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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
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.
Sep 30, 2002 | There is, on Page 722 in the September Vogue, a red bag that captures the spirit and perversity of America's new devotion to Buddhism. It is a "yoga mat carrier" designed by Marc Jacobs, a white-hot couturier, with supermodel Christy Turlington, for her company Nuala, which makes Buddhism-inspired clothing and is devoted to the creation, through retail, of "symbiosis between the outer and inner being, the individual and collective experience." The bag costs $350 -- serious money for an accessory, but a small price, perhaps, for symbiosis.
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 birdlike -- 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.
