Ayya Khema
Ayya Khema (actually Ilse Ledermann , born August 25, 1923 in Berlin as Ilse Kussel , † November 2, 1997 in Uttenbühl in the Allgäu) was a Buddhist nun in the Theravada tradition.
Life
Childhood and youth
Ayya Khema was born as Ilse Kussel on August 25, 1923 in Berlin, the only child of wealthy Jewish parents. She also spent her childhood and youth in Berlin. Her parents left Berlin via Trieste in early 1939 and fled to Shanghai ( Republic of China ), the last place of refuge for European Jews at the time. Kussel left Germany in April 1939 on one of the last ship transports of Jewish children. She was temporarily admitted to a host family of Russian-Jewish origin in Glasgow ( Scotland ). In February 1941 she followed her parents to the European Jewish community in exile.
During the Pacific War , the Japanese captured Shanghai in 1937 . At the urging of the German government, the approx. 20,000 European Jews were forcibly concentrated in one part of the city in early 1943. In Shanghai Ghetto Kussels Father Theodore died in August 1945, a few weeks before the liberation of the ghetto by the Americans.
Emigration to the USA
After they married Johannes Dombrowski and their daughter Irene was born in the Shanghai ghetto, the family was able to emigrate to California (USA) on one of the last troop transporters in 1949 , shortly before the People's Liberation Army conquered Shanghai. In the USA, Ilse Dombrowski soon received American citizenship.
Until the birth of her son Jeffrey in 1956, she lived and worked in San Diego as a secretary and accountant. During these years she felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the material orientation of her new life, and she began to read philosophical and spiritual books. However, she remained alone in her family with her thoughts and feelings until she met Gerd Ledermann in 1959 at her mother's house in California, a Jewish electrical engineer also from Berlin, whom she married in Mexico soon after the divorce of her first marriage . The couple and their son Jeffrey lived there for a short time in a spiritual community.
to travel
In the years that followed, Ilse traveled to Central and South America , Australia , Asia and Europe with Gerd Ledermann and the son from his first marriage . The family lived and worked for a long time in Mexico , Pakistan and Australia. The beginning of her spiritual development was marked by stays in the ashram of the late Ramana Maharshi and in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in southern India. It was there that Ilse Ledermann met the "mother" Mirra Alfassa , Sri Aurobindo's congenial companion, whose imaginative guided meditations and linguistic simplicity gave her an initial and formative approach to meditation.
In 1967 the family settled in Queensland, Australia, bought a piece of land and began building the Shalom (Peace) organic farm .
Contact with Buddhism
In the early 1970s, the English Buddhist monk Phra Khantipalo (Laurence Mills) visited the family. From him, Ilse Ledermann heard the Buddhadhamma , the historical Buddha's doctrine of reality and liberation, for the first time . Soon she organized meditation courses for Khantipalo on the farm, traveled to various Buddhist centers in the USA and Burma and later accompanied her first own meditation courses on the farm.
In 1977 the marriage with Gerd Ledermann broke up. After the farm was sold, Ilse bought a plot of land near Sydney on which the Buddhist forest monastery Wat Buddha Dhamma was built under the direction of Khantipalo. After several months of training in Thai forest monasteries with Ajahn Singtong and Ajahn Maha Bua , Ilse traveled to Sri Lanka in 1979, where she became a novice ( Samaneri ) with the name Khema in August 1979 in the Vajirarama Temple by the abbot Narada Mahathera in the early Buddhist tradition of Theravada was ordained.
Soon afterwards, Sister Khema met the German monk Nyanaponika Mahathera (1901–1994), who was also of Jewish descent in Sri Lanka and who patiently and competently answered her questions about the understanding of the Buddhadhamma. When she later referred to a teacher, it was Nyanaponika, of whom she always spoke with the greatest respect and gratitude.
This was followed by a period of intensive meditation for Sister Khema, as well as later the public engagement for the concerns of the stunted nun order in Sri Lanka.
Teaching activity and illness
In 1983 she sought out Matara Sri Nyanarama Mahathera (1901-1992), a highly respected Sinhalese monk and meditation master from the Mitirigala Temple. According to Ayya Khema's own statements, in the presence of Bhikkhu Katukurunde Nyanananda (born 1940), he confirmed her meditation practice of meditatively refined states of consciousness ( jhana ) as correct and authorized her to systematically develop this meditative development of calmness ( samatha- bhavana) in the West to teach. Parallel to the start of this teaching activity, a monastery for western nuns was established in Sri Lanka on the island of Parappuduwa in Lake Ratgama , whose first abbess Sister Khema was until the early 1990s. In 1987 she was instrumental in founding Sakyadhita .
At about the same time, she found out about her cancer . She decided against an operation. In December 1988, Sister Khema was ordained a bhikkhuni at the International Buddhist Progress Society, a national Chinese Buddhist tradition, at the Hsi Lai Temple in Los Angeles, California .
Through her teaching activities in Europe and overseas since the early eighties, Sister Khema, who now traditionally called herself Ayya ("venerable lady"), became known as a Buddhist nun and meditation teacher. As the situation in Sri Lanka became more and more difficult and unsafe at the end of the 1980s due to ethnic unrest, a Buddhist meditation and study center, the Buddha House in Allgäu , was set up in early 1989 in southern Bavaria on the initiative of some German Buddhists . It became more and more the center of Ayya Khema's teaching and life and soon also the seat of the Jhana Verlag, which she founded.
A small community of women and men soon formed in the Buddha House who supported Ayya Khema in spreading the Buddhadhamma in word and writing. The Buddhist monks Nyanabodhi (Roland Wildgruber) and Nyanacitta (Matthias Scharlipp), as well as the nun Sanghamitta (Traudel Reiss) emerged from this group. In 1993, Ayya Khema underwent extensive cancer surgery, which was followed by other operations. Due to the keen interest in Buddhist meditation, the Buddha-Haus community opened a meditation center in Munich at the end of 1993 and another in Stuttgart at the beginning of 1999.
In 1995, on the initiative of Ayya Khema, after a first project in the Bavarian Forest had failed, a former Alphotel was acquired in the Allgäu and converted into a forest monastery and retreat center, which opened its doors in the summer of 1997 as Metta Vihara ("Residence of Loving Kindness") . It also became the seat of the Order of the Western Forest Monastery Tradition founded by Ayya Khema in October 1997.
Death and aftermath
In mid-1997, Ayya Khema had to undergo another cancer treatment. On the morning of November 2, 1997 (All Souls' Day), she died in the Buddha House. Her ashes were solemnly buried in the stupa in the garden of the Buddha House in May 1998 . She appointed her long-time student Nyanabodhi as her successor in the spiritual leadership of the centers. In her will of October 17, 1997 she stated: “The Dhamma teachers authorized by me are only the following persons: Ven. Nyanabodhi, Ven. Nyanacitta, Charlie Pils, Norbert Wildgruber, Sylvia Kolk, Friedericke Termeer, Ingo Steinbach, Werner Glückler, Karen Kold -Wagner, Iris Absolon, Ursula Lyon, Anja Tactor, Philippa Ransom, Leigh Brasington, Dr. Karmananda, Charles Ling. "
On the stupa in the garden of the Buddha house, in which the urn with Ayya Khema's ashes was buried, there is a commemorative plaque with the following inscription:
"Not in the air, not in the middle of the sea,
not hiding in the mountain crevices, there is
no place on this earth
where death does not conquer one."
Buddha (Dhammapada, verse 128)
Ayya Khema (1923-1997)
swell
- Ayya Khema: I give you my life. Jhana Verlag in the Buddha House, 2007
- unpublished conversations between Ayya Khema and Nyanacitta (Matthias Scharlipp)
- Buddha House Archives
Works
- Ayya Khema, Pema Chödrön : Open heart - courageous spirit. Jhana Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3931274284
- Ayya Khema: meditation without a secret. Theseus Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3896200836
- Ayya Khema: Don't think so much, love more - Buddha and Jesus in dialogue. Hoffmann and Campe Verlag 1997 (original edition: Jesus meets the Buddha. Jhana Verlag, 1995)
- Ayya Khema: I give you my life. Jhana Verlag, 1997, ISBN 9783931274344
- Ayya Khema: What is it all about? A lecture on Dhamma practice. August 21, 1991. ISBN 3-928396-04-8 ( online )
- Ayya Khema: All of Us - Beset by Birth, Decay and Death; Twelve Dhamma Talks On Practice given on Parappaduwa Nuns Island. 1987. ( online )
- Ayya Khema: Eternity is now: Finding peace through the teachings of the Buddha. Scherz Verlag, 2008, ISBN 9783502611868 , original title: Being Nobody, going Nowhere
Web links
- Literature by and about Ayya Khema in the catalog of the German National Library
- Buddha House overall project with information about Metta Vihara Waldkloster, Jhana Verlag u. a.
- Sakyadhita - International Association of Buddhist Women
- Matthias Scharlipp (Nyanacitta)
Individual evidence
- ^ Wat Buddha Dhamma Forest Monastery, Wisemans Ferry, NSW Australia
- ↑ Charlie Pils' website
- ↑ Sylvia Kolk's website
- ↑ Leigh Brasington website
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Khema, Ayya |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Ledermann, Ilse; Kussel, Ilse (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Buddhist nun |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 25, 1923 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 2, 1997 |
| Place of death | Uttenbühl , Oy-Mittelberg |