Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo: The Cave
In 1976, Tenzin Palmo climbed into a cave high in the Himalayas and made it her home. The space measured roughly ten feet across and six feet deep, carved into a mountain above 10,000 feet in the Lahul region, close to a monastery where she had been living. Winters there could drop to thirty below zero Fahrenheit, with snow smothering the land for months. A Western woman pushing far past what anyone expected of a Buddhist nun, she stayed in that cave for twelve years, keeping pace with the most committed Tibetan yogis.
People tend to react to those twelve years with a mix of bewilderment and amazement, and the first word out of their mouths is usually: why? Part of the answer lies in what came before. At her root guru's monastery, Palmo had been the lone nun surrounded by dozens of monks. They treated her with respect, yet she felt set apart because of her sex, and that distance held back the practice she was reaching for. So she left for Lahaul. The monastery there eased some of the loneliness, but not enough.
When she learned of a cave nearby, she knew at once she wanted it. The locals pushed back with the same warnings women so often hear: men would come and rape her, ghosts haunted the place, the cold would kill her. No one, of course, ever raised such objections to a male yogi chasing the same solitude. She brought the question to her guru, Khamtrul Rinpoche. His response was practical. If the cave stayed reasonably dry and faced south, he told her, she would manage. That settled it, and she went.
She set up an altar, built a wall to hold back the winter cold, and dug out a small store room. She was thirty-three, cut off from the world below, and by her own account deeply happy there. Her days ran on a fixed rhythm: four meditation sessions of three hours each, carried out inside a traditional wooden meditation box. At night she slept sitting upright in that same box, three hours only, as the practice required. A garden outside gave her turnips and potatoes, mostly. Now and then she walked down to the monastery for teachings, visited her guru, picked up supplies, and readied herself for the long shut-in winters. Nine years passed this way before she felt prepared for something harder: a strict three-year retreat in total seclusion.
Those three years passed in near-complete calm. Afterward she said she found it remarkable that claustrophobia never touched her. One blizzard ran for over a week and sealed her into darkness, the snow packing the entrance so solidly that digging free took hours. That happened more than once. She came out of the retreat steadier and far more resourceful than she had gone in.
The ending arrived without warning. Near the close of the three years, a presence at her entrance startled her. It was a police officer, there to tell her she had been living in the country illegally for the whole stretch. She had twenty-four hours to leave the cave or face consequences. That abrupt knock closed out her twelve years underground, three of them in full isolation. She traveled to Italy and began raising money for a nunnery that would open twelve years down the road.
Palmo left the cave in 1988. In 1999, Vicki Mackenzie published Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo's Quest for Enlightenment. Palmo never really sat down to read the account of her own life, but she holds Mackenzie in high regard as a writer. Had she told the story herself, she has said, it would have come out deadly dull; Mackenzie made it both truthful and gripping. The book reached well beyond Buddhist readers, drawing in people who knew nothing about the religion, and it turned a great deal of attention toward Palmo and the example she set. In 2002, a year after her nunnery opened, the book became a documentary carrying the same name.
Like the Buddha, who felt little pull toward teaching after his enlightenment, Palmo takes no particular pleasure in instructing others and hopes to go back into retreat someday. Yet when she emerged from the cave, she was ready at last to take up the work of lifting women within Buddhism, and she has stayed with that cause ever since. She pushes past the limits her tradition has set for women, and she insists she will keep doing so, as a woman, through every rebirth still ahead of her.