page_title: Freda Bedi
section_title: Life in India
hierarchical_section_title: Freda Bedi / Life in India
caption_attribution_description: English: Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, 16th Karmapa with Pope Paul VI
context_page_description: Freda Bedi, also known as Sister Palmo or Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo, was a British woman who was jailed in India as a supporter of Indian nationalism and was the first Western woman to take full ordination in Tibetan Buddhism.
context_section_description: After a year in Berlin where B.P.L. Bedi was studying - and where their first child, Ranga,  was born - Freda, her husband and baby son sailed to India in 1934. She worked as a journalist and taught English at a women's college in Lahore, and with her husband published a high quality quarterly review "Contemporary India". They also later published a weekly political paper, "Monday Morning".  Freda regularly contributed articles to Lahore's main nationalist daily, The Tribune. Both she and her husband were leftists and campaigning nationalists active in India's independence movement.  The couple's second child, Tilak, died when less than a year old. The family lived in an encampment of huts, without power or running water, outside Model Town in Lahore. 
  "Baba" Bedi spent about fifteen months in a prison camp at Deoli in the early stages of World War Two because as a communist he was seeking to disrupt recruitment of Punjabis into the British Indian army. Freda herself was jailed for three months in 1941 as a satyagrahi after deliberately defying the wartime regulations as part of a civil disobedience campaign spearheaded by Mohandas K. Gandhi After independence in 1947, Bedi and her family moved to Kashmir, where husband and wife were influential supporters of Sheikh Abdullah, the left-wing Kashmiri nationalist leader. She joined a  women's militia for a while and taught English at a newly established women's college in Srinagar in Kashmir. Later in Delhi, she became editor of the magazine "Social Welfare" of the Ministry of Welfare. 
  Freda Bedi briefly served as a member of the United Nations Social Services Planning Commission to Burma, during which she was first exposed to Buddhism, which quickly became the defining aspect of her life. In Rangoon she learned vipassana from Mahasi Sayadaw, and Sayadaw U Titthila.
   In Delhi, she became a prominent Buddhist and in 1956, when the 14th Dalai Lama made his first visit to India, she showed him around Buddhist shrines in Delhi.
  In 1959, when the Dalai Lama arrived in India after an arduous trek across the Himalayas followed by thousands of his Tibetan devotees, she was asked by India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to help them and spent time improving facilities for refugees at camps in Assam and West Bengal. She became an observant Tibetan Buddhist and she followed the guidance of the 16th Karmapa of the Kagyu School. She worked, with the support of the Dalai Lama, to establish the Young Lamas Home School. Bedi initially set up the Young Lama's School in Delhi but after a short period it was moved to Dalhousie. The school trained young Tibetan lamas and monks in languages and social sciences as well as religion, to equip the coming generation of Tibetan spiritual leaders for life in exile. A number of Bedi's pupils became well-known teachers, including Chogyam Trungpa, Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, Akong Rinpoche, Tulku Pema Tenzin, Gelek Rimpoche, Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche, and the sons of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Chokyi Nyima and Chokling of Tsikey). In 1963, with Lama Karma Thinley Rinpoche and under the guidance of the Karmapa, she founded the Karma Drubgyu Thargay Ling nunnery for Tibetan women, now located in Tilokpur, Kangra Valley.
  While running the Young Lamas Home School at Dalhousie in north India, Bedi also spent time at Rumtek in Sikkim, the seat of the Karmapa in exile. In 1966, she took sramaneri ordination by the Karmapa and was given the name Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo. She was one of the first Western women to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. In 1972, she took full bhikshuni ordination in Hong Kong - the first western woman to do so, and according to the scholar Hanna Havnevik possibly the first woman in the Tibetan tradition ever to receive this higher ordination. She accompanied the Karmapa on his first visit to the West in 1974, a landmark five-month tour across North America and Europe. Although not fluent in Tibetan, she helped to translate prayers and religious texts into English.She is credited for bringing Tibetian Buddhism to the West.
  Bedi died in N
caption: Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, 16th Karmapa with Pope Paul VI and Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo (third from the right of the Pope) at the Vatican on 17 January 1975
exif: {}