Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
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, dreadlocked and dressed in tattered white skirts, live in caves and meditate for years at a time (and upon whom Palmo modeled 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.
