Tenzin Palmo

Ani Tenzin Palmo, a 64-year-old Buddhist nun , is traveling the world to raise funds to build a religious community for women in India.

What is the sound of a Buddhist nun sitting alone for 12 years in a Himalayan cave?

"Quiet," Tenzin Palmo recalled last week.

"Never boring. And very beautiful."

The phone line from Vancouver fell silent for a moment.

"I wasn't planning to do 12 years," she continued. "But it was the ideal place to practice" meditation. "So, I just stayed there."

"There" was a space both tiny and vast . . .

Tenzin Palmo's cave near the Tibetan border was so small she slept sitting up, her legs folded beneath her as in meditation. Beyond lay snowcapped mountains and mist-filled valleys sweeping to infinity.

"It was the perfect environment for carrying on one's spiritual practices," said Palmo, 64, who has since become a leading transmitter of Tibetan Buddhism to the West and a star in some eastern Buddhist countries. . .

When she climbed down from her "perfect environment" in 1988, however, she returned not to a welcoming community of nuns, but of monks. It was no surprise.

Born Diane Perry in London in 1943, Palmo had become a Tibetan Buddhist at age 18 and moved two years later to study in northern India. She soon discovered how few nuns are in the 1,200-year-old Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

"Everything I read in those days was about monks, monks, monks," she recalled with a laugh.

Worse, women who did commit to Tibetan religious life typically found themselves kept uneducated and "waiting on the monks" as cooks and housekeepers.

Perry - who had wanted to be a nun since age 10 "even though I didn't believe in God" - was undeterred.

She shaved her head and took ordination in 1964 - one of the first Western women ever to do so - and later served as assistant to her teacher, before heading to her snow cave in 1976.

But after she returned, she discovered the winds of feminism reaching even the high Himalayas. Her lama, Khamtrul Rinpoche, asked her several years later to create a separate religious community nearby for women. . .

Since then, she has been traveling the world to raise funds for what has become the Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India, which opened the first of its many doors in 2000.

The site, about 40 miles from Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama, houses 52 women, she said, but "we are building for 130."

"She's important because she's absorbed the great teachings of Tibetan Buddhism and communicates them through a Western mind," said Christopher Sohnly, a member of the Shambhala Center's visit committee, which invited Ani Tenzin Palmo to Philadelphia. Her efforts to promote women's religious communities have also made her "a pop star in places like Taiwan," Sohnly said. She was the subject of 1999 biography, Cave in the Snow, by Vickie MacKenzie, and published Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Lessons in Practical Buddhism, in 1999.