Tenzin Palmo..My past life as a dog

[Guest guest]

Dear All in TBP,

Love and Love alone...

 

Read the following interesting experiences of a Buddhist nun, who

lived in a cave in Himalayas for 12 long years meditating and now

want to start a nunnery for Buddhist girls. I received it from a

friend, and am sharing it with you all, so that you also enjoy

reading and then appreciate the will power of this great lady.

 

Love and Love alone....

P. Gopi Krishna

====

Tenzin Palmo..My past life as a dog

Posted by: " Alton Slater " altonslater lostnfoundation

Tue Mar 6, 2007 5:38 pm (PST)

My past life as a dog

 

For 12 years, Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo meditated alone in a tiny

cave in Tibet. Now she wants to elevate the status of other Buddhist

women, believed to be reincarnated as females as punishment for past

mistakes.

 

By Janelle Brown

 

On the opposite side of the world, in Tibet, British-born Buddhist

nun Tenzin Palmo practices a less ostentatious form of spirituality.

For 12 years, the 59-year-old lived in a cave high in the Himalayas,

meditating and chanting and doing her own yoga in a 6-foot-square

hole in a mountain. That $350 would have kept her in lentils for

well over a year.

 

Now, after coming down from her cave, Palmo could use the money for

the nunnery she founded in hopes of reversing Buddhism's patriarchal

traditions. It is a place that Palmo hopes will help her reinstate

an entire lost lineage of female Tibetan spiritual leaders.

 

Palmo is currently touring the world on a fundraising mission,

enlisting supporters for her campaign to elevate Buddhist women from

the status of unfortunate entities paying with

gender for disappointing past lives, to roles of influence and worth

in their religion. She recently stopped in Santa Cruz to lead

meditation retreats and conduct meetings with devotees

as she sat on the balcony of her host's hillside home.

 

While it would be very easy for Palmo to find humiliating truths

comparing the austerities of Eastern Buddhist practices with the

marketing of the West's current vogue for inner peace, Palmo, a

devout believer in compassion, prefers not to criticize. Instead she

simply acknowledges the chasm between the challenging traditions of

her ancient religion, and the " instant enlightenment " hopes of

American dabblers.

" People think: A weekend tantric course and you've got it! " she

observes. " Recently someone asked His Holiness the Dalai

Lama, 'What's the quickest way to enlightenment? ' Of course, that

had to have been a Westerner. But you cannot even think [of

enlightenment] in terms of lifetimes, you have to think in terms of

eons. People have no idea. You have

to give your whole life to this. "

 

Palmo stands out among Buddhists worldwide -- not only because of

her intense and patient devotion, but because she is female. She

comes from a religious culture that has often viewed women as little

more than yoga-mat carriers, so the fact that she -- a woman, and a

Westerner -- could match the feats of the most dedicated male

practitioners of Eastern

Buddhism is a revelation -- and an inspiration to Tibetan women who

have chosen to follow her

 

example. With the momentum of this admiration in the East, Palmo is

beginning to quietly revolutionize the growing religion's gender

traditions.

 

It is tempting to describe tiny Palmo, in her flowing saffron robes,

as bird like -- she is, but more owl than dove, with her sharp nose

and piercing blue eyes. She looks frail, so thin that you can see

every bone and vein on her shaved skull, and she is hunched from

years of back troubles. Yet Palmo comes across as earthy, solid

enough to live in a cave if she needed to. She is in possession of a

sharp wit but also an ethereal spirituality; in mid-conversation she

might fall silent while she unconsciously grooms the dead leaves

from a houseplant, or mist over as she contemplates impending war in

the Middle East.

 

Next page: She had no books other than religious texts, and she

slept sitting upright in a meditation box Born as Diane Perry in

1943, the daughter of a fishmonger in London's East

End, Palmo was fascinated by spirituality and the East throughout

her childhood, eventually discovering Buddhism and giving up the

frivolity of teen life -- dancing, high heels --

when she was 18 years old. By the time she was 20, Palmo was on a

boat to Dalhousie, India -- a refugee zone for

Tibetans in northern India -- where she studied Buddhism and taught

rudimentary English to young monks who were the reincarnations of

dead spiritual masters.

 

Within a year, Palmo had found a guru -- the reincarnated lama

Khamtrul Rinpoche -- and joined a border monastery (there were no

nunneries prepared to deal with an educated

woman), eventually becoming one of the first Western women to ever

be a fully ordained

 

Buddhist nun. And then she climbed the mountain for the sojourn that

brought her a certain amount of fame -- at least among other

Buddhists.

 

The life of the yogi is perhaps as removed from Western

comprehension of Buddhism as any practice of the religion. The

Tibetan yogi spends most of his life in meditation and retreat -- he

is, essentially, the wise guru living in the cave at the top of the

mountain, long a staple of American jokes. At the age of 27, Palmo

climbed up to a niche in the side of

a mountain in the Himalayas, and decided to make it her home. For

the next 12 years, she lived in this tiny cave at

13,200 feet above sea level, speaking to no one for months, even

years on end, as she meditated and sought enlightenment.

 

For food, Palmo grew turnips and potatoes in a tiny hillside garden,

and ate lentils and canned supplies brought up once or twice a year

by villagers; she cooked on a small wood-burning stove, with a

pressure cooker as her main luxury. She had no books other than

religious texts, and no bed -- she slept sitting upright in her tiny

meditation box. During

the winter, heavy snows would block the entrance, and Palmo almost

suffocated before she dug herself out. In the spring, the melting

snows would flood her cave. Palmo doesn't talk much about her

spiritual achievements up there in the snow, but says that she " was

never bored. "

 

In 1988, Palmo finally descended to discover that she'd become

famous -- the strange Western woman who had undergone Buddhism's

most demanding practice ended up

lecturing around the world, and being profiled in the book " Cave in

the Snow. " Eventually, though, she decided that her new life's

calling was to address the gender inequalities

that she'd encountered when she was studying Buddhism. Feminism,

which has infiltrated Western Buddhism and given rise to a large

number of respected female teachers there, had almost entirely

bypassed Eastern Buddhism. Palmo joined a small but growing group of

Buddhist women -- Western women, but also a few Tibetans -- who were

turning their

attention to the needs of neglected nuns.

 

Although there are a few countries -- Taiwan and Korea, namely --

where Buddhist women play a strong role in spiritual life, most

Eastern countries leave women out of

the picture. Original Buddhist teachings had initially granted women

spiritual equality, but years of patriarchal social

practices had turned nuns into second-rate citizens (much, it should

be noted, like the nuns in the Catholic Church).

 

" I once asked my lama why there were so few female incarnations in

Tibet, " she recalls. " He said, 'My sister had more signs at the time

of her birth than I did. Everyone said 'Oh, someone very special is

coming. 'Then it was a girl and they said, 'Whoops, mistake!' If it

had been a boy

 

it would have been taken care of. But because it was a girl, nothing

was done about it. She was married off, with no education or

training. The social structure was not

prepared to deal with it. "

 

Only a few countries even allow women to be fully ordained as nuns

(ironically, neither of the spiritual centers revered most by

Westerners -- Tibet and Japan -- offer ordination).

 

Traditionally, nuns are denied anything but the most rudimentary

education; and the situation has become worse since the Chinese

occupation of Tibet. While new monasteries were quickly set up for

monks who fled the country, few nunneries were replaced. Many nuns

simply ended up as cooks or servants in the monasteries; there were

few female spiritual leaders.

 

To remedy this, Palmo has launched a fledgling nunnery that will,

she hopes, reestablish a lost lineage of female yogis, known as the

togdenma. These women are the female

counterparts to the togden yogis who, deadlocked and dressed in

tattered white skirts, live in caves and meditate for years at a

time (and upon whom Palmo modelled her own retreat).

 

" That example of someone living in a cave in a state of renunciation

is something which resonates deeply in the Tibetan psyche, " she

says. Although the female togdenma existed in small numbers in Tibet

through the first half of the 20th century, all traces of these nuns

were lost during the Chinese occupation.

 

Next page: " You can imagine a group of 24 teenage girls keeping

silent for this long. It takes great discipline "

Tenzin Palmo's Dongyi Gatsal Ling Nunnery in the mountains of

northern India is only half-complete, but it already houses 24 young

nuns; some of the girls escaped from Tibet, enduring rape and abuse

at the hands of Chinese and Nepali soldiers, while others came from

Indian families in search of a better life than their mothers or

sisters. The nuns study meditation, rituals, debate and philosophy;

English and Tibetan; along with practical skills like driving,

tailoring and computers. For two months a year, the girls live in a

silent

meditation retreat; " You can imagine a group of 24 teenage girls

keeping silent for this long, living in one house, eight to a room, "

Palmo says, wryly. " It takes great discipline. "

 

The nunnery, once complete, will hold up to 200 nuns at a time; with

an additional center nearby for international Buddhist women seeking

retreat. The hope, says Palmo, is that the nuns will eventually

become spiritual teachers on par with the male gurus and yogis.

Already, her nuns have had audiences with the Dalai Lama, who has

himself begun to

preach spiritual equality.

 

" The Dalai Lama has said: Male body, female body, it makes no

difference. If you really study and practice there is nothing you

cannot accomplish in the female body, " Palmo says. " This is

important for the nuns to hear, because the message is always given

that somehow if you have a female body you did something wrong in

your last life. The best thing you can hope for is to be a good

girl, work very hard, and come back as a boy the next time. "

 

Palmo has been working to open her nunnery for nearly nine years,

and in the time since she began, a number of other nunneries have

also opened their doors in India, offering a real education to young

Buddhist women. This is due partly to Western Buddhist women, who

have been arriving in Tibet to study and provide the first feminist

role models for young Tibetan girls.

 

In the last decade that she has spent travelling the world,

lecturing and raising money for her nunnery, Palmo has seen all

things Buddhist gain momentum in the popular Western media. This is

not, she notes, the first time she's witnessed Buddhism become

fashionable: Her own arrival in India in 1964 came just before

floods of hippies flocked to India seeking gurus. Her hope is that

at least a few in this round of " spiritual materialists " will see

past the $350 yoga bags and

quick-fix weekend retreats to find a more lasting religious practice.

 

" Buddhism is a trend. It rises and it falls; in the 1960's the

hippies were all going to India in search of truth -- with capital

letters and blazing lights. Most of them just got stoned and that

was it, " she says. " But most of the great teachers in America today

were from those hippies. At a certain point they saw through their

illusions and got down to work. "

 

Perhaps Buddhism is currently on the rise because its simplicity

offers such a contrast to the high-tech hustle of the last decade;

even so, the " simplicity " that Westerners covet doesn't much

resemble the austerity of Buddhism's eastern roots. Then again,

Palmo suggests, you don't need to get rid of all of your possessions

and live in a cave in order to seek

enlightenment, even though materialistic trappings won't really help.

 

" People know that, in the end, getting a new car, or another set of

clothing, another Haagan Daz, won't solve their problems, " she

says. " One of the advantages of being born in an affluent society is

that if one has any intelligence at all, one will realize that

having more and more won't solve the problem, and happiness does not

lie in possessions, or even

relationships: The answer lies within ourselves. If we can't find

peace and happiness there, it's not going to come from the outside. "

Gopi Krishna <gopi