SISTER PALMO

by Sheila Fugard

My meeting with Sister Palmo was in 1972 in Cape Town, South Africa. She had come to us from India as the first Buddhist teacher to visit Africa. Her arrival was auspicious for a continent that now seemed plunged into darkness.

I was, at that meeting, someone whose life was in a way reduced, stale and perhaps meaningless despite having spent some six years studying various forms of meditation. What Sister Palmo  spoke to me about was all this, but rather through the life of the Buddha than my own personality. I recognised samsara, the bodhisattva way, and that Refuge brought about a rebirth. The clarity of my experience was like seeing the sword of Manjusri held within the all encompassing  compassion of the Green Tara.

Sister Palmo seemed in Africa to be possessed of a great truth that worked not simply as a palliative to suffering, but a valid form of life, with enlightenment at its source, always present in the constant play of Dharma.

Chance brought me to England the following year. I again met Sister Palmo in the autumn at Samye Ling, the Tibetan meditation centre in Scotland. The centre seemed remote. The winds and rains of the coming winter were settling in. Forces of nature that were conducive to meditation.

Sister Palmo’s understanding of my ignorance was total. I lived through it. I survived in a clean way like a knife that has been miraculously sharpened to some small measure of self knowledge. Sister Palmo invited me to join her on a journey through Scotland. Trains and their slow prowess across a wintry landscape were relieved by gentle conversation.

It was some time before I recognised the woman that was Sister Palmo. The many aspects that made up my teacher . . . the young woman at Oxford, influenced by visits of Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi . . . her marriage as a student to the son of the renowned Indian Bedi family, direct descendants of Guru Nanak.

A period of political involvement in the Gandhi movement followed. Already the compassionate

activity of the bodhisattva gave to her actions an honesty far beyond the demands of politics.

A visit to Burma in 1953, as a member of a United Nations Mission, saw the great opening of the Dharma, through her Burmese gurus. This lightning flash of conversion was followed by Refuge and precepts. In 1959 with the invasion of Tibet, and the influx of Tibetan Lamas into India, came her encounter with His Holiness Karmapa, an ultimate experience. Becoming the personal pupil of Karmapa, himself possessing the activity of a living Avalokiteshvara, was a profound commitment to the beauty and life affirming path of Dharma that lead her to take the ordination of a Buddhist nun in 1966.

In lay life, Sister Palmo’s design for the preservation of Tibetan Buddhism in the early sixties is a monument to the teachings propagated in the West today. She gave practical assistance through the founding of the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie, to Lamas in exile.

She took into her home, the young Trungpa Rinpoche. Sister Palmo must have helped shape that vision and foreseen the dynamic role he would assume in transmitting Dharma to young America.

Sister Palmo’s concern that Tibetan Buddhism be not lost at that perilous time after the fall of Tibet is hard to appreciate in the late seventies when the teachings are so firmly rooted in the West.

An occasion brought me to America in 1974. It was the time of the first visit of His Holiness Karmapa to the West. San Francisco basked in a heat wave. The Crown Ceremony at Fort Mason was all pageantry of a monarch bestowing a great blessing. The power of His Holiness to awaken the slumbering Buddha in all, was great.

My memory of those extraordinary days was of receiving the precepts from His Holiness, together with a small group of Americans. Dharma had led me from an alien shore in Africa to this shrine room at the Nyingma Institute. The shrine room itself was ablaze. Light from thangkas. Flowers spoke. Candles showered. His Holiness seemed not only to fill all space, but also my mind. Sister Palmo was very much part of this Mandala, echoing the presence of His Holiness, as a still reflection.

In May, 1976, I flew from London on another of the many journeys that have taken me to Sister Palmo.  I needed to turn my back on Africa with its conflagrations of apartheid, the aftermath of the Angolan war, and the tensions prior to the Soweto riots.

At Karma Tengay Ling, in San Mateo, I again found Sister Palmo. My vision was beyond the deceptions of the self, or the woman I had travelled with in Scotland. Rather, I was aware of the great wisdom. I saw the radiance of the mother energies, and the subtle power of the yogi. I was to see through her eyes The Dharma on the Enlightenment Day of the Buddha, when Sister Palmo gave the Seven Precepts to be kept for that day only. The Precepts were no longer rules but simply the natural way to be. The thought of enlightenment, as it arose for the Sakyamuni Buddha, was of itself the natural order of things. As sunlight, or the tide relentlessly coming in. In the evening, I meditated in the Shrine Room, where Zen students were chanting the mantra of the Buddha.

Teacher, guru, Kalyanamitra, are all words. The understanding between guru and pupil is wordless. Guru and pupil are in a way one. The consistency of the teacher endeavours to transform the pupil into the same vajra substance. Nothing exists that the teacher has not already experienced. For the pupil, as the horizon widens, the reference to experience is unitive with the teacher.

Sister Palmo as a woman teacher, brings in elements of the Great Mothers which makes the journey into the diamond quality of Dharma a unique blessing.

Sheila Fugard — Publisher—Editor of MAITRI, for the Karma Rigdol Centres, founded in 1972 by Ven Gelongma (Sister) K.K.Palmo, under the direction of His Holiness Gyalwa Karmapa, the 16th. For subscriptions to this beautiful small magazine, write: P.O.Box 5090, Walmer 6065, Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

Sheila Fugard kindly gave Karma Rigdol Publications permission to reprint this fine article.