’The nearby Lake Manasarovar is very special too. We were there for my fiftieth birthday. Ram insisted on bathing in it, so I did too. It almost killed me. It was freezing, with this icy wind blowing. You have to drink the water too, otherwise it doesn’t count!’
She met the nomads, gentle people still clinging to a way of life that had been going on for millennia. She heard their longing for the Dalai Lama, saw their poverty, but thought they were better off than the Tibetan town-folk, who were humiliated daily by the Chinese overlords. ‘For all their suffering I was astonished by the indomitable spirit of the Tibetans and how they managed to stay cheerful in such awful circumstances,’ she said. ‘It was bliss to be there, one of my peak experiences even though I felt terrible with splitting headaches and altitude sickness! I had a sense of fulfilment – I had dreamt of it for so long.’
There was no longing to stay, however. Tenzin Palmo may have had the strongest connections possible with Tibet and its religion, but now she was a Westerner, who had furthermore discovered Western music. In the midst of the stony wastes of West Tibet, under the shadow of the sublime, mystical Mount Kailash, Tenzin Palmo played Mozart. ‘You can take Mozart anywhere,’ she enthused. ’To me it’s the perfect music. It’s incredibly moving and gives me great joy! My Desert Island Discs would be almost all Mozart. If you could think of heaven with music, it would have Mozart there.’
She was also longing for some decent food. ‘I got sick to death of greasy noodles. I was longing for rice and dhal,’ she said. Her home was no longer Tibet.
Tenzin Palmo sincerely believed that Assisi would be her base for the rest of her life. With this thought in mind she set about building a small two-roomed wooden house in the grounds belonging to her friends with money given to her through donations. She meant to go back into retreat, for she had certainly not forgotten her pursuit of perfection. She had actually begun when, Italian-style, building permission was suddenly withdrawn. Once again it seemed that fate, or ‘karma’, was stepping in and taking a hand in Tenzin Palmo’s life. She may have been ready to settle down but her days of ‘going forth into homelessness’, as decreed by the Buddha as the ideal state for his monks and nuns, were far from over. She had work to do. Much work.
Chapter Thirteen
The Vision
The month was March 1993. The place Dharamsala, the former British hill station in Himachal Pradesh, north India, now the home of the Dalai Lama and his government in exile. As senior nun and burgeoning teacher, Tenzin Palmo had been invited to attend the first Western Buddhism conference, aimed at discussing the issues involved in the phenomena of transmitting the Buddha-dharma to the West. With her were twenty-one other leading representatives of the major Buddhist traditions in Europe and America, as well as eminent lamas from the different Tibetan schools. The discussions went back and forth – the role of the teacher, the differences between the Eastern and Western psyche, ethical guidelines – when suddenly ’the role of women in Buddhism’ came up.
An attractive German laywoman, Sylvia Wetzel, took the floor. With a small but discernible gulp she invited His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the assembled throng of luminaries to join her in a visualization. ‘Please imagine that you are a male coming to a Buddhist centre. You see the painting of this beautiful Tara surrounded by sixteen female arhats and you have the possibility to see too Her Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama who, in all of her fourteen incarnations, has always chosen a female rebirth,’she began. ‘You are surrounded by very high female rinpoches beautiful, strong, educated women. Then you see the Bhikshunis coming in, self-confident, outspoken. Then you see the monks coming in behind them – very shy and timid. You hear about the lineage lamas of the tradition, who are all female, down to the female Tara in the painting.
‘Remember you are male,’ she reminded them, ‘and you approach a lama, feeling a little bit insecure and a little bit irritated, and ask, “Why are there all these female symbols, female Buddhas?” And she replies, “Don’t worry. Men and women are equal. Well, almost. We do have some scriptures which say that a male rebirth is inferior, but isn’t this the case? Men do have a more difficult time when all the leaders, spiritually, philosophically and politically are women.”
‘And then the male student, who is very sincere, goes to another lama, a Mahayanist from the Higher Vehicle School, and says, "I am a man, how can I identify with all these female icons?” And she replies, “You just meditate on Shunyata (Emptiness). In Shunyata no man, no woman, no body, nothing.
No problem!"
’So you go to a tantric teacher and say, “All these women and I am a man. I don’t know how to relate.” And she says, “How wonderful you are, beautiful Daka, you are so useful to us practitioners helping us to raise our kundalini energy. How blessed you are to be male, to benefit female practitioners on their path to enlightenment."’
It was outrageous but delivered in such a charming way that everyone, including the Dalai Lama, laughed. ‘Now you have given me another angle on the matter,’ he said. In effect Sylvia Wetzel had voiced what millions of women down the centuries had felt. In spite of the mirth, the dam holding back more than 2,500 years of spiritual sexism and pent-up female resentment was beginning to burst.
Others began to join in. A leading Buddhist teacher and author, American nun Thubten Chodron, told how the subtle prejudice she had met within institutions had undermined her confidence to the point that it was a serious hindrance on the path. ‘Even if our pain was acknowledged it would make us feel better,’ she declared.
Sympathetic male teachers spoke up. ‘This is a wonderful challenge for the male – to see it and accept it,’ said a Zen master.
American Tibetan Buddhist monk Thubten Pende gave his views: ‘When I translated the texts concerning the ordination ceremony I got such a shock. It said that even the most senior nun had to sit behind the most novice monk because, although her ordination was superior, the basis of that ordination, her body, was inferior. I thought, “There it is.” I’d heard about this belief but I’d never found evidence of it. I had to recite this text at the ceremony. I was embarrassed to say it and ashamed of the institution I was representing. I wondered, “Why doesn’t she get up and leave?” I would.’
The English Theravadan monk Ven Ajahn Amaso also spoke up: ’Seeing the nuns not receiving the respect given to the monks is very painful. It is like having a spear in your heart,’ he said.
Then it was Tenzin Palmo’s turn, and with all her natural eloquence she told her tale: ‘When I first came to India I lived in a monastery with 100 monks. I was the only nun,’ she said, and paused for several seconds for her words to sink in. ‘I think that is why I eventually went to live by myself in a cave.’ Everyone got the point. ‘The monks were kind, and I had no problems of sexual harassment or troubles of that sort, but of course I was unfortunately within a female form. They actually told me they prayed that in my next life I would have the good fortune to be reborn as a male so that I could join in all the monastery’s activities. In the meantime, they said, they didn’t hold it too much against me that I had this inferior rebirth in the female form. It wasn’t too much my fault.’