Reflections on a Mountain Lake: Teachings on Practical Buddhism
Tashi Jong (Himachal Pradesh) · 2002
J
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
1943 CE · Modern · London
b. 1943 CE (living)
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo (born Diane Perry, 1943) is a British-born nun of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and a prominent advocate for women's practice and full ordination. Among the first Western women to take ordination in the Tibetan tradition, she spent twelve years in Himalayan retreat—three of them in strict solitary practice in a remote cave—an account popularized in Vicki Mackenzie's 'Cave in the Snow.' She later founded Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in northern India to give women rigorous training, and is known for her vow to pursue awakening in female form. As a living person she is presented aniconically. She is well documented.
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Stop 1 of 3Born
LondonלונדוןEngland
What they did here
Born Diane Perry in England; travelled to India in 1964 and became one of the first Western women ordained in the Tibetan tradition.
London in this era
Victorian and Edwardian London transformed into a major center of modern Jewish life as the nineteenth century progressed. After Jewish emancipation in 1858, the Anglo-Jewish community—long established but circumscribed—flourished into one of Europe's most influential Jewish populations, with thriving synagogues, schools, and charitable institutions spreading across the East End and westward into more affluent neighborhoods. The era witnessed intense intellectual ferment: debates over Jewish modernity, the Enlightenment's challenge to tradition, and emerging Zionist thought animated London's salons and study halls. The Great Synagogue on Duke's Place and later the Portuguese Synagogue became focal points not merely of prayer but of communal identity. In the twentieth century, London endured the shadow of the Holocaust while becoming a refuge for scholars and rabbis fleeing Europe—a city where traditional learning coexisted with progressive theology. Lord Jonathan Sacks's tenure as Chief Rabbi from 1991 onward epitomized this dual inheritance: a place where rigorous Jewish scholarship met sophisticated engagement with secular culture, and where the memory of destroyed worlds mingled with hope for Jewish continuity in the West.
About London
London, on the Thames in south-east England, is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. Founded by the Romans as Londinium, it has had a bishop since 604 and is the seat of St Paul's Cathedral. Jews settled there after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and were expelled from England in 1290; a small Sephardi community was allowed to remain from 1656, and London became the centre of British Jewish life. The Royal Society, founded there in 1660, made it a hub of science, and by the nineteenth century it was the world's largest city. In the twentieth century it gained institutions such as the Buddhist Society (1924) and the London Central Mosque (1977).
In London at the same time
Across the traditions, in London at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.