Enjoy highlights from our Faith & Moral Courage event series: read the conversation between Sister Lucy Kurien and Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. To watch the full event and discover more content from Faith & Moral Courage event series, subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
When I was very young I believed that we were inherently perfect and that we had to come back again and again to discover our innate perfection. My questions were, how does one become perfect and what is perfection? I would ask my teachers, the priests and anybody I thought might know.
What is perfection? Everybody said, well, you have to be good. Some people added, you have to be kind. Even at a small age I thought, no, that’s not it. Yes, of course we have to be good. Of course we have to be kind. But I know lots of people who are good and kind, but they are not perfect. What is this quality within us that we need to rediscover, that we have forgotten and that we don’t know, but it’s our true nature? So then I was trying all sorts of religions, but I had never really believed in the idea of a creator God. I didn’t believe there was someone out there judging us and pulling the strings behind the scenes and so forth. So most orthodox religions were not of much interest.
So I thought, I have to find a path for myself. Then when I was 18, I was working in a library and somebody left a book called The Mind Unshaken. I loved the title. As I read it, I just knew this was it. I said to my mother, I’m a Buddhist. And she said, oh, are you, dear? Well, that’s nice. Finish reading the book, then you tell me all about it.
It was like discovering what I had already known. I renounced because it said you had to renounce. I gave up Elvis Presley and all my clothes and boyfriends and everything and was very renounced. But I never read anywhere about nuns, I only read about monks. However, after a while I recognised that my connection was with Tibetan Buddhism and I realised I needed to find a teacher.
So when I was 20, I went to India to find my teacher. I worked in the school for young incarnate lamas. At one time I was the secretary for the person running the school. There was a letter asking for us to sell some Tibetan homemade paper and it was signed Dr Rinpoche. As I read that name, just spontaneously, faith arose. So I asked Frida, who is Dr Rinpoche? And she said, he’s a very high kaji lama.
To cut a long story short, on my 21st birthday I met with Dr Rinpoche. Three weeks later I became a nun. I went to work with him as his secretary and teaching English. The problem in those days was that there really wasn’t anything happening for nuns. Nuns were not educated and they were very neglected and overlooked. In general there really were almost no nuns at all and all the emphasis was on creating new monasteries. So I worked for my lama for about six years. Then he said, now it’s time you go away and practice.
He told me to go to the Himalayan valley of Lahaul, which is at about 11,000ft. I went to Lahaul and I stayed in the monastery there for about six years, which was lovely. I loved the monks and nuns there, but in the end it was a bit too social. I wasn’t there to socialise, I was there to do a retreat. Then I heard about a cave further up the mountain and when I went there and people thought it was tremendously courageous. It wasn’t courageous at all and instead I was just so happy to find somewhere to be isolated. Five months of the year, it was snowing so nobody could ever come. I was just incredibly grateful. Every year I would go back to Tashi Jong, where my llama now was to see him and to seek his advice and then I would return to Lahaul. The last three years I stayed in a long term retreat and didn’t come out.
Then in the late 1980s, for whatever reason, I was thrown out of India due to a visa situation. I went to Italy to stay with some good friends there. I had been in India for 24 years and I needed to reconnect with Western culture. After staying in the hills behind Assisi, I felt I then needed to go back to India. The lamas said, look, we have nothing for nuns, so why don’t you start a nunnery? I had no money, I wasn’t Tibetan and I wasn’t a llama. I wasn’t anybody. I had no idea how to do it, except that I knew this needed to be done. I had a scroll painting of the Buddha, Tara, who represents fearlessness, compassion and immediate action. So I said to Tara, okay lady, if you want a nunnery, you do it. I have no idea, but I will be the front person. I felt if it was going to happen and the divine energy would carry it along, and it did.
Now we have a nunnery of about 115 nuns. The most important change for Buddhist nuns is that nowadays they receive education and are very independent. In order to raise interest in nuns, we had to travel the world giving talks on meditation and on basic Buddhist principles. That has been a wonderful insight into how all over the world, essentially, people are just people and most of them have good hearts.
Sister Lucy
It is such an honor to know Jetsuma. Sometimes I ask myself, how can she be like this? So simple, grounded at the same time, so joyful and full of divine energy around her. She has remained someone whom I really admire.
Jetsunma
If people sometimes say, who inspires you? I would say the one person who really inspires me in my life is Sister Lucy. Even though dealing with hardship and the awful things that she’s hearing about day after day and the difficulties she has with dealing with officials, she just radiates joy. That’s why people believe her and that’s why people help her and that’s why she has done so much to inspire people to reach out and help others. Sister Lucy always has a phone listening to people who are again calling out and are destitute and needy. Her staff say no, there’s no room. Sister Lucy always says, we will make room and she never turns anyone away.
I would say faith and courage is exemplified in what Sister Lucy is doing and what she inspires in others. She started all these homes. They are run by all these other people that she has inspired with her example and vision. This is the point that she is able to ignite that flame in others and not just only keeping it to herself.
We all innately do have courage and faith, but it sometimes needs to be revealed because it’s covered up by people’s anxieties and worries. We don’t believe in our own inner potential or our own innate wisdom and compassion, which is there waiting to be discovered. The fact that Sister Lucy herself embodies this, but is also able to inspire others, is what makes her so special.
Sister Lucy
When I started Maher as an interfaith organisation, it was not very easy to get the support from the Catholic Church. They asked me, does canon law allow this? I said to myself, I don’t know anything about the canon law because I’m not educated in that. I just know what the human law tells me and that is to love everyone. Jesus taught us to love one another. I never had an experience where Jesus said anything rather than that.
It was very difficult for the church to accept me. I knew I’d be rejected by the people, by the church, and I would be questioned. I was fearful that I would not have any people with me. But then I noticed that if I gave up the small nunnery community, I could embrace the whole world. But to tell you the truth, I did not lose anyone. In fact, I gained everybody. Slowly, slowly they understood me and I am well accepted.
Jetsunma
I think that one gains courage by believing that there is something which needs to be done which you’re going to do. Whether you want to do it or not is irrelevant. There’s an inner certainty that this is the right way to go and the right thing to do. It might look like courage to other people, but to you it’s just a certainty. My certainty was that we needed to help these young women who wish to be nuns in the Himalayan tradition who are being so overlooked and neglected, and nobody is noticing how bright, intelligent, focused and devoted they actually are. Not just myself, but many others also recognised that there was really a big lack in the Buddhist world, and especially in the Tibetan Buddhist world, of the feminine. There was such a lack of appreciation for the feminine. They needed a big boost up, both from the point of view of their studies and their actual practice. So one goes ahead. It’s not a matter of courage, it’s just of conviction that this is what has to be done. Nobody else was doing it.
This content is a segment of an extensive event series exploring what faith and moral courage look like in an age of polycrisis. Where does extraordinary courage come from? What can we learn from people who’ve risked everything to live up to their values? What forms of courage are especially needed in our age of unravelling, uncertainty and risk? How can we inspire ourselves and each other to grow our capacity to brave our limits? Are there insights from the world’s spiritual and faith traditions that can help us grow our courage?