Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo Founder of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery
(this page is not managed by Jetsunma herself)

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo (born 1943) is a bhikṣuṇī in the Drukpa Lineage of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. She is an author, teacher and founder of the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India. She is best known for being one of the very few Western yoginis trained in the East, having spent twelve years living in a remote cave in the Himalayas, three of those years in strict meditation retreat.

Either in formal practice, or in a crowd and in a community, with happy or unhappy circumstances, we should have an equa...
24/08/2026

Either in formal practice, or in a crowd and in a community, with happy or unhappy circumstances, we should have an equanimity within ourselves, so we won’t become downcast when things are wrong or excited when they go well. If one really can meditate on emptiness, on the non substantiality of what happens, it is of course a wonderful antidote… but even without this, we should maintain a kind of balance.

Samsara is like a sea, we need a boat, which is the Dharma, to ferry across to the other shore. A boat floats but is not submerged, we are tossed by the waves of samsara, but we should not be submerged in it.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo: Jetsunma sitting among a crowd of people. Nangchen, 2007

If you go to places which have been for some time associated with something good, a saint or some holy being, and where ...
21/08/2026

If you go to places which have been for some time associated with something good, a saint or some holy being, and where people pray and rejoice, you can feel the atmosphere; it lightens the spirits. That’s why people go on pilgrimage. For example, if you go to Bodhgaya in India, despite all the beggars, the chaos, the dirt and the complete mess of Bodhgaya, when you get into the enclosure of the actual site, it has such vibrancy! It’s a very special place, because many people have been going there for centuries and centuries, meditating and concentrating their minds with devotion. That’s why people like to go there and practise, meditate and circumambulate; they feel recharged.

For some years I lived near Assisi, which is connected with Saint Francis and Santa Chiara. It’s a very commercial place, full of all this religious junk, but despite that it has an incredible atmosphere. So many people I have met subsequently who visited there as part of the tourist track had very profound spiritual experiences. They were so surprised! It wasn’t what they were going there for at all.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo: Jetsunma standing in Vultures Peak - Rajgir, 2023.

19/08/2026

The Dharma gives the techniques and methods to cultivate good qualities.

All "deities" are aspects of our own true nature. They are like a mirror to us. A reflection of who we really are, if on...
17/08/2026

All "deities" are aspects of our own true nature. They are like a mirror to us. A reflection of who we really are, if only we understood it.

If you were doing a particular sadhana, for example say Tara practice, right? Then you're visualising yourself as a deity, you're visualising yourself as Tara. And in your mind you're thinking, "Okay, now I'm me, and I'm going to pretend to be Tara." So you're visualising yourself as Tara. But the fact of the matter is that you are not "you" pretending to be Tara, you are Tara pretending to be "you". And that's the point!

Actually, we are the deity. The deity is a reflection of our innate Buddha nature, but we just don't really recognise it. So by visualising oneself as a deity, reciting the mantra, and so forth, it helps us to reconnect with our true nature which is completely open and spacious and it's not this very limited "me".

Somebody I knew asked a Lama, "Okay, if you tell me to practice Tara, then I will do it wholeheartedly, but first answer me one question, is Tara real? Does Tara really exist?" And the Lama thought, and then he smiled and said, "Tara knows that she does not really exist."

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo: Jetsunma standing in front of a Thangka featuring various aspects of Tara. DGL Nunnery, 2010

Buddhism, despite its own belief, does not have a copyright on ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is just ultimate reali...
14/08/2026

Buddhism, despite its own belief, does not have a copyright on ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is just ultimate reality, and how we realise it... well, different people have different paths. So the names we give to ultimate reality change in accordance with the culture of that place, but they are just labels on space.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Jetsunma & Sister Lucy Kurien from Maher Ashram India - Pune, 2013

12/08/2026

All the kleshas that we have are not intrinsic to the mind. They're called "adventitious" which means they're not part of the mind.

It would be good to recognise that we are not our thoughts and feelings. We normally identify with them, and this causes...
10/08/2026

It would be good to recognise that we are not our thoughts and feelings. We normally identify with them, and this causes a lot of our problems. We think this is me: I am angry. I am this. I am that. But actually speaking, behind all that, something else much more profound is going on. So don't worry.

A good part of impermanence is that things do pass. It's not always the same. Let these thoughts and feelings arise, recognise them, and just let them pass. Don't identify with them. Don't grasp at these thoughts and feelings as something more real. They are just thoughts and feelings. They are just black clouds. They are not the sky.

- Jetsuna Tenzin Palmo

Photo: An old photo of a younger Jetsunma

We can abstain from doing a lot of things quietly, without making a big issue of it. When I was in Italy, I got sick an...
07/08/2026

We can abstain from doing a lot of things quietly, without making a big issue of it. When I was in Italy, I got sick and I was in hospital. It was a big hospital in Perugia. I explained that I was vegetarian and they all looked at me like I was from Mars. Then, the chief cook turned up, and he asked, "Why are you a vegetarian" My Italian not being good, I said the simplest thing I could think of. I quoted George Bernard Shaw and said, "Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends." After that the cook made delicious vegetarian food for me. The whole ward was full of envy! The point is, I didn’t need to give him a whole lecture on the evils of eating meat. It doesn’t mean he became a vegetarian, but maybe he went away and thought about it. And nobody was offended.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo: Australia, 2008

05/08/2026

It doesn't depend on any particular belief system.

When the mind has moments of great lucidity and stillness, we turn the attention onto the thoughts themselves and start ...
03/08/2026

When the mind has moments of great lucidity and stillness, we turn the attention onto the thoughts themselves and start to bring back thinking, in the sense of this probing, this investigation, this curiosity about the mind itself.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo: New Delhi, India - 2023

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Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery
Palampur
176081

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