‘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 inwards. 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.