My plane was thirty minutes away from Chandigarh and beginning its descent. We were thirty thousand feet above sea level. “Watch the magnificent Himalayan ranges on the right as we descend,” chimed the pilot with a ting tong that precedes and concludes all in-flight announcements.
The mountains almost rose up to greet the plane. Himalaya — the proud child of mother earth who, through tapas, rose to touch the clouds — and became home to innumerable sages, saints, and spiritual masters.
The Himalayas are also home to Sri Badrika Ashram, the abode of the divine Sri Hari and Om Swami. However, today I am not writing about them. The Himalayas houses another equally special place. Its called the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery (DGL). It means Garden of the Authentic Lineage and is located in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh. This nunnery was founded by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, one of the first western women to be initiated into Tibetian tradition.
The Himalayan peaks mean different things to different people. Some see it as a mountain to scale and conquer, while others see it as the sacred landscape that plays a crucial role in many Indian epics. To me, the Himalayas signify freedom. That’s where my Guru found his liberation, and generations of seekers have stayed in its caves to find answers to questions that hound them.
However, Jetsunma Tenzing Palmo’s book made me aware that this privilege has only been afforded to men. We have systematically ensured that 50% of the human race cannot even aspire to be seekers because they have been deemed ineligible. The same mountains and spiritual centers that offer so much solace to me are almost entirely off-limits to women. They can visit them, pray there, or even do short stays, but they could not dare ask for the same knowledge or opportunities afforded to their male counterparts. In this article, I will tell you a brief story of Jetsunma Tenzing Palmo and offer some insights gained from the story.
The Woman with The Iron Will
Jetsunma Tenzing Palmo was born as Diane Perry in 1943. In her initial years, she felt out of place in a girl’s body. Her father died when she was two, and her mother, Lee, was a spiritualist and often held séances at their house. Diane had a vivid memory of her mother commenting that the spirits were not very strong. The next moment, their neighbor, a spirit guide, asked a heavy woman to sit on a massive mahogany table and levitated it, making it do laps of the room while guests dived for safety.
Diane was always interested in eastern tradition and would paint Japanese women with kimonos, and preferred to eat at Chinese restaurants whenever possible. She was constantly looking for her truth and realized she was a Buddhist when she was 18 after reading “The Mind Unshaken” by John Walters.
She read about an expat Englishwoman named Freda Bedi living in India. Freda had opened a school for young reincarnated lamas among the exiled Tibetan community, and after saving up money for a few years, Diane joined her.
At Freda’s house, she saw her guru, the 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche, and immediately recognized him. She requested his permission to be a nun and was ordained as Drubgyu Tenzin Palmo. She was one of the first western women to be ordained a buddhist nun. She faced severe challenges in the monastery. Disgusted with the treatment and the male chauvinism, she swore to achieve liberation in female form and went to the Himalayan valley of Lahaul to practice spirituality more intensely.
While conditions were better in Lahaul, she still did not find the adequate solitude necessary to focus on her inner journey. Hence, she moved to a cave high in the Himalayas and remained there for the next 12 years. She went in when she was 33 and emerged when she was 45. She spent the last three years in complete solitude.
When she reengaged with the world, she saw that while conditions were getting better, women still did not have a place where they could learn and practice the teachings. Nuns were regularly shuffled between monasteries and had no mentors or teachers who could give them the same knowledge afforded to men. With the blessings of her teacher, Khamtrul Rinpoche, she traveled the world, taught courses, and finally had enough money to start Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery (DGL) in Himachal Pradesh.
Here are some key lessons I learned from Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s book.
After Khamtrul Rinpoche ordained her as a nun, she was suddenly the only nun in an all-male bastion. While young monks could spend twenty-five years in the monastery studying logic, consciousness, and philosophy of the void, she lived alone in an old tin shack, bathing under a cold standpipe and relieving herself in a bucket. She learned detachment when she saw that attachment to the same comforts being enjoyed by the monks was causing her grief. She very quickly hit a spiritual glass ceiling present in most organized religions. When men went to monasteries and universities, women lived in small nunneries, were not encouraged to read or write, and practiced simple rituals. That’s why there were no female Dalai Lamas and masters. In Thailand, the women had to shuffle backward on their knees away from any monk. Those with large breasts had to bind them to ensure they did not appear overtly female. The problem precedes Buddhism, and for centuries women had been considered the weaker sex with no rights of their own. They were lesser beings, not capable of enlightenment and their bodies forbade it. They could reach higher stages and be reborn as men to cross the final threshold. Tenzin Palmo was so outraged with the treatment offered to her that one day she asked a senior lama, “What is it about a penis that makes it so crucial to enlightenment’?
Tenzin Palmo was so disgusted by her treatment that she began to read Buddhist scriptures to discover Buddha’s views on this matter. Her research confirmed her suspicions.
“Buddha never denied women could become enlightened. He asked us to meditate on the body as a skeleton of guts, blood, and feces to reduce the attraction to the physical. Nagarjuna and Shantideva, who wrote later, moved the contemplation to a woman’s body and referred to it as impure.”
Once a lama accused Tenzin Palmo of being seductive and causing him difficulty. She was aghast and claimed, “I am doing nothing to you; it’s your mind.” To his credit, he laughed and admitted it was true.
We all come to Om Swami for different reasons. Some want a guru because it provides comfort in life, some because it feels right, and a few because they genuinely want to learn how to escape this cyclical bondage of Samsara. If you belong to the last category, please read on very carefully.
We CANNOT achieve liberation unless you stop seeing the duality that is gender. For centuries men have blamed women for their ability to control their minds, actions, desires, and lust. The only single reason we discriminate against them is that we don’t know how to be around them. We are fine as long as we can slot them into the social roles of daughters, wives, sisters, and aunts, but we cannot deal with women as equals. If you are serious about liberation, nurture the feminine in your life and ensure she has an equal opportunity for liberation. We are immensely lucky to be under the shade of Om Swami — the greatest guru and teacher to have walked this planet. By making the Sadhana App, and Black Lotus App, he has ensured women don’t need to leave their houses to accelerate their spiritual journies. The ashram welcomes everyone equally. It was such a poignant sight today morning when everyone mediated on the Devi after Sri Hari aarti. The hall was packed, and women outnumbered men as they called upon the mother to grace their lives. If you are a woman with a family that does not support you, remember that they don’t need to know about your journey. Chant when you cook, clean the house, shower, or walk. Do Nitya Karma on Sadhana whenever possible, and gradually you will see situations changing around you. We, men, have masted the art of social conditioning and making you believe that your place is in the house. Gradually work on loosening those chains. The divine has no gender, but if you are to assign one, remember you cannot visualize Shiva without Shakti.
One of the most interesting parts of Tenzin Palmo’s book is when she describes a vivid dream. She is in a vast prison of many levels. The people on the topmost levels live in penthouses and enjoy every kind of luxury conceivable, while the beings on the bottom floors are undergoing all types of torture. She realized that everyone, including herself, is a prisoner. The people indulging in reckless luxury are just as imprisoned as those being tortured on the lower floors. She finds a boat and resolves to escape with as many people as possible. She walks all over the prison, trying to convince people to leave with her, but no one wants to escape. They all seem content with their current situation. The inertia of the present moment is far more potent than any urge to escape. Finally, two more people join her in escaping on the boat. While there are prison guards all around, no one stops them. They kept going for miles, but there seemed to be no escape. Every time she wants to give up, she thinks of the two others who trusted her and keeps going. They finally cross over from the prison and enter the suburbs of a town. She knocks on a door, and a woman opens it. She congratulates them on their escape and tells Tenzin that she needs to go back to help people, and the powers will help her. Tenzin woke up at this point.
There is no doubt about the fact that this Samsara is a prison. We wear golden or iron handcuffs depending on our circumstances. We are all chained to the cycle of pleasure and pain. I sometimes looked at my beautiful house and saw it as a golden prison. The lovely view, the comfortable mattress, four-poster bed, and well-stocked kitchen are golden chains. However, under the guidance of Swami, I now see my house like an actor seeing the set of a play. It’s home for the duration of the play. After the play is complete and you have taken the final bow, you must vacate it for the next occupant. This really helps me because I am currently in the ashram, sharing a room with 31 other participants. I am typing this article near the stairs of the meditation hall because the library is closed. The floor is hard, and my bottom is complaining, but I am content. Life is a lot easier when you consider yourself an actor vs. believing that you are the character.
Navaratri is the best time to perform the most beautiful and powerful NavDurga Sadhana to deepen your bond with the divine mother.
