Word soon got out that Tenzin Palmo’s retreat had ended and friends now sought her out, eager to see for themselves the results of that long period of meditation and solitude. Was she still all right? Had that prolonged period of introspection and isolation sent her mad, or slightly deranged? Maybe she had been transfigured into a glorious being of light, surrounded by rainbows, as the fabulous stories of yore told? If the people who came looking had expected to see a major metamorphosis, however, they were to be disappointed.
‘It wasn’t so much that Tenzin Palmo had changed, more that her qualities were enhanced. The warmth, the mental sharpness, the humour were all still there, but more so. There was growth. It was as though she already had the talent and the capacity and then put the effort behind it. She is very single-minded,’ reported Didi Contractor, the woman who had vetted Tenzin Palmo’s cave to make sure it was habitable when she first went to live there and who had known many great spiritual teachers and their followers during her years in India.
‘I don’t think anyone on the outside can see the results of what she managed in the cave. What she accomplished was between her and the Deity (I’d rather say that than the Nothingness).One can only go by the symptoms. Certainly she has stature and an integrity of character which is very developed. She also has a completeness. Tenzin Palmo is always completely consistent and always completely kind. But I don’t know whether that is either a proof or a fruit of her spiritual search. It could be part of who she is that makes it possible for her to take up the search. I would say, however, that Tenzin Palmo has got further than any of the other many western seekers I’ve met,’ she commented.
Another visitor was Lia Frede, a German woman who lived in a beautiful house in the hills of Dharamsala, and who had known Tenzin Palmo for some years. She also had had a long interest in spiritual matters, particularly Vipassana meditation, and had conducted several retreats herself. Coincidentally Lia was leading a small trek in Lahoul, studying the ecology of the region, when she heard the news that Tenzin Palmo was ‘out’.
‘I was delighted to have the chance to talk to her because I wanted to know what she had accomplished,’ she said frankly.’The day is etched clearly on my mind. I had terrible trouble finding the cave, it was so well blended in with the rest of the mountain – but we eventually got there. I was a little shy about intruding so I left my two companions at the gate and went inside and called. Immediately Tenzin Palmo came out, smiled happily and said, “Come in, come in, bring your friends, I’ve just baked bread. Would you like tea?” It was as though she had seen me yesterday. She was totally normal. I remember sitting there thinking it was all so incongruous. There we were in the cave having this delicious fresh bread with roasted sesame on it and chatting away. It was as though we were in the middle of England having afternoon tea.
‘As she walked us back down the path I asked her what results she had got from her retreat. I didn’t like to ask her outright if she’d got Enlightened but I was waiting for her to tell me of some transcendent experience she’d had. It was certainly what I would have expected. Instead she looked at me and replied, “One thing I can tell you – I was never bored.” That was it. I was waiting for more, but nothing else was said. It has always puzzled me that that was the only statement she made. ‘ Tenzin Palmo was obviously being as tight-lipped as ever.
If Tenzin Palmo was revealing nothing, Lia, like Didi, could see for herself clearly her friend’s exceptional qualities. ‘Tenzin Palmo has deep-seated purity and, I would say, innocence. And the other thing is that she has true equanimity. Things that happen to her she neither objects nor supports – she neither pushes nor obstructs. She has this neutrality. She deals with what is happening without attaching any ego involvement to it. It’s not that she’s trying, the ego is just not there. I was amazed by her reaction when she was trapped in her cave and she thought she was going to die. I know if I had been in that situation I would have panicked. Instead she calmly did her death meditations. And when I heard that her supplies didn’t arrive and she almost starved, I was furious! I would have wanted to know why. She never bothered to find out though. Nor did she blame the Superintendent for breaking up her retreat. She knows that people have their karma. Still, to me that amount of equanimity shows a definite degree of spiritual advancement.’
More relevant than people’s impressions of Tenzin Palmo was her response to them. Having been isolated from people and the ways of the world for so long, what was it like suddenly coming into contact with them again, having to make conversation, having to deal with the noise and mundanity of everyday life? According to the testimonies of other Western retreatants, who had ventured into shorter periods of silence and seclusion, re-entry into the world was a shocking experience, an assault on the senses and the psyche which left them reeling. They reported that it took weeks for them to recover and reintegrate back into society. Tenzin Palmo had been cut off from human contact for infinitely longer and had, by her own admission, been removing layer upon layer of outer coverings. Her sensitivity must have been honed to finer levels than ever before. ‘At first talking to people was exhausting, not at the time, but afterwards I found myself very tired. But after a while it was OK,’ she conceded.
Curiously, rather than making her less capable of dealing with people, less willing to enter into relationship with the world as one might expect, the cave seemed to have the opposite effect. Palmo was not traumatized by meeting the world again, and was witnessed being exceptionally sociable, very chatty, and super-sensitive to the needs and suffering of humanity. It was as big a sign as any that her meditations in the cave had worked.
’Tenzin Palmo has a large compassion – an unruffled compassion,’ commented Lia Frede. ’She’s really very unjudgemental and gives her ear and advice to anyone, be it a sinner or a saint. She’s neutral – she doesn’t mind whether someone has just affronted her or been nice to her. It is something I’ve noticed in other spiritually advanced beings. Anyone who comes to her with a problem, she’s always willing to help. That’s why people seek her company, because it has a purifying influence when you are with a person like that.’
‘I have the kind of mind that wherever I am that’s where I am,’ was Tenzin Palmo’s attitude. ‘I think I have two sides to my nature – one is this basic need to be alone, the love of isolation, the other is a sociability and friendliness. I don’t know if I am particularly warm towards others but I do know that whoever I am with I feel they are the most important person in the world at that time. Internally there is always this feeling of wishing them well. So although I love to be alone, when I’m with others that’s fine too.’
Now, thrust into the mainstream of the world once more, Tenzin Palmo could see for herself if she had changed. Had there been a transformation? That, ultimately, was the only valid test of her spiritual practices, for no amount of retreat could have been said to have worked unless there was a fundamental shift, a turning around of your old, habitual ways of seeing and being. Up there on her mountain, in splendid isolation, she may have been thoroughly absorbed in the eternal verities but could that experience stand up to the challenge of everyday life?
’There is a kind of inner freedom which I don’t think I had when I started – an inner peace and clarity. I think it came from having to be self-sufficient, having nothing or no one to turn to whatever happened,’ she said. ‘Also while I was in retreat everything became dreamlike, just as the Buddha described. One could see the illusory nature of everything going on around one – because one was not in the middle of it,’ she continued, using the impersonal pronoun in order to deflect attention from any realizations she may have had! ‘And then when you come out you see that people are so caught up in their life – we identify so totally with what we’ve created. We believe in it so completely. That’s why we suffer – because there’s no space for us.’
‘Now I notice that there is an inner distance towards whatever occurs, whether what’s occurring is outwards or in
wards. Sometimes, it feels like being in an empty house with all the doors and windows wide open and the wind just blowing through without anything obstructing it. Not always. Sometimes one gets caught up again, but now one knows that one is caught up again.’
While being like ‘an empty house’ may seem desirable to a meditator, to the average person, brought up on the notion that passion and emotional involvement is what gives life its colour and verve, such a state could seem vapid and remote. Was being an ‘empty house’ the same as being a ’shell’ of a person – cold and unfeeling? And what is the difference between detachment and being cut off from your emotions anyway? A study conducted at a London hospital among children who were left for weeks without visitors showed that it was at the point when they stopped crying and became in the eyes of the staff ‘good’, that the harm was done. Follow-up studies showed that these children had developed the potential for psychotic behaviour. The stage at which they stopped crying was when some vital feeling part of them had ’died’. Was being detached being alienated?
Tenzin Palmo, as might be expected, refuted all such insinuations. ‘It’s not a cold emptiness,’ she stated emphatically, ‘it’s a warm spaciousness. It means that one is no longer involved in one’s ephemeral emotions. One sees how people cause so much of their own suffering just because they think that without having these strong emotions they’re not real people.
‘Why does one go into retreat?’ she went on hotly. ‘One goes into a retreat to understand who one really is and what the situation truly is. When one begins to understand oneself then one can truly understand others because we are all interrelated. It is very difficult to understand others while one is still caught up in the turmoil of one’s emotional involvement – because we’re always interpreting others from the standpoint of our own needs. That’s why, when you meet hermits who have really done a lot of retreat, say twenty-five years, they are not cold and distant. On the contrary. They are absolutely lovely people. You know that their love for you is totally without judgement because it doesn’t rely on who you are or what you are doing, or how you treat them. It’s totally impartial. It’s just love. It’s like the sun – it shines on everyone. Whatever you did they’d still love you because they understand your predicament and in that understanding naturally arises love and compassion. It’s not based on sentiment. It’s not based on emotion. Sentimental love is very unstable, because it’s based on feed-back and how good it makes you feel. That is not real love at all.’
It may not have been psychological but there was severing going on in Tenzin Palmo’s life just the same. As it turned out, the Superintendent’s edict had a far more dramatic effect than terminating her retreat. It brought to an end an entire era. Now the utterly unexpected happened. After a lifetime of being enamoured with the East in general and Tibetan Buddhism in particular, she began to feel the pull of her own culture. For the first time in the twenty-four years that she had been living in India, the West beckoned.
She explained: ‘I felt my time in India had drawn to a close, that I needed to get back to the West and rediscover my roots. After all, I am not Tibetan. When I worked in the library in Hackney I had a boyfriend who was into classical music, architecture, art, old churches, that kind of thing. He loved to talk about it all and go to concerts and galleries. I was very fascinated. Then I became a Buddhist when I was eighteen and renounced all that! My whole focus turned. After twenty-four years of being in India and reading nothing but dharma books, however, I felt there was this huge void in my life and that I hadn’t finished what I was supposed to have done.’
Having no idea of where she wanted to go, Tenzin Palmo did what she always did in such situations – remained still and waited for the ‘voice’ to speak to her. In the meantime her many friends, scattered all around the world, began to write inviting her to their countries. She contemplated America, Australia, England, but none seemed right. Then an American friend, Ram, whom she had met in India, wrote saying he had found the perfect place – Assisi. Why didn’t she join him and his wife there? She had never been to Assisi, but once she read the name the voice spoke out loud and clear.
’That’s it,’ she said, clicking her fingers.
Without sentimentality or sadness Tenzin Palmo prepared to leave the Cave of Great Bliss. It had consumed a colossal chunk of her life, her ‘prime years’ between the ages of thirty-three and forty-five, but to her it seemed nothing. ‘The thing that struck me most was where had all the time gone? Time just condensed. The last three years in particular just flew past. It seemed like four months at most,’ she commented.
Without haste she packed her few belongings, bade farewell to her Lahouli friends and made her way to the West and the cradle of the greatest flowering of Western culture, Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance. She had come full circle. Coming into the world, leaving it, and then returning. She arrived at the pretty medieval town of Assisi, built on the flanks of Mount Subasio in Umbria, in the dead of night but knew instantly she’d made the right choice. It could have been the small clusters of picturesque houses perched on mountain-tops so reminiscent of Lahoul, or the aura of sanctity left by St Francis which still hung in the air, or even the fact that there were several Indian ashrams in the area, but the moment Tenzin Palmo arrived she felt at home.
‘I felt a very strong connection with Assisi. To this day it’s the only place I miss, including my cave. There’s a special, ineffable quality about it which is palpable in spite of the millions of tourists who flock there each year. It’s not an ordinary place. It’s the centre for world peace and holds a lot of inter-faith conferences. And many people have reported having spiritual experiences there, strong transformative experiences,’ he said.
She moved into the bottom floor of a house belonging to a friend of Ram’s and proceeded to rediscover her Western roots with delight. She roamed the charming, narrow streets of the town, often at night and alone, feeling quite safe. She visited the famous double basilica housing St Francis’s tomb, marvelling in the exquisite frescoes, especially those by Giotto. And she climbed the mountain, curious to see another cave, the one inhabited by St Francis who had prayed so hard to God to let him know the suffering of Jesus that not only did the stigmata appear on his hands and feet but actual nails manifested too. Over the five years she lived in Assisi Tenzin Palmo developed a strong devotion to St Francis and would spend hours meditating in his cave when there were no tourists around.
‘It was a very different cave from mine because it has this church built over it. But it was great! There are still doves in the tree outside, descendants of ones St Francis bought from a seller and left there to multiply. I loved his animal stories. Do you know he had a cicada and they’d sing to each other?He was a very vivid saint,’ she said.
Once Tenzin Palmo revealed that she felt she had been a Christian monk in one of her many lifetimes. ‘The feeling when I go into cloisters is very strong. It’s almost deja vu. And I’ve always had an affinity with the enclosed orders. I think I probably decided to go to the East when the Christian tradition stopped going anywhere. It would make sense,’ she divulged.
The austerities that she had submitted herself to for so long now gave way to a few indulgences. She learnt to eat pasta and developed a liking for cappuccino and tiramisu (although she claimed her favourite dish was still rice, vegetables and dhal).She watched videos, especially old black and white 1940s movies. More than this, she buried herself in her friends’ vast library and music collection, soaking up her European heritage like a dry sponge. ‘It was as though the whole Western part of myself had been ruptured and needed to be healed and put back together again.’ She now allowed herself to read novels, veering towards French authors and stories with a religious plot like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. And she devoured anything she could find on medieval history, devoting herself to this new learning with the same thoroughness with which she had tackled Buddhism. The period around the twelfth and thirteenth century,
the time when St Francis lived, particularly appealed to her. ‘There was a lot of intellectual ferment and scholastic debate going on then – a lot of stuff coming from the Arabs and Jews and they were slowly beginning to discover the Greeks. It was also the time of the growth of the mendicant orders when very great saints and artists were around,’ she explained.
She also plunged into the biographies and writings of the Christian saints and philosophers: St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Thomas Aquinas, the Desert Fathers, Thomas Merton, the Philokalia, the scriptures from the Orthodox Church, and much much more. As she read, her appreciation for the religion she had once dismissed grew and with it came a new understanding and pride in her Western identity.
’The Tibetans generally regard us as barbarians. They think we’re very good at inventing the motor car, but have nothing much inside, and so in terms of real culture are barren. At a certain point that is very disempowering. It is just like when the Christian missionaries went abroad and denigrated whatever culture they found themselves in, thinking theirs was the only true one,’ she said. ‘I began to see it isn’t true. We are not all McDonalds and Coca Cola. We have incredible philosophy and art and an incredible spiritual tradition. Western thought is very sophisticated and I discovered that in matters of the religion it was all there. Personally, I still found the Buddhist analysis of the Path the most clear and complete for someone like me, but it was so good to see the same insights being stated albeit in a different way. These things are important to know.’ Then she added with a wry smile, ‘Interestingly when Buddhism first went to Tibet the Indians thought the Tibetans were “barbarians” too. They didn’t want to hand over the precious Buddha dharma to them because they thought they would mess it up!’
Cave in the snow. A western woman’s quest for enlightenment Page 17
