[2] In 1911 he traveled to British Guiana to study insects, and in 1912, he joined the Greek campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the first of the Balkan Wars.
During the First World War, Pallis, initially aided the Salvation Army in the region along the Sava River in Serbia.
During the battle of Cambrai, in a charge that killed his captain and first lieutenant, Pallis was shot through the knee and was forced to retire from combat.
[3] He went on expeditions to the Arctic, Switzerland, and the Dolomites, and Snowdonia, the Peak District, and the Scottish Highlands when closer to home.
Near the village of Nako, at the border with Tibet, Pallis and his team succeeded in making the first ascent of Leo Pargial (22,280 feet).
[5] From Sikkim Pallis had hoped to cross the border into Tibet proper, but due to political circumstances it was impossible to obtain the necessary permissions.
'”[8] Pallis by now saw himself as a "pilgrim" of Tibetan Buddhism and in both Sikkim and Ladakh he received his religious education directly from qualified instructors within the living tradition.
prevented further travels until 1947, when Pallis and Richard Nicholson were able to visit the Tibetan heartland before the coming Chinese invasion.
They traveled widely throughout Tibet's Tsang province, seeking to fulfill their shared desire to "absorb the spirit of the Tradition by direct experience".
[16] While in Kalimpong, Pallis also met with the Dalai Lama's Great Royal Mother, and he developed a close relationship with the abbot of the nearby Tharpa Choling monastery.
He goes on to say that "Mr. Pallis when consenting to write the foreword, devoted many weeks to the work of finally putting the book in order".
[20] Pallis soon discovered a love of early music—in particular chamber music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and for the viola da gamba.
At age eighty-nine his Nocturne de l’Ephemere was performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London; his niece writes that "he was able to go on stage to accept the applause which he did with his customary modesty".
He wrote from the perspective of what has come to be called the traditionalist or perennialist school of comparative religion founded by René Guénon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon, each of whom he knew personally.
He was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion (along with Schuon, Guénon, and Coomaraswamy), writings on both the topics of Tibetan culture and religious practice as well as the Perennialist philosophy.
His first, Peaks and Lamas (1939),[29] mentioned previously, tells the story "of how access was gained, across the varying episodes of Himalayan travel, to a traditional world, still complete and vigorous, that of Buddhism in its Tibetan branch".
[36] Since the publication of his first book, sixty-six years ago, generations of scholars and students have turned to Pallis for insight into Buddhism and Tibet.
Despite such scholarly acclaim, it is also true, as Harry Oldmeadow states, that "Pallis had no interest in research for its own sake, nor in any purely theoretical understanding of doctrine: his work was always attuned to the demands of the spiritual life itself.
[37] Huston Smith expresses a similar judgment when he declares: "Though Pallis respects scholarship, he doesn’t consider himself a Buddhist scholar.