovely and fascinating.

  Thank you for offering to send me things, but really there is nothing that I need and also customs duty on everything is 100%. Give my love to Arthur, Graham, Martin and Kim and you of course, Diane.

  As her letter also revealed, Tenzin Palmo’s eye was still very much drawn to the attractions of the opposite sex. She was twenty, attractive, vital, and the split between the two sides of herself had not been resolved. As though to emphasize her dilemma, one evening a nun brought her three letters. One was from a former Sinhalese boyfriend lamenting the fact that she’d gone away and beseeching her to return to England to marry him. The second was from another Japanese boy who said he had changed his mind about inter-racial marriages never working and would she mind coming back to him. And the third was from her Japanese ‘fiance’, saying that the conditions she had written about sounded so dreadful that she must immediately fly to Japan – and that he was sending her a ticket.

  ‘I laughed and laughed. The nun who’d delivered the post asked what was going on. “Three men think I should marry them,” I told her. She asked me which one was I going to accept. I paused for a moment and replied, “I’m not going to marry any of them. I’m going to be a nun.” None of those men realized I was having the time of my life. They all thought that because I wasn’t wit
h them I must be miserable. They didn’t understand at all. At that moment I remembered again what I was there for.’

  The fact was that some truly remarkable and interesting new men were coming into Tenzin Palmo’s life. The English author John Blofeld, well known for his rendering of the Zen masters and his translation of the I Ching, climbed the hill to visit her. She had written to him after reading The Wheel of Life, the account of his own journey into Buddhism written with exquisite eloquence, expressing how much the book had meant to her, and much to her surprise he had replied. A long correspondence followed in which Tenzin Palmo spoke of her plans and John Blofeld had replied offering guidance and advice. He was to play an important part in her life right up to his death in 1987.

  ‘He was much older than me but we got along splendidly.

  He was a lovely friend and such a wonderful person – kind, intelligent. He was a very humble person who had a genuine devotion to the dharma (Buddhist path) without any kind of arrogance at all. Towards the end he wrote to me saying he was becoming more and more involved in Chinese Buddhism, was beginning to talk Mandarin like a Chinese, had grown a white beard, and that when he looked in the mirror he reminded himself of a Taoist sage. I replied that I’d hoped he’d grown his hair too and was wearing it in a top knot with a jade clip because if you’re going to do something it’s worth doing properly,’ she said, quoting her own personal lore. ‘With him it was all very natural – like rediscovering a personality that was very deep.

  ‘But he also had a very strong connection with the Tibetans, especially with Tara. He loathed, however, what they were giving us to eat; dumplings one day, rice and lentils the next. Personally, I couldn’t see what was wrong with it!’ she added.

  Being one of the first Westerners on the scene, Tenzin Palmo once again found herself in the unique position of meeting some of the most eminent lamas in Tibetan Buddhism, figures such as H.H. the Karmapa, head of the Kargyu lineage, whose reincarnations can be traced back back further than the Dalai Lama’s. He was held in immense reverence by all Tibetans.

  ‘It was a wonderful period. At that time if you were a Westerner who was interested in the dharma everyone was amazed and delighted and all the doors were open,’ she recalled.

  ‘I remember the first time I met the Karmapa, I was very afraid as he looked so severe, rather like Napoleon. I went in and started prostrating and heard this very high-pitched giggle. I looked up and there he was with his big dimples giggling, pointing a finger saying, “Who’s this, who’s this?” At that time we really got the red carpet treatment, not like nowadays.’

  One day in June, just three months after she had arrived in Dalhousie, she met the Dalai Lama himself. She was wearing traditional Tibetan costume – a floor-length wrap-around dress, called a chuba, in dark blue with an underblouse of turquoise, which had formerly belonged to a princess. It was warm and elegant. ‘You look like a lady from Lhasa,’ were the Dalai Lama’s opening words. These were followed by the far more enigmatic phrase: ‘Oh, Ani-la, tukdam gong phel?’ (‘Oh, nun, is your practice progressing well?’)

  The interpreter turned to Tenzin Palmo in confusion. ‘I don’t know why he called you Ani-la, and that greeting is only used when two hermits meet,’ he said. Had the Dalai Lama with his legendary clear-sightedness seen what was to come and maybe even what had gone before?

  Tenzin Palmo looked at the Dalai Lama and heard herself saying: ‘No, I’m not from Lhasa, I’m a Khampa,’ meaning a person who originates from Kham, a region in eastern Tibet. She had no idea why she said it – having no particular knowledge of Kham or Khampas either.

  ‘What are your plans?’ inquired the Dalai Lama next.

  ‘You should know that the best of all plans go astray,’ replied Tenzin Palmo, with a boldness that was to surface on a much later date when she was to address the Dalai Lama again on a much more serious issue.

  A week after this auspicious encounter Tenzin Palmo was to meet the most important man in her life – the man she had gone to India to find.

  Chapter Five

  The Guru

  The eighth Khamtrul Rinpoche had come a long way.

  He had left his monastery in Kham, East Tibet, one night, disguised as a merchant ready to make his daring escape. The Khampagar was a vast edifice as big as a palace, with bright yellow walls and a golden roof that glittered in the pristine Tibetan sun. It had been his world for almost thirty years, if you counted just this lifetime. If you took in all of his reincarnations, however, it had been his home, and the seat of his considerable power for the past 450 years ever since 1548, when the first of his reincarnations had been recognized. By the time the eighth Khamtrul Rinpoche was born, some time in the 1930s, the Khampagar had grown in size and influence, to encompass some 200 daughter monasteries, hundreds of thousands of monks, and an elite corps of yogis famed throughout all Tibet. This wasn’t all. Like some enclave of Eastern Renaissance, over the centuries the Khampagar had simultaneously developed excellence in all fields of sacred art including painting and Lama dancing. In the face of the Chinese destruction, Khamtrul Rinpoche was leaving it all behind – the pomp, the privilege, the regalia, his retinue and an entire way of life.

  The journey out had been treacherous. Travelling by horse with a small band of followers, they had crossed icy rivers in full flood, the horses swimming with just their nostrils above water, their meagre possessions transported on rafts. It was said that Khamtrul Rinpoche had calmed the waves by throwing sacred sand on them, but, whatever the reason, no life was lost and all their goods made it safely to the other side. After that there was a wide stretch of open land to traverse in full view of a road used by convoys of Chinese military trucks. Miraculously not one came into sight as the horseman rode on. The last and greatest obstacle was the Himalayas themselves, the highest mountain ranges in the world. Khamtrul Rinpoche had ridden over them and down into the safety of India.

  For the past couple of years he had been in and around Dalhousie with the rest of the Tibetans, gathering together the few of his disciples who had also managed to escape, trying to resurrect the Khampagar way of life on this very foreign soil. On 30 June 1964 Khamtrul Rinpoche found himself at the Young Lamas’ Home School visiting Freda Bedi.

  Tenzin Palmo had her first premonition that her guru was about to appear one evening as she was checking the school’s correspondence. In among all the letters she found one from a Tibetan craft community, enclosing a sample of hand-made paper which they hoped Mrs Bedi could market. It was signed by someone called Khamtrul Rinpoche. She had no idea who Khamtrul Rinpoche was, but as she later put it, ‘The second I read that name faith arose.’

  She turned to Mrs Bedi, heard his story and learnt that he was expected any day. ‘The more I heard about him the more excited I became. I felt this was the person I wanted to take Refuge with,’Tenzin Palmo explained, referring to the ceremony where one commits officially to the Buddhist path.

  It was Tenzin Palmo’s twenty-first birthday, 30 June 1964, when he arrived. ‘It was full moon and we were making preparations for some long-life initiations when the telephone rang. Mrs Bedi answered. “Your best birthday present has just arrived at the bus stop,’ she said. I was so excited and at the same time absolutely terrified. I knew my lama was here,’ she recalled. ‘I ran back to the nunnery to change into my Tibetan dress and to get a kata (the white scarf traditionally given in greeting), but by the time I had got back to the school Khamtrul Rinpoche had already come and gone inside. I nervously ventured after him. He was sitting on a couch with two young lamas, both of them recognized reincarnations. I was so scared I didn’t even look at him. I just stared at the bottom of his robe and his brown shoes. I had no idea if he was young or old, fat or thin.’

  Mrs Bedi introduced her, explaining that Tenzin Palmo was connected with the Buddhist Society in England and had recently travelled to India to work with her. ‘I remember thinking that what was she was saying was extremely irrelevant but at the same ti
me being so grateful that she was talking at all,’ Tenzin Palmo continued.

  Cutting across the small talk and still not knowing what Khamtrul actually looked like, she blurted out: ’Tell him I want to take Refuge,’ she said, referring to the ceremony when one becomes officially a Buddhist.

  ‘Oh yes. Of course,’ Khamtrul Rinpoche replied. At that point she looked up.

  She saw a tall, large man, about ten years older than herself, with a strong, round face, almost stern in expression and a strange knob on the top of his head. It was similar to that depicted on effigies of the Buddha. ‘The feeling was two things at the same time. One was seeing somebody you knew extremely well whom you haven’t seen for a very long time. A feeling of "Oh, how nice to see you again!” And at the same time it was as though an innermost part of my being had taken form in front of me. As though he’d always been there but now he was outside,’ she explained.

  Such is the meeting with a true guru – it happens rarely.

  Within hours Tenzin Palmo had also stated she wanted to become a nun, and would he please ordain her. Again Khamtrul Rinpoche said, ‘Yes, of course,’ as though it were only natural. Three weeks later, on 24 July 1964, it was done. ‘It took that long because Khamtrul Rinpoche said he wanted to take me back to his monastery in Banuri to perform the ceremonies there,’ she said, without any trace of irony.

  She had been in India only three months, but what seemed from the outside a recklessly hasty decision was to her mind utterly reasonable and completely logical.

  ’The point was I was searching for perfection. I knew that Tibetan Buddhism not only gave the most flawless description of that state but provided the most clear path to get there. That’s why I became a nun. Because if one was going to follow that path one needed the least distractions possible,’she stated, single-minded as ever.