This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Stories of Inspiring Buddhist Women Class 2: Ayya Khema. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Stories of Inspiring Buddhist Women Class 2: Ayya Khema

The following talk was given by Diana Clark, Leigh Brasington at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on January 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Stories of Inspiring Buddhist Women Class 2: Ayya Khema - Leigh Brasington, Diana Clark

Introduction

Diana Clark: Welcome to our second class in the second series of Stories of Inspiring Buddhist Women. I am so happy that you're here to join me to discover these women. Some of these women I didn't know about before I started talking about them, and some of them I did know, but didn't know a lot. It's been a lot of fun for me to do some poking around and to share with you all.

I just want to state that this class is not meant to be the definitive biography of these individuals. Instead, it's an opportunity to acknowledge, respect, and honor these women, as well as to allow ourselves to be touched by them. Even though these are maybe not the stories that we hear the most in Dharma talks or in books, it doesn't mean that there aren't these amazing women around. This is how we'll start getting these stories out there, by sharing them all with you.

I also want to say that I don't want to suggest that we have to be like them, or that what they're doing is the only way, or that they are the epitome and somebody that we should emulate. Again, just allow yourself to be touched by what we're learning here. How can it support your practice? I know for me, sometimes I feel like, "Wow, they found a way, maybe I can find a way through this little rough patch here." Maybe in an abstract way, their stories can support us.

Today, we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to be talking about an amazing woman. Many of you have heard of her through books, and maybe even some of her teachings. We have the great good fortune to have a student of hers who is going to be sharing about her with us. It also happens, in my view, that this student is a fantastic storyteller.

We will be talking about Ayya Khema¹, this wonderful, amazing woman. And Leigh Brasington, I believe you're her senior student in the United States, right? Maybe in the world.

Leigh Brasington: Senior in terms of teaching more in her style. Not in the world, because she has a number of students in Germany. But I'm the only one she authorized in the States who is actually doing it. So if that makes me senior, I guess.

Diana Clark: I'll turn it over to you, Leigh, to share about Ayya Khema.

The Life of Ayya Khema

Leigh Brasington: Thank you, Diana. This is a great privilege for me to be able to talk about my teacher. Ayya Khema was my very first meditation teacher. She taught me to meditate. I reconnected with her five years later, and she taught me the Jhānas², and I then started sitting with her regularly. Eventually, she told me to be a Dharma teacher. She completely transformed my life. I don't know what my life would have been like if I hadn't met her. I don't even want to think about that because it was so powerful.

Ilse Ledermann, which was her name before she became Ayya Khema, was born in Berlin in 1923, the daughter of a Jewish banker. She was ten when Hitler came to power. When she was 15, she was sent on one of the Kindertransport³ refugee ships for Jewish children to flee Germany. I've heard that it was the last of the children's ships, though I can't vouch for that. She went to Scotland, where I believe there were relatives she stayed with. Her parents managed to escape to Shanghai before the war broke out.

In 1941, around the time of Pearl Harbor, she was 18. She took a Japanese freighter from Scotland around Africa to India, and then on to Shanghai where she was reunited with her parents. She actually totally enjoyed being in Shanghai. When I reconnected with her after five years, she found out I had been in Shanghai fairly recently, and she wanted to know all about it and what it was like. Things were really good until 1944, when the Japanese threw all Westerners into a concentration camp. Her father died there.

She was liberated by the Americans in 1945 at the end of the war, but she didn't get out of China until 1949. There were just so many refugees. She had married, had a daughter, and took a ship—again, I've heard it was the last ship out before the Chinese Communists took Shanghai. She came to California, sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge. She, her husband, and their daughter settled in Los Angeles, where she worked as a teller at Bank of America.

Eventually, she got divorced, remarried, and had a son. She and her new husband actually moved to Mexico to an organic farm. Her husband was an engineer and got a posting to Pakistan for an engineering project. So they went to Pakistan and did the project. Then, they drove to London in their Land Rover. We're talking 1959. That used to be the "hippie trail"—India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, all the way to England. She was one of the people blazing that trail.

On the way, she had heard about the Hunza people, so they drove up to visit them. She became friends with the King of the Hunza and discovered that you weren't allowed to go there unless you had a special permit. But they didn't know that, and she ended up friends with the King of the Hunza.

After they got to London, they decided to drive back to India in their Land Rover—she, her husband, and her son. When they got to India, Ilse was interested in learning to meditate, so she found a Hindu teacher. I don't remember his name, but anything I don't remember, you can find easily in her autobiography. It's an adventure story filled with nuggets of Dharma along the way. The name of the book is I Give You My Life.

After India, she, her husband, and her son (her daughter was with her daughter's father back in San Diego) went to Queensland, Australia, and settled on an organic farm. After six years of doing this Hindu meditation, one of their neighbors came over one afternoon and said, "There's a Buddhist monk going to be giving a talk at my house. Would you like to come along and hear what he has to say?"

Ilse went to hear this Buddhist monk, who was Venerable Khantipālo⁴. She said that she knew immediately she was home. She'd been doing this Hindu meditation very religiously, and it didn't make any sense to her; she didn't know what was going on. But immediately she connected with what Khantipālo was teaching. She began practicing in the Theravada tradition, going on retreats with him while he was teaching in Australia.

On these retreats, she apparently was stumbling into the Jhānas, but she didn't know what was going on. Because she was a voracious reader, she started looking through the Suttas. The translations she had weren't the good ones we have now by Bhikkhu Bodhi; these were the ones from around 1905, not quite as easy to read. But she figured out what was happening based on the Suttas and the translation of the Visuddhimagga⁵ that was available.

She realized these states were the Jhānas. She talked about how one night, after she'd learned the first four Jhānas while on retreat, she thought, "I'm going to find the fifth Jhāna now." And she did. She wound up teaching herself all eight of the Jhānas. To me, this is absolutely remarkable. I stumbled into the first Jhāna, and I had no idea what was going on. I tried asking a few teachers, but she did her own research, figured it out, and taught herself all the rest of them. Truly amazing.

She began assisting Venerable Khantipālo and becoming a Dharma teacher herself. She came back from one retreat and her son met her at the railway station with a note from her husband that basically said, "You're more interested in this meditation stuff than me. I'm out of here." Ayya Khema said she was pretty upset by that. But when she calmed down, she realized that he was correct: she was more into the meditation than the relationship. So she began teaching more on her own.

Eventually, she went to Sri Lanka. While she was there, she began to wonder, "I found the Jhānas, I think, but am I doing it right?" She told the people she knew there that she wanted to find a Jhāna master. Word came that Venerable Nyanarama⁶ was the real deal. She told the lady she was staying with, "I need to go to Venerable Nyanarama's monastery."

They told her, "Well, you can't go there. It's a two days' ride in a Jeep back into the jungle, and then you have to walk in." She said, "But I really need to go to the monastery." "Well, you really can't go." "But I need to speak to Venerable Nyanarama." "Oh, if you want to speak to him, he's come into town for some medical treatment. He's staying at the monastery around the corner."

So they walked to the closest monastery. She went in, had an interview with Venerable Nyanarama, and explained what she was doing. At the end, she asked, "Am I doing it right?" And he said, "Yes. And furthermore, you must teach these. They are in danger of becoming a lost art." And so she did.

Venerable Nyanarama, being a monk, wasn't particularly comfortable teaching women—nuns or laywomen. So he basically assigned all the women students he had to Ayya Khema (she wasn't Ayya Khema at that point, but shortly after that she became a nun). In Sri Lanka at that time, you could only be a ten-precept nun; you couldn't get full ordination. But Ayya Khema was not going to let anything stand in her way, certainly not 2,500 years of patriarchy.

She came back to visit her daughter in San Diego. During that trip, she went to a Chinese Zen temple in Los Angeles and received full ordination, because the fully ordained lineage of nuns had not died out in China (in fact, they had originally received their ordination from Sri Lanka). She was just reconnecting a little further down the line. Then she went back to being a fully ordained Theravada nun—perhaps the first one in a thousand years, as the lineage of fully ordained nuns in Theravada had died out about a millennium prior.

This was Ayya Khema: "You can't do that." "No, I'm going to go do that." And she did. She also managed to pull together the first international Buddhist women's conference and got the Dalai Lama to be the keynote speaker. She brought in nuns and laywomen from all over for the conference, and they continued to hold those conferences. One of her students was very influential in forming Sakyadhita⁷, a group dedicated to supporting women in Buddhism, particularly nuns. She was amazing.

Retreats with Ayya Khema

To go on retreat with her was a very interesting experience. Ayya Khema was as German as you could possibly imagine, and she was as Jewish as you could possibly imagine. She was your favorite Jewish grandmother, and yet she had strictness and German drive. We lost a lot of really good people in the Second World War, unfortunately.

You'd go on retreat with her, and she would tell you at the beginning: "Okay, I'm going to give you instructions on what to do. I don't care what you've been doing in the past. You're on retreat with me, and you should learn what I'm teaching. When you go home, if you want to go back to doing whatever, feel free to do that. But while you're on retreat with me, you'll do what I teach."

She was the sort of person to whom you would say, "Oh, yes, ma'am, right away." If you had trouble with authority figures, maybe she wasn't the best teacher for you, because she definitely came off as an authority figure.

Her retreats were usually based around a Sutta. She would take a Sutta—maybe something from the Middle Length Discourses that you could read in 20 minutes—and it would be the theme for a ten-day retreat. She would go into each point in great detail, giving you a really in-depth teaching on what the Buddha was actually talking about.

On the first retreat I went on, I thought I had meditated before, but I quickly learned that what Ayya Khema thought was meditation was not what I had been doing. The practice of following the breath was too boring for me. I'd sit there for 45 minutes in excruciating boredom, trying not to think and just watch myself breathe. Luckily, seven days in, she showed us the body scan. Ayya Khema had been a student of Robert Hover, who was a student of U Ba Khin, who was S.N. Goenka's⁸ teacher. So she would teach the body scan during every one of her retreats. I could do that because it gave me something to do, rather than just sitting there being bored. It was a good thing it was a ten-day retreat, because I feel like it was the ninth day before I actually understood enough to take the practice home.

One other thing was crucial on that retreat: I was a pothead. I was stoned like five nights a week and had been for 14 years. Of course, I wasn't going to smoke on the retreat; I could give it up occasionally. At the end of the retreat, she would do a precept ceremony. Unlike most teachers who do the precepts at the beginning, she did a really sweet precept ceremony at the end. I thought, "Yeah, that's a religion thing, and I'm a Presbyterian preacher's kid, and I'm not interested in religion stuff." So I wasn't going to do the ceremony.

But she gave a really brilliant talk on the precepts. When she got to the fifth precept, she said, "We are confused enough already. We don't need to ingest anything that makes us more confused." That really struck home with me. I was curious about meditation because I'm curious about what's really going on in the world. If I really wanted to understand what's going on, she was right: I needed a clear mind. I quit smoking pot right at that instant.

So the two things I took away from that retreat were: one, this woman is a brilliant teacher who speaks clearly and lays it out there; and two, the body scan and quitting pot.

Three years later, I stumbled into the first Jhāna on a retreat. Nobody told me it was a Jhāna; I just got the word pīti⁹. For the next two years, I was going around accessing pīti and asking teachers, "What's going on with this?" Nobody told me anything that made any sense to my experience.

Then I reconnected with Ayya Khema. Her interviews basically consisted of: "Tell me what happens when you meditate." When she asked me that, I said, "I can get to pīti." She said, "Oh, good. That's the first Jhāna. Here's how you do the second." Somebody actually knew, and furthermore knew what came next, which was wonderful.

During that retreat, she taught me Jhānas two, three, four, and five. A year later, I was back, and she taught me six, seven, and eight. That retreat was five and a half weeks long, so I had time to practice the Jhānas and learn what they were for. They're a warm-up exercise for your insight practice. She had me step through the Jhānas, step out of number eight, and start doing an insight practice. The insight practices I was doing post-Jhāna were much more profound and powerful than anything I had ever experienced before.

She had the Buddha's gradual training just nailed: keep your precepts; guard your senses; be mindful; abandon the hindrances; do your Jhāna practice; and now, start investigating reality. It was transformative. My friends could see I was different when I came back.

While teaching, she would have the Sutta in front of her. She would read a little bit of it and then talk off the top of her head for the next hour on the paragraph she just read. The next day, she'd read the next paragraph and explain everything going on. Some of the material took a couple of days to fully explain. She had a phenomenal memory and knew the Suttas incredibly well. She was an inspiration to anybody that studied with her because of the clarity of what she taught and her ability to make the Buddha's teachings come alive in the 20th century. If you heard a Sutta from her, it made sense. Then you could read another Sutta along the same lines, and it made a lot more sense than when you'd read it before. That's how I learned what I know about the Suttas—by her giving me the background necessary to read them.

She had an island in Sri Lanka where she was living when I first met her, where she had a nunnery for Western women who wanted to come and practice for three months or longer. But with the civil war in Sri Lanka, the infrastructure of the country had broken down (though she wasn't in any danger). Her German students convinced her to come back to Germany to live.

The first time she went to Germany to teach a retreat, she had to spend the whole plane ride with a German-Pāli dictionary, learning the German words for the Pāli terms. She only knew the English words—"sati is mindfulness, but what's the German word for sati?" She had good students in Germany, and eventually, they got an old inn founded in the 1600s and fixed it up as a retreat center. She lived there until she died in November of 1997.

She would come to the US to teach a retreat and visit her daughter in San Diego. She would go to Australia to teach a retreat and visit her son in Brisbane. The rest of the time she taught in Europe. She was teaching right up to the very end. She was the most remarkable person I've ever met. You've probably heard it said of some people, "They broke the mold when they made that person." Well, there was no mold for Ayya Khema. She was hand-carved.

Q&A

Diana Clark: So it's time for our breakout groups now. What is inspiring about Ayya Khema? What's inspiring about this German-Jewish refugee who turned out to be one of the most amazing Dharma teachers of the 20th century?

(Breakout groups occur)

Diana Clark: Any comments from your breakout groups? Any questions that came up? Raise your hand. Yeah, Rachel.

Rachel: In our group, we wondered... you never definitively stated that she had achieved enlightenment. We assumed that was true. But I wondered if she ever said, "I am enlightened," or gave that impression, just out of curiosity.

Leigh Brasington: Two things to say. One, she said, "It takes one to know one." You can't really tell if somebody is fully awakened unless you are. The other thing I would say is she has a book on the ninth discourse in the Long Discourses (Dīgha Nikāya number nine), the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta, called Who Is My Self?. She talks about the Jhānas in the first part, and not-self in the second part. Read the last chapter. The last chapter is not about the Sutta; she discusses the four stages of awakening. You could also listen to the talk—I'll stick the link to that talk in the chat.

This talk will give you probably your best sense of Ayya Khema and her relationship to the stages of awakening. But I'm going to leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions. I'm quite certain for myself I'm not awakened, so I can't really say about her. But she was definitely ahead of me. She was very spiritually advanced to do what she did.

Question: How many languages did she speak?

Leigh Brasington: She spoke German as her native language, and she learned English in Scotland. She knew a lot of Pāli, but I wouldn't say she spoke Pāli. So it was mostly German and English. One of her German students said to me, "Actually, I can understand her English better than her German because she speaks with a pre-war German dialect." She had a unique way of speaking.

Question: What became of her children? Did they follow her into Buddhism, or did they find their own different paths?

Leigh Brasington: Neither of her children followed her into Buddhism. But her favorite grandson went on retreat with her. I don't know if he's still practicing, but he followed her in. I also heard about a granddaughter who was interested in Buddhism and wanted to find out information about her grandmother, but people don't always follow their parents' religion!

Nancy: Is there anything in her teaching that relates to being a woman in those traditions? Did she speak to that?

Leigh Brasington: When she was teaching a retreat, there was almost nothing about her personally. I learned about her because some of her students on the first month-long retreat I did with her insisted that she tell us something about her life, which she did on the last night. But there were no personal stories mixed in. She did teach about women in Buddhism in other contexts, but on retreat, it was pretty much straight to the Sutta: "This is the Sutta, this is what it means, and this is how you should practice it." But Lucinda can probably tell us a lot more because Lucinda was on Nuns' Island.

Lucinda: Her actions. She was seminal in organizing women and opening up ordination for women. She was an advocate for women. She taught everyone, but she was an activist on behalf of women internationally.

Leigh Brasington: Yes, in Sri Lanka today, there are over a thousand fully ordained nuns, and basically, they are all from Ayya Khema. She started the movement and convinced enough other women. Then there was a core group that started ordaining more nuns. Almost all fully ordained nuns in the Theravada tradition can trace their lineage back to Ayya Khema. She was very much an activist.

Diana Clark: Here's a person who had this extraordinary life story—escaping Nazi Germany, finding her way to China, surviving a concentration camp, escaping again. Do you think that the hardships she witnessed influenced her practice and the way that she taught?

Leigh Brasington: I think it had a huge impact. There are three doorways to awakening: Anicca¹⁰, Dukkha¹¹, and Anatta¹² (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not-self). Ayya Khema went through the Dukkha doorway because she knew Dukkha. The Hindu practice she was doing wasn't addressing her experience of suffering from earlier in her life. Buddhism addresses Dukkha pretty directly, and she went through that doorway, just like the Buddha did. One of her favorite sayings was, "Dukkha is our best teacher," which makes total sense. If everything's going perfectly, you don't change anything. It's when things are going wrong that you start learning new stuff. Her innate brilliance was there to share it with everyone.

Diana Clark: You talked about Jhānas. Was this the primary thing that she taught? Is she noteworthy because nobody else was teaching about Jhānas at this time?

Leigh Brasington: The Jhānas are eight altered states of consciousness brought on by concentration that yield even more concentration, allowing you to stair-step your way down to deeper levels. With a supremely concentrated mind, whatever insight practice you do is going to go much more efficiently.

When I first sat with her in 1985, she did not mention the Jhānas in public talks. She mentioned them once, saying she was surprised at how many of the women that came to Nuns' Island could get into the Jhānas. If a student came to an interview and had access concentration, she would teach them the Jhānas in the interviews, but she wasn't publicly teaching them. Five years later, she was publicly teaching them as part of the retreat. That's what she became known for. But I would say that she was a Dharma teacher, not a "Jhāna teacher." She taught the Dharma as found in the Suttas. The retreat I mentioned on the Samaññaphala Sutta talking about the gradual training had such a huge impact on me.

Diana Clark: You recently edited and published a book about her loving-kindness teachings. She was diminutive—I think you said she was 4'11"—but a powerhouse and an authority. Could you speak to the warmth and strength in her teachings?

Leigh Brasington: I'm over six feet tall, and yet I thought of Ayya Khema as taller than me. That was the aura that came off of her. She was stern and authoritative, but she was also very loving. She has these brilliant loving-kindness guided meditations with beautiful visualizations. Even better, she did three evening talks on the 15 qualities at the beginning of the Metta Sutta¹³ that you are to cultivate on the spiritual path.

One of her students asked me, "If I transcribe those talks, will you convert it into a book?" So I took those transcriptions and put them into a beautiful book on metta. If you want to know about metta from the Suttas, read that book. She was stern, and she was very loving—both at the same time.

Conclusion

Diana Clark: What a beautiful way to honor your teacher—helping publish a book of her teachings to make them available to even more people. Thank you, Leigh, for being here to talk about her with your firsthand experience. It's just really great.

Leigh Brasington: Thank you so much for inviting me. I love reminiscing about this person who so changed my life. Read her autobiography, I Give You My Life, and read any of her other books. There are a ton of them.

Diana Clark: We'll have one more class next week to talk about a third woman. Until then, may you be safe, may you be well. Take care of yourselves and each other. See you next week.