TENZIN PALMO

CAVE IN THE SNOW:
TENZIM PALMO’S QUEST FOR ENLIGHTENMENT.
By Vicki MacKenzie. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998.

“ I like to sit and meditate.
There is nothing else that I like to do.”

Tenzin Palmo, née Diane Perry, tells her story of dedication and discipline through the writing of Vicki MacKenzie. A young and frisky Chogyam Trungpa was her first meditation teacher during his early days in England as she searched for the path and its beginning. After saving arduously, Tenzin Palmo had the 90 Pounds that were required for a passage to India. While quite indirect, and on nothing more than a banana boat, Tenzin reached the Indian subcontinent and found her guru, Khamtrul Rinpoche. Completely devoted to him, Tenzin was kept from receiving the teachings that were routinely offered men. Ordained as a nun, the situation did not improve. The book in fact outlines her struggles as a woman within yet another strongly traditional maschilist culture. However, while she had always felt a sort of discomfort as a woman she found in that discomfort the root of her practice. Tenzin Palmo’s bodhisattva vow not only promised to continually return into other lifetimes for the benefit of other sentient beings, but it included the vow that she would do so as a female.

What enabled Tenzin Palmo to fully assume and utilize her position as doubly foreign was her eventual long retreat in the “cave in the snow” that would be her home for a number of years of solitary retreat. And, even though this retreat was interrupted abruptly by bureaucratic interference (the announcement of an expired visa), Tenzin took it as yet another auspicious moment to test her practice. The cave brought her a more intense contemplation of the women who had preceded her in the quest for and along the path. When she left the cave, short of her intended retreat period, she did so in the company of the dakinis and female bodhisattvas, the women of wisdom who laboured to bring love and equanimity into the world. A-Yu Khadro, the Kwan Yin and, finally, Tibet’s own protector, Tara all kept Tenzin company. But it was Yeshe Tsogyel who was to inspire her much more fully and emphasize Tenzin Palmo’s vow to be reborn as a woman in her future lives. Tenzin’s return to the outside s world was achieved through a friend’s invitation to Assisi, home of the bodhisattva St. Francis. There she began to teach meditation, and there her vision for establishing a center for women took shape.

All in all, this is a book about the arduous parallel path presented to women even in Buddhist practice. Though perhaps not as difficult today in the West, the notion of womanhood as rebirth within a lesser realm persists enough for Tenzin Palmo’s experience to be of extreme value.