Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo: A Brief Biography
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo ranks among the first Western women ever ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun, and she now holds seniority over all the others, having kept her vows for more than fifty-one years. She teaches, she writes, she has given long stretches of her life to strict retreat, and she opened a nunnery of her own. She argues for women's place in Buddhism without following the usual script for how that argument is supposed to go. Her devotion runs toward the dharma and toward the other nuns who share her path.
She was born Diane Perry in Hertfordshire, England, on June 30, 1943, and grew up in London. From a young age she carried a persistent sense that something was off, that she had landed in the wrong place and even the wrong body, and she wanted out of the city early. Her mother, a widow in frail health, kept a cheerful temperament and a spiritual life. Séances happened at the house most weeks, which gave the young Perry an early comfort with ideas outside the ordinary. The family was warm. She found work she liked as a librarian and read her way through one religion after another without ever feeling she belonged to any of them.
The turning came at eighteen. Stuck in an airport with her mother, she had only one book on hand, and it happened to be about Buddhism. She got halfway through and announced she was a Buddhist. Her mother said how nice. A few years on she mentioned she intended to leave for India to find a Buddhist teacher, and her mother, far from objecting, simply asked when she planned to go. Someone living a spiritual life herself, the mother took it for granted that her daughter would walk her own road. Perry wrote to Freda Bedi, a Western woman teaching English to Tibetan refugees in India, and Bedi wrote back with one instruction: come. At twenty she moved there to teach at the Young Lamas Home School, and by her twenty-first birthday she had met the 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche, who became her root guru.
She took ordination in the Vajrayana tradition in 1964 and received the name Drubgyu Tenzin Palmo, which translates roughly as Glorious Lady Who Upholds the Doctrine of the Practice Succession. She began as a novice. Full bhiksuni ordination came later, in 1973. For six years she lived at Khamtrul Rinpoche's monastery as the only nun among roughly a hundred monks. None of them troubled her. They did tell her, gently, that being female was not really her fault, and they would pray for her to be reborn male so the practice might come more easily. On her guru's advice she eventually left and went up into the mountains of Lahaul.
The monastery suited her, but she wanted to be alone. She learned of a cave in the area and set her mind on retreating there. People warned her off, predicting she would be raped or freeze. She talked it over with her guru, came away steadied, and at thirty-three she moved in.
The cave kept her for nine years. She would return to the monastery for teachings and to carry back food and supplies, then go back to the quiet. Toward the end she chose full seclusion for a long retreat. When it finished she discovered her visa had lapsed and she was in the country illegally. The year was 1988. She relocated to Italy and threw herself into the campaign for equal standing for Buddhist nuns.
Her guru had asked her for years to found a nunnery, so she traveled and raised money until she could. The Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery opened in 2000, taking in women from Tibet and the Himalayan border country and giving them education and training. One of her aims is to revive the lost lineage of the togdenmas there. She sits on the Committee of Western Bhikshunis, which works toward establishing bhikshuni ordination within the Tibetan traditions, and in 2008 she received the title Jetsunma, reverend lady, for her work on behalf of women in Buddhism.
Across the world, people honor Tenzin Palmo for what she has done for women within Tibetan Buddhism. She has vowed to reach enlightenment in a female body, however many lifetimes that demands. Twelve years spent in a cave put her alongside the most committed yogis and pushed past what had been thought possible for a woman in this tradition. She keeps changing monks' minds a day at a time, and the nunnery she built keeps opening doors for other women. Tenzin Palmo is a revolutionary bodhisattva. - Kate Mattes