Ayya Khema: Dharma Adventurer

 

08.19.2022 AYYA KHEMA: DHARMA ADVENTURER With a new book of her teachings out, the 25th anniversary of her passing coming this November, and what would be her 100th birthday next year, it’s a fine time to become familiar (or refamiliarize yourself) with the teachings of Ayya Khema — a modern Buddhist pioneer for certain, and an incredibly gifted teacher of the dharma. The new book in question is The Path to Peace: A Buddhist Guide to Cultivating Loving-kindness, which brings together Ayya Khema’s teachings on the Metta Sutta (which lays out the why and how of cultivating metta, or loving-kindness) with her unique metta visualization practices. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the book’s editor, Leigh Brasington, and he laid out the facts of what he termed her “adventure-filled life.” And adventure-filled it was! Here are just a handful of biographical notes about Ayya Khema: Born in 1923 (nee Ilse Kussel), she would become a German Jewish Theravada Buddhist nun—and as Brasington put it, “perhaps the first fully ordained Theravada nun in a thousand years” Was 10 years old when Hitler came to power, and sent out on the last kinder transport, of Jewish children out of Germany In 1941, was a passenger on a Japanese freighter from Scotland to Shanghai, where her parents had escaped In the 60’s, with her husband at the time, drove from Pakistan to London in a Land Rover—and, later, from London to India! Founded Wat Buddha Dhamma forest monastery in New South Wales, where she installed Venerable Khantipalo as abbot Helped to organize the first International Conference on Buddhist Women in 1987, which would lead to the foundation of the Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women Again, that’s just for starts. And just as impressive as the facts of her life are her teachings. Though English was not her first language, Ayya Khema was known for the incredible clarity of her dharma teachings, which were almost palpably frank and helpful, leading us to consider all the ways we might cultivate not just loving-kindness, but also the other three of Buddhism’s brahmaviharas or “divine abodes” (compassion, sympathetic joy, and empathy), honesty in our practice, and the jhanas, states of meditative absorption that, ideally, beget more positive meditative experiences. For all she’s done to support individuals’ meditation practices and to elevate the stature of women in the dharma and in the world, we owe Ayya Khema a debt of our gratitude and attention. Though she is not here with us today, we can still dive into and take up her beautiful teachings. May this Weekend Reader help you in your diving, refreshing and enlivening your relationship to your practice, your heart, and your mind. —Rod Meade Sperry, digital editorial director, Lion’s Roar

Buddhist nun Ayya Khema was a force of nature — and of unconditional love Lion’s Roar’s Rod Meade Sperry talks to Leigh Brasington about a new posthumous release from the pioneering Buddhist nun Ayya Khema, The Path to Peace: A Buddhist Guide to Cultivating Loving-kindness. Leigh Brasington: She was brilliant. And so amazingly clear. Anyone you talked to about her, one of the first things they’re gonna tell you about her was her clarity and how she could really express these very deep ideas in a way that was so highly accessible. She died in 1997. And so November will be the 25th anniversary of her death, but she’s still publishing material because she was that brilliant a teacher.

The Four Highest Emotions Ayya Khema on cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. True love exists when the heart is so broadly trained that it can embrace all human beings and all living creatures. This requires a learning process that is sometimes hard, above all when someone turns out to be very unfriendly or unpleasant. But this condition can be reached by everyone, because we all have the capacity for love within us.

“Facing the Mirror” What we perceive as the faults of others are simply a reflection of our own. If we observe what is going on in the other person, we can use what we notice as a mirror to know ourselves. A commentary on two verses of the Dhammapada by the late Ayya Khema. It isn’t difficult for us to notice other people’s faults, as these so frequently annoy us, and in this negative state we are convinced that what we think is right, and that we are entitled to pass judgment. This makes us quick to criticize, and in doing so we forget that our thinking is based on our own opinions, which cannot be completely objective. In a sense, all our opinions are wrong, because they are rooted in our ego-illusion: “I have, I want, I will; I believe, I know, I think.” On the relative level, these opinions of ours may be true, but relative truth can never be enough to completely satisfy us since in the end it can only express the truth of one ego against that of another.

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