Tenzin Palmo: 12 Years in a Cave & a Fight for Nuns

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-26

Tenzin Palmo is one of the most remarkable figures in modern Buddhism: a London shop-worker’s daughter who became a Tibetan Buddhist nun, spent some twelve years meditating in a cave in the Himalayas, and then came down the mountain to fight for the women who would come after her. Her life joins deep practice to public advocacy, and it belongs squarely in the story of women in Buddhism.

From London to the Himalayas

She was born Diane Perry in London in 1943, and felt drawn to Buddhism as a young woman, before it was at all common in the West. At twenty she travelled to India, and in 1964 she was ordained — one of the very first Western women to take ordination in the Tibetan tradition. She became a student of the eighth Khamtrul Rinpoche in the Drukpa Kagyu lineage, and took the name Tenzin Palmo.

For years she trained, often as the only nun among monks — an experience that gave her a first-hand education in exactly the obstacles women faced, and would later drive her work.

Twelve years in a cave

In 1976, seeking the conditions for sustained deep practice, Tenzin Palmo withdrew to a cave high in the Lahaul valley of the Indian Himalayas, around 13,000 feet up. She would remain there for some twelve years, the final three in strict, sealed solitary retreat. She endured ferocious winters and avalanches, slept sitting up in a traditional meditation box, grew vegetables in the brief summers, and gave herself to many hours of meditation a day.

The story of those years, told in Vicki Mackenzie’s widely read biography Cave in the Snow, made Tenzin Palmo something of a legend — a living demonstration that the most rigorous contemplative path was open to a Western woman who would simply do the work.

The nunnery and the cause of ordination

When she emerged, Tenzin Palmo did not retreat into private accomplishment. She founded Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, which opened in 2000, to give Himalayan women the kind of serious training long reserved for monks — including reviving the togden-ma, the female version of the realized yogi-practitioners of her lineage.

Alongside the nunnery she became one of Buddhism’s most candid public voices on the position of women — speaking plainly about the institutional barriers nuns face and supporting the movement to restore full bhikkhunī ordination. She is said to have vowed to attain enlightenment in female form, however many lifetimes it takes. In recognition of her work and attainment, she was given the title Jetsunma (“Venerable Lady”) in 2008.

What she teaches

Tenzin Palmo’s public teaching is as plain and bracing as her life. She speaks of the necessity of real determination — that genuine practice asks everything of us, not a comfortable hour now and then — and of how precious the rare opportunity to practise at all is. She is unsentimental about the obstacles women have faced in Buddhist institutions, and equally clear-eyed that they are obstacles of circumstance and structure, not of spiritual capacity. Asked about her own aspiration, she is widely reported to have said she intends to attain enlightenment in a female body, however many lifetimes it takes. It is of a piece with everything else about her: a quiet refusal to accept that the heights are not meant for women — expressed not as a complaint but as a life lived all the way to its edges.

Tenzin Palmo’s life answers a quiet question with a loud example: what can a woman accomplish on the Buddhist path, given the chance and the determination? Her answer is — everything. (For her tradition, see Tibetan Buddhism; for a contemporary in the Theravāda world, the lay master Dīpā Ma; for the wider story, women in Buddhism. Unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)