Tenzin Palmo has agreed to tell her story only to Vicki Mackenzie. From living as a mendicant of $80 a year, she became a globe-trotting fundraiser.

In 1988 she emerged from the cave determined to build a convent in northern India, and to revive the Togdenma lineage, a long-forgotten female spiritual elite. For twelve years she faced unimaginable cold, wild animals, floods and rockfalls, grew her own food and slept in a traditional wooden meditation box, three feet square-she never lay down. She decided to seclude herself in a remote cave, 12,00 feet up in the Himalayas. She left after six years, set on attaining enlightenment in the body of a woman a totally radical objective. The only woman among hundreds of men, she grew determined to break down the prejudices that had excluded women from the path to enlightenment for thousands of years. After reading a book on Buddhism she realized that this was what she had been seeking and left England for India at the age of twenty.Īfter considerable searching she entered a monastery. Her book Cave in the Snow: a woman's quest for enlightenment was reviewed in Minneapolis City Pages.Dianne Perry led an average childhood in London's East End until, in her teens, she became convinced there must be a spiritual dimension to life of a kind unavailable to her. She was interviewed by the Radio National program The Spirit of Things in 2002 about her book, Why Buddhism? Westerners in Search of Wisdom.

The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi: British Feminist, Indian Nationalist, Buddhist Nun, 2017.Child of Tibet (co-authored with Soname Yangchen), 2006.

Why Buddhism?: Westerners in search of wisdom.Cave in the Snow: a Western woman's quest for enlightenment, 1999, ISBN 1-58234-045-5 (a biography of Tenzin Palmo, also about Freda Bedi).Her books on Buddhism and reincarnation include: Since taking a month-long meditation course in Nepal in 1976, her primary interest has been to make the profundity of Buddhist philosophy accessible to the general public. She went on to write for the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Express, the Mail on Sunday and many national magazines. Later she moved on to London where she worked as a features writer on the Daily Sketch and the Daily Mail. The daughter of a naval officer, she graduated from Queensland University and became a reporter at the Sun newspaper in Sydney. Vicki Mackenzie (born 1947), an author and journalist, was born in England and spent much of her early life in Australia.

Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie