Ayya Khema

Ayya Khema was born in Berlin in 1923 to Jewish parents. In 1938, aged about fifteen, she left Germany on a children’s transport to Scotland, and then joined her parents in Shanghai. The family was held in a Japanese prison camp during the war, where her father died. She later married, lived in the United States, and travelled in Asia with her husband and son between 1960 and 1964. She learned meditation there.

In 1979, at the age of 56, she became a nun in Sri Lanka and took the name Khema. She set up the Parappuduwa Nuns Island, and the BuddhaNet account says she also set up an International Buddhist Women’s Centre in Colombo. In 1987 she coordinated the first international conference of Buddhist nuns, which led to the founding of Sakyadhita, a worldwide association of Buddhist women. In May of that year, according to the same account, she became the first Buddhist nun to address the United Nations in New York.

Her students asked her to teach in Germany, and after about fifty years abroad she returned. She founded the Buddha-Haus in the Allgäu, and the Buddha-Haus site still calls her its founder. It also describes Metta Vihara, which she founded in the Allgäu, as the first Buddhist forest monastery in Germany; BuddhaNet says she inaugurated it in June 1997. She died there in November 1997.

She wrote around twenty-five books on meditation and the Buddha’s teaching in English and German. Being Nobody, Going Nowhere received the Christmas Humphreys Memorial Award in 1988. Access to Insight hosts several of her Dhamma talks, including twelve given on Parappuduwa Nuns Island.