Arriving in Hong Kong, Tenzin Palmo duly donned the black and brown robes of the Chinese Buddhist nun and with head bowed and hands together stood through the long ceremonies which formally accepted her as a full member of the Buddhist monastic community. As she did so camera lights flashed and reporters scribbled furiously. Tenzin Palmo made the headlines. Once again she was the first Western woman to take such a step and the Chinese occupants of the former British colony were mesmerized. What the photographers did not pick up, however, were the little stumps of incense which, as part of the ritual, had been placed on the nuns’ heads and left to burn slowly down on to the freshly shaven scalps, leaving a small scar to remind them for ever of their commitment. Tenzin Palmo cried, but not from pain.
‘I was absolutely blissed out,’ she said. Later, when she showed a photograph of the event to H. H. Sakya Trizin, her second guru, he took one look at her white beatific face silhouetted against the black cloth and remarked: ‘You look like a bald-headed Virgin Mary.’
After all these delays and detours she finally reached Lahoul and resumed her way of life with renewed determination: getting in supplies during the summer weeks, strict meditational practice during the winter. Her mind and heart were still set on Enlightenment. But for all her enthusiasm, and the strength of her will, the conditions at Tayul Gompa for the sort of spiritual advancement that Tenzin Palmo was seeking were still far from satisfactory.
‘Getting water was a problem. When you are in retreat you should not be seen by anyone, which meant that I had to collect water at night. The path was full of snow and very icy. I didn’t have any Wellingtons so I used to wrap my straw sandals in plastic bags which made it even more slippery. I used to go out once a week after dark with a hurricane lamp, a big tin on my back and a bucket and would carry back thirty litres of water. It was very difficult. I learnt to be very frugal with water.’
And then there was the noise. Just as the elderly nun who had greeted Tenzin Palmo on her arrival had intimated, the winter months for the majority of the community were set aside for serious partying. ‘While I was trying to be in retreat, the others would sweep all the snow from the top of their houses, take their mats up there, and have these great conversations, yelling at each other across the rooftops in the sun. In the evening they held these dinner parties with their eighteen plates and cups. It was very sociable! It was also very difficult to meditate.’ Actually, they gathered to card and spin fleece for their families. One person would provide food and drink while their guests would spin their wool for them. They would rotate so everyone’s work was completed as a team.
After six years she had had enough. ‘I had gone to Lahoul to meditate, not to have a swinging social life!’ she said. ‘I decided I had to move out, to find somewhere quieter. So I went up above the monastery to look for a place where I could build a small house.’ Up in the mountains she called upon the dakinis, those ethereal female Buddhist spirits, known for their wildness, their power and their willingness to assist spiritual practitioners, to come to her aid. She had always had a particularly intimate relationship with them. Now she addressed them in her own inimitable way: ‘Look here – if you find me a suitable place to do a retreat, then on my side I promise I will try to practise,’ she prayed. ‘I felt very positive about it, very happy. I was sure something was going to happen,’ she commented.
She came down the mountain and the next morning went to see one of the nuns. ‘I’m thinking of building a house above the monastery,’ she remarked.
‘How can you do that? You need money for building materials and labour and you don’t have any. Why don’t you live in a cave?’ the nun replied.
‘A cave is out of the question. To begin with there are very few caves in Lahoul, and where there are caves there isn’t any water, and where there is water there are people,’ Tenzin Palmo pointed out.
’That’s true,’ the nun replied, ‘but last night I suddenly remembered an old nun who told me about a cave up on the mountain which has water nearby as well as trees and a meadow outside. Why don’t we go and look for it?’
The moment the words were out Tenzin Palmo knew.
’That’s it!’ she said.
The next day she gathered together a group of people, including the head lama of the monastery, and set off up the mountain in search of the cave the nun had heard about.
Chapter Eight
The Cave
Tenzin Palmo, with her small band of companions, began to climb the mountain which stood behind Tayul Gompa in the direction in which they had been told the cave lay. They trudged up and up in a steep ascent, leaving the habitations of human beings far behind. Higher and higher they went, across the sweet-smelling grasses which gave off aromatic scents as they brushed by, climbing more than 1,000 feet beyond the Gompa, their chests bursting with the effort and the altitude. This was not a trek for either the faint-hearted or the short-winded. The way was perilously steep and treacherous. There was no path to follow and the drop beside them was sheer. At various points the way was made more hazardous by wide streams of loose scree - boulders and stones that the mountain rising over them habitually shrugged off as though irritated by their presence. They had to be traversed if the cave was to be found, but one false foothold on those slippery stones meant likely death.
Undaunted, they carried on. After two hours of climbing they suddenly came across it. It was so well blended in with the mountain, so ‘camouflaged’, that until they were almost upon it they had no idea it was there. It was certainly not the archetypal cave of one’s imagination or of Hollywood movies. Here was no deep hollow in the mountainside with a neat round entrance and a smooth dirt floor, offering a cosy, self-contained, if primitive living space. It was less, much less than that. This ‘cave’ was nothing more than an overhang on a natural ledge of the mountain with three sides open to the elements. It had a craggy roof which you had to stoop to stand under, a jagged, slanting back wall and beyond the ledge outside a sheer drop into the steep V of the Lahouli valley. At best it was a flimsy shelter. At worst a mere indentation in a rock. It was also inconceivably smalclass="underline" a space measuring at most ten feet wide by six feet deep. It was a cupboard of a cave. A cell for solitary confinement.
Tenzin Palmo stood on the tiny ledge and surveyed the scene. The view was sensational. How could it be otherwise? In front of her, stretching in a 180 degree arc, was a vast range of mountains. She was almost eye to eye with their peaks. Right now, in summer, only the tops were covered with snow but in the long eight-month winter they would constitute a massive wall of whiteness soaring into the pristine, pollution-free, azure-blue sky above. The light was crystalline, imbuing everything with a shimmering luminosity, the air sparkling and crisp. The silence was profound. Only the rushing grey-green waters of the Bhaga river below, the whistle of the wind and the occasional flap of a bird’s wing broke the quietness. To her right was a small juniper forest, which could provide fuel. To her left, about a quarter of a mile away, was a spring, gurgling out from between some rocks, a vital source of fresh, clean water. And behind her was yet more mountain towering over her like a sentinel. For all the awesome power of her surroundings, and the extreme isolation, the cave and its surroundings felt peaceful and benign, as though the mighty mountains offered security by their sheer size and solidity, although this, of course, was an illusion – mountains being as impermanent as everything else made of ‘compounded phenomena’.