The Life and Legacy of Tenzin Palmo

In May and June we read texts, first the Yoga Upanishads and then the Yoga Vasishtha. This month we are reading a book by someone still living, and in her case the life behind the book is as much the teaching as the book itself.

Tenzin Palmo was born Diane Perry in London in 1943. Her father sold fish in the East End and the family lived above the shop. There was nothing in that childhood to suggest India or the Himalayas. At eighteen she happened to pick up a book on Buddhism, and by the time she finished it she had the strange feeling that she was not learning something new but recognising something she had always thought, without ever having had a word for it.

At twenty she took a boat to India. In a Tibetan refugee community in Himachal Pradesh she found her teacher, Khamtrul Rinpoche, and became one of the first Western women to be ordained as a nun in the Tibetan tradition. The years that followed were harder than the journey. She lived as the only nun among a hundred monks, and while the monks were kind to her, the deeper training was given only to the men. She was left out of it because she was a woman. Out of that long frustration came the vow for which she is now known across the Buddhist world: to keep working toward enlightenment in a woman’s form, however many lifetimes it took.

In 1976, with her teacher’s blessing, she moved into a cave in the Lahaul valley, at about thirteen thousand feet. It measured roughly ten feet by six. She stayed twelve years, the last three in strict retreat, seeing no one at all. She grew turnips and potatoes in the short summer, slept sitting upright in a wooden meditation box for about three hours a night, and one winter had to dig her way out after a blizzard buried the cave entirely.

When she finally came down, people naturally wanted to hear about the cave. What she gave them instead was a series of plain talks about ordinary life, and a book was later made from those talks. It is called Into the Heart of Life, and it is what we are reading this month.
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The book begins where the tradition always begins, with impermanence. Everything changes. We have heard this so many times that it has stopped meaning anything, and her point is that we know it in the head while refusing it everywhere else.
Look at how we actually live. We arrange our days as if the people in them will always be there. We are somehow taken by surprise when old age comes, though it comes to everyone. Even in a happy moment we are already worrying about losing it, and the worrying eats into the moment while it is still here.

She says the trouble is not that things change, since change is also what allows anything to heal or begin. The trouble is the grasping, the attempt to make something permanent out of what was never going to be permanent. It is like standing in a river and trying to hold the water still.

Anyone who spent last month with the Yoga Vasishtha will recognise this ground. The Vasishtha said that the world we suffer in is mostly the mind’s own construction. Tenzin Palmo is describing the same thing from very near, in the moment the mind tightens around something that was always going to change.
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The chapter most people remember is the one on love, because in it she says something uncomfortable about nearly all of us.
We assume that attachment is love, and she says it is not. Attachment says, I love you, so stay, do not change, keep making me happy. Love wants the other person to be well whether or not we benefit from it. She is careful here, because this is where people misunderstand renunciation. She is not telling anyone to love less. She is pointing out that much of what we call love has a hook in it, and the hook is for us. The mother who cannot let a grown child live his own life is not loving more than other mothers, she is holding more tightly. From the inside the two feel identical, and that is exactly what makes the teaching difficult.

The test she offers is a simple one. When the other person changes, or leaves, or stops giving back, watch what happens in us. If we can still wish them well, that part was love. The part that feels injured is usually the attachment.

None of this is foreign to our own tradition. Sir has reminded us often enough that the Gita’s teaching on non-attachment was given to a householder standing on a battlefield, not to a hermit. Tenzin Palmo went the other way, spent twelve years in a cave, and came back saying the practice belongs in the family, not away from it.
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There is a chapter on what the Buddhist tradition calls the eight worldly concerns. They come in four pairs: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace.
Her observation is that these four pairs run most of an ordinary day. Someone praises our work and the whole morning lifts. Someone ignores us in a meeting and we spend the afternoon replaying it. A small gain here, a small slight there, and the mind swings back and forth without our deciding any of it.

She does not promise that any of this will stop. Praise and blame will keep coming as long as there are other people around us. What the practice offers is the chance to notice the swing while it is happening, and a mind that can see flattery working on it is already a little less caught in it.
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She also talks about karma, and clears away some of the fog around the word. Karma is not fate, and it is not a cosmic ledger of reward and punishment. She compares it to gardening. Every intention plants something. If we act from anger a hundred times, the hundred and first time the anger comes up on its own, because we have planted it a hundred times.

Last month we met the same idea in the Yoga Vasishtha, which calls these grooves in the mind vasanas, the residues that make it tilt the way it has tilted before. Tenzin Palmo watched this machinery for twelve years with nothing to distract her from it, and her conclusion is a hopeful one. These patterns were built by repetition, and they weaken the same way, by being seen clearly each time and not fed.
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Here is what to try this month.
Keep your morning meditation the same, with no new technique to add. During the day, pick one of the four pairs, and praise and blame is a good one to start with. When someone compliments you, notice the small lift, the way the mind wants more of it. When someone criticises you, notice how you tighten and begin preparing arguments in your own defence. Do not fight either reaction and do not scold yourself for having it. She is clear that the practice is only to be aware of the swing while it is happening.

Then, once this month, take a quiet look at one relationship that matters to you, and ask how much of it is wanting the other person’s happiness and how much is wanting them to supply yours. There is no need to rush toward a flattering answer. Whatever the honest answer turns out to be, that is where the work starts.
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Tenzin Palmo is in her eighties now. She lives near Tashi Jong in Himachal Pradesh, at the nunnery she built so that young nuns would not face the closed doors she once faced. People still ask her about the cave, and she tends to wave the question away. The cave, she says, was only a quiet room. The mind she took into it is the same mind the rest of us wake up with every morning, and that is why she is worth reading. The practice she is describing does not require another life or another place, because it happens in the middle of the one we already have.
Om Tat Sat.