Cave In The Snow: A Western Woman's Quest for Enlightenment

by Vicki Mackenzie

’That’s Tenzin Palmo, the Englishwoman who has spent twelve years meditating in a cave over 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas. For most of that time she was totally alone. She has only just come out,’ he said.

The anger, the paranoia, the longings, the lust (especially the lust).

We began to chat. She told me that she was now living in Assisi in a small house in the garden of a friend’s place, and was enjoying it immensely.

’The purpose of life is to realize our spiritual nature. And to do that one has to go away and practise, to reap the fruits of the path, otherwise you have nothing to give anyone else.’

‘Not at all. To my mind worldly life is an escape,’ she retorted, quick as a flash. ‘When you have a problem you can turn on the television, phone a friend, go out for a coffee.

‘I have made a vow to attain Enlightenment in the female form – no matter how many lifetimes it takes,’ Tenzin Palmo had said.

What she had promised was to become a female Buddha, and female Buddhas (like female Christs and female Mohammeds) were decidedly thin on the ground.

She was born in a stately home, Woolmers Park, in Hertfordshire, in the library to be exact.

Home for the first twenty years of her life was above a fish shop at 72 Old Bethnal Green Road, Bethnal Green, just round the corner from

the historical Old Roman Road in the heart of London’s East End.

and, most significantly for this story, a spiritual seeker and a staunch supporter of Tenzin Palmo in all her endeavours throughout all her life. They were very close.

All around her were the Cockneys, the ’real Londoners’, renowned for their sharp wit, quick tongues, and latterly for winning Brain of Britain competitions.

to take me there so that I could see some oriental faces.’

Personally, I think it was a karmic thing because when I got older it just disappeared, and I was never seriously ill in the cave,’ she said. ‘Because of these very high fevers I used to have a lot of out-of-body experiences,’she continued. ’I used to travel around the neighbourhood but because I was a little girl I wouldn’t go far from home. I didn’t want to get lost. So I would just wander around the streets, floating above everything, looking down on people for a change, instead of always looking up at them. I tried it again when I was a teenager but I got scared so I never developed the ability.’

My mother had done this profound practice absolutely spontaneously! Furthermore, it worked.

‘I reached my peak at three

‘I wanted to know, how do we become perfect?

“Well, who made all things dull and ugly then?" It was the same with the harvest hymns, praising God for the sunshine and rain. In that case, I thought God

must also have brought the drought and the famine.’

Tenzin Palmo, it seemed, was confronting the problem of ’duality’, good and evil, dark and light, big and small, looking for an a...

Christianity. It remained an enigma. At fifteen she took up yoga and through that was introduced to Hinduism.

At school a teacher read them Heinrich Harrer’s book Seven Years in Tibet, about his journey to the Land of Snows and his friendship with the Dalai Lama.

And when she was around nine or ten years old she saw a programme on the temples in Thailand.

She turned to Lee and asked her who he was. ‘He’s some kind of oriental god,’ her mother replied. ‘No, he lived and has a story, like Jesus,’ Tenzin Palmo replied, with conviction. It was only a matter of...

Sartre, a Camus and one other which she grabbed at the last moment because someone had just brought it in. It had a nice image of the Buddha on the cover but it was the title, The Mind Unshaken, that caught her eye. In Germany she read the Sartre and the Camus but for some reason had ignored the Buddhist book.

In the airport on the way home, however, there was an eight-hour delay and as it was a military establishment with no shops or amusements on offer

she had no alternative to relieve her boredom but t...

She had got half-way through it when she turned to her mother and said in a small, surprised voice: ‘I’m a Buddhist.’ Lee Perry replied in her down-to-earth way: ’That’s nice, dear, finish reading the book and then you can tell me all about it.’ Tenzin Palmo was not so phlegmatic. ‘To me, it was astonishing. Everything I had ever believed in, there it was! Much better stated than anything I could haveformulated for myself, of course, but nonetheless! That view! It was exactly as I...

‘The other thing I liked very much was the teaching on rebirth and the fact that there was no external deity pulling the strings. Also, when I encountered Hinduism there was a lot of emphasis on atman (soul) and its relationship with the Divine. When I first heard the word “atman” I felt this nausea, this revulsion against even the word. Buddhism, on the other hand was talking about non-atman! There was no such thing as this independent entity which is “Self” with capital letters and blazing lights. To me this was so liberating. It was so wonderful finally to find a religion, a spiritual path which proceeded from that.’ As with so many other strange predilections in her life, her inexplicable nausea over the word ‘atman’ would be made clear later on.

‘I kept reading that the main thing in Buddhism was to be without desire, so I thought “Right”. I proceeded to give all my clothes to my mother for her to dispose of and I started going around in this kind of yellow Greek tunic type thing. It went straight down and I wore it with a belt and black stockings,’she said, laughing at the memory. ‘I stopped wearing make-up, I pulled my hair back, wore sensible shoes and stopped going out with boys. I was desperately trying to be desireless.’

He was a fascinating character who managed to combine a distinguished career at the bench with an unconventional interest in alternative medicine, astrology, ESP and Buddhism.

He mingled with such luminaries as C.G. Jung, the Zen Master Dr D.T. Suzuki and the royal family of Thailand, and was one of the first to meet and welcome the Dalai Lama when he was newly exiled. When

Tenzin Palmo found her way to the Buddhist Society it was the oldest and largest Buddhist organizatio...

small building with a very limite...

At Eccleston Square Tenzin Palmo immersed herself in the treasures of Theravadan Buddhism, the ’Southern School’ which existed in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.

She learnt about the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, his brilliant and logical diagnosis of the human condition and its cure: the truth of

suffering; the truth of the cause of suffering; the truth of the cessation of suffering and the tru...

She discovered his Eightfold Path:right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right concentration, right meditation, the Buddha’s blueprint for conducting either the secular or meditative life.

given to her by a woman from whom she had bought two Siamese cats. It was typical of the way things were coming to her at that time. The statue had been on the woman’s mantelpiece, brought back from Burma by her merchant seaman husband, and when the woman discovered that Tenzin Palmo was a real Buddhist she spontaneously handed it over.

do that! Buddhists wouldn’t do such a thing.” So I didn’t but it was very painful not to. Later I saw pictures of people in the East prostrating in front of the Buddha image and I was so happy. I prostrated and prostrated and prostrated. It just felt so right,’ she said.

Somehow she also came across the Tibetan mantra ‘Om Mani Padme Hung’, which calls on Chenrezig the Buddha of compassion, and began to recite it in her own way, with surprising results.

Particularly disconcerting, to Tenzin Palmo’s mind, were the Arhats, those great heroes who had attained Nirvana having eradicated for all time all traces of ignorance, greed and hatred. As

such they never had to be born again into this world of suffering. They were free! It should have been just what Tenzin Palmo was after, but they never appealed.

brief description of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism Nyingmapa, Sakya, Gelugpa and Kargyupa. ‘When I read the word “Kargyupa” a voice inside said, “You’re Kargyu.” And I said, “What’s Kargyupa?” and the voice said, “It doesn’t matter, you’re Kargyupa.” And my heart dropped. Being a Tibetan Buddhist was the last thing I wanted to be.’

Following the dictates of the Voice, Tenzin Palmo contacted the only person she knew in London who had any knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, who, over afternoon tea, handed her the Evan-Wentz biography of Milarepa, Tibet’s most beloved poet-saint, cave-meditator par excellence and founder of the Kargyupas. It was a riveting tale.

Milarepa was a swashbuckling spiritual hero of the eleventh century who had led a spectacularly disreputable youth during which he had practised black magic to avenge his family’s wrongs, killing several people in the process. Finally seeing the error of his ways he had sought out a guru, the renowned Marpa the Translator, who had brought the Buddhist texts from India, beseeching him to give him the Saving Truths. Marpa took one look at the young reprobate standing before him and promptly set him about the Herculean task of building a high stone tower. When the task was completed Marpa surveyed the work and brusquely told Milarepa to dismantle it replacing each stone to the place it had come from. This process was repeated four times until Milarepa, bleeding and almost broken, had expiated his foul deeds and proven his determination. Marpa now bestowed on him the secret initiations and teachings he yearned for.

Armed with these, a staff, a cloak, a bowl and nothing else, he disappeared into the Mountain of Solitude where, freezing cold and with nothing to eat but nettles, his body beca...

When, after years of dedicated effort, he finally emerged to teach, flowers rained down and rainbows appeared in the sky.

All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: Acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separation; births in death. Knowing this one should, from the very first, renounce acquisition and heaping up, and building and meeting, And, faithful to the commands of an eminent guru, set about realizing the Truth, which hath no birth or death. That alone is the best science.

She had discovered boys and they had certainly discovered her. Life in the heart of London was fun. It was the early sixties, the time of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Beatniks, Radio Luxembourg and rock’n’ roll. The cult