Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo and Her Root Guru
Tenzin Palmo belongs to a small group of Western women who received full ordination as a bhikkhuni, and her name carries weight among women drawn to Buddhist practice. She has said she recognized herself as a Buddhist at eighteen. Two years later she made her way to India, and it was there she found the teacher she considered her root guru: the 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche, a lineage holder in the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Any account of Palmo that skips over this bond misses the center of her story, because she understood the connection as something stretching back across lifetimes.
The 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche came into the world in Tibet in 1931. He was still young when Chinese forces moved in during the Battle of Chamdo. For a time he stayed through the resistance efforts, but the pressure forced him out roughly a year ahead of the 1959 uprising. The years that followed were unsettled, with frequent moves, until he settled in the area around the Dalai Lama's base in McLeod Ganj. He and a group of other monks received 37 acres of land regarded as sacred in Northeast India. They called the place Tashi Jong and raised the Khampagar monastery there, the work shared among monks, lamas, and lay helpers. Statues and paintings the Rinpoche made himself are still part of the site. Over time the community grew into something substantial, with the monastery and the Khampagar Institute, which teaches Buddhist philosophy. More than a hundred monks live there, along with several hundred lay people and a handful of yogis.
Palmo had already taken refuge in Khamtrul Rinpoche before the two ever stood face to face, which happened on her twenty-first birthday. The meeting did not feel like a first meeting to her. She sensed she had known this man for ages. Neither of them treated the recognition as strange. The Rinpoche said he had been keeping her near him across their past lives, and that her rebirth as a Western woman had stretched out the gap before this latest reunion. In earlier lives, as she understood it, she had been a Tibetan man, which she offered as the reason she had felt so out of place in a female body as a child. She has also said she now welcomes the female rebirth, given how much remains unfinished for women within Buddhism.
Living at the monastery, Palmo was the only nun on the grounds. That position put the bias against women in monastic life directly in front of her. Six years of demanding study wore on her, and a mix of frustration and depletion led her to leave. The Rinpoche pointed her toward a monastery in Lahaul, high up in the Indian Himalayas. She continued her studies there and came upon a cave in the mountainside that became her home for twelve years, three of them spent in silent retreat. Over that stretch, Khamtrul Rinpoche kept urging her to found a nunnery. The scale of it felt beyond her, and she held off.
The Rinpoche died in 1980 at forty-nine, his health failing. Palmo was still in her cave during those years and was not able to be with him at the end. Some time after his death and rebirth, the lamas of Khampagar renewed the request that she start a nunnery. This time she kept the weight of the task in mind and began raising money. Construction of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery got underway in 2000.
There were two reincarnations rather than one. Shedrub Nyima, called the 9th Khamtrul Rinpoche, was born in 1980, and Jigme Pema Nyinjadh, also named as a 9th Khamtrul Rinpoche, in 1981. Jigme Pema Nyinjadh holds the seat of the Gyalwang Drukpa, head of the Drukpa lineage. Shedrub Nyima is the one who has stayed connected to Palmo. She met him when he was three, shortly before her three-year silent retreat. The small boy called out "My nun! My nun!" at the sight of her and played with her for hours, which cut against the quiet, meditative way he usually received visitors. Shedrub Nyima now holds the seat at Khampagar and stands as the spiritual head of Palmo's nunnery.
Palmo speaks openly about how hard the loss of her root guru hit her, and about the grief of being absent when he died. She describes him as someone who inspired devotion, and she counts it a gift to still have him near. He is a different person now, more subdued, yet she picks out in him the same familiarity she would know in an old friend. The 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche never saw the nunnery take shape, but his next incarnation has had a hand in building it. The teachings and the closeness carry forward from one life into the next.