‘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!’