Most of all Tenzin Palmo discovered the pleasure of music, which fed some long-neglected part of herself. She steeped herself in the classical composers – Bach, Handel, Haydn and her favourite, Mozart. ‘It was a wonderful thing to find Mozart. I completely fell in love with him,’ she declared. ‘It was something quite profound at a certain level. It was very moisturizing. I think I had become extremely dry, somewhere,’ she said candidly.
Knowingly or not, Tenzin Palmo was balancing East with West, asceticism with sensuality, solitude with sociability giving herself a more rounded personality. In this way she was following the exact advice given by one of her new-found Christian mentors, the great thirteenth-century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, who had written: ‘I say that the contemplative person should avoid even the thought of deeds to be done during the period of his contemplation but afterwards he should get busy for no one can or should engage in contemplation all the time, for active life is to be a respite from contemplation.’
At this time another aspect to Tenzin Palmo’s life began to open up – one that would develop much further in the future. The Christians soon got wind of her presence in Assisi and became highly interested to see and hear for themselves the woman who had spent so long in retreat alone. Her effort was beyond anything their orders ever attempted. She was asked to talk at seminars and at one point received an embossed invitation from the Vatican Council, no less, asking her to speak at an inter-faith conference in Taiwan. She was also invited to conduct workshops in seminaries and convents to tell the enclosed orders precisely what she had done, and how she had done it. Tenzin Palmo happily accepted, as she was now well receptive to inter-faith dialogue and was keen to give whatever knowledge she had in exchange for Christian methods of contemplation. But it didn’t work out like that at all.
‘At one Benedictine monastery I was told that mass was at 5 a.m. and so I thought I would join in. When I got to the chapel, however, there were only one or two people inside. I asked where everyone was and was told that they were in a small room that had been set aside for my meditation course. When I got there I found all these shoes neatly lined up outside the door and all the inmates inside sitting there on the floor cross-legged. They had set up an altar with a Buddha statue on it, flowers and water bowls and asked me if it was all right."It’s lovely, thank you,” I told them.
’They were only interested in learning about Buddhism. They’d been studying it, had met the Dalai Lama and were keen to know more. I wanted to encourage Christian meditation but they weren’t having any of it. They told me that there were so few masters of the inner life in Catholicism which was why the young people were falling away. They said the young were asking for ways of obtaining inner peace and a spiritual path to put meaning back into their lives. The nuns and monks felt that if they could get themselves together they could become guides to bring the young people what they needed.
’They wanted methods, because they had lost their own. They wanted directions: what to do, what not to do, descriptions of the problems that can arise in meditation and how to deal with them. Tibetan methods are excellent because they don’t require any particular faith structure. Anyone can make use of them including psychologists. So I told them what to do and they would sit there nodding their heads. Afterwards one elderly Carmelite nun said: “If only someone had told me how to meditate years ago. It’s so simple. ‘"
From her side, Tenzin Palmo enjoyed being with the nuns enormously. They swapped methods of robe-wearing, she told them about her life, they explained theirs. In spite of the differences, their pleasure in the commonality of the habit was mutual. From the Christian nuns she also picked up methods of a different kind which were to be extremely useful in a few years’ time. In turn the Christian fraternity so appreciated Tenzin Palmo that they invited her to their monasteries to do long retreats whenever she wanted. She thanked them kindly and declined.
As time went by her name became known and her influence began to spread. She was invited to talk in Rome, north Italy, Umbria, Devon, Poland. While she was in Poland she visited Auschwitz and saw for herself the place which had been the site of so much human suffering. ‘One of the things that moved me most of all were the photographs of the people who had gone to the gas chambers. So many of them were bright-eyed and beautiful. Some were even smiling. I found that incredibly painful,’ she said.
For all of her appreciation of Western culture, she had not relinquished her Buddhism, nor her meditation. Far from it. She continued to do her daily practices and conducted several short retreats. Before she knew it she was also caught up in a project to start a nunnery for Western Buddhist nuns in Pomaia, near Pisa.
She had met the women at a summer course and, recognizing in them a reflection of her own dire experience when she was first ordained, was touched by their plight. ‘The nuns had no place of their own, and no one was looking after them. The monks were OK – they had their monastery, but the nuns were moving from centre to centre. It was not good for their spiritual development at all,’ she said.
Later, when the opportunity came for her to join her friend Ram on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, in Tibet, she jumped at it. She had never been to the land which had fostered the strongest impulses in her present life, and Mount Kailash was regarded as the most sacred pilgrimage site of all. Situated in a remote region of western Tibet, in one of the most desolate places on earth, Mount Kailash was hailed as the very centre of the tantric universe by Buddhists and Hindus alike. At its peak, which soared more than 21,000 feet into the rarefied atmosphere, lived the gods abided over by Tara herself. Tenzin Palmo had wanted to go to Kailash ever since she first read about the mystical mountain in Lama Govinda’s inspirational book The Way of the White Clouds, but had never seriously thought she would make it in this lifetime.
‘It was incredible to be in Tibet finally – so much of my life had been spent thinking and reading about it. The surroundings absolutely lived up to my expectations – but there was also the anguish of seeing all that had been destroyed under the Chinese. There were huge monasteries which were just ruins. It was terribly sad,’ she said.
They hired four yaks to carry their tents and cooking gear while they travelled by the more modern method of Land Cruiser. The journey took ten days, as there were no roads and the going was incredibly hard. When she eventually got there it was worth it. ‘Kailash itself was wonderful. We had to go over the 18,000 feet Dolma Pass in a snowstorm to get to it and Ram and I were both exhausted and got disorientated. Then this big black dog appeared. We gave it some soggy biscuits and he showed us the way down. We were incredibly happy. It was very special and a great blessing. It took us two and a half days to circumambulate Mount Kailash once, prostrating at the holy places. Some Tibetans do it in a day. They get up at 3 a.m. and finish at 10 p.m. Some do twenty to thirty rounds in a month! Some go for 108, the numbers of beads on their malas (rosaries). And some prostrate all the way around, which takes them about two weeks. It’s very flinty so it’s not easy.’