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Remembering Ayya Khema

Alright, so actually, I'm not going to talk as much about the book as I am going to talk about Ayya Khema^[1], who she was, what she was like, things like that. So I'm going to put a link in the chat, which is from my website and contains stuff about Ayya Khema. So, if you're curious, you can take a look at that page. It has links to talks by Ayya Khema, pictures of Ayya Khema, so forth. And maybe we should start out with a few pictures of Ayya Khema.

So Ayya Khema was a German-Jewish, Theravadan nun. She was born in Berlin in 1923, which means she was 10 when Hitler came to power. Her father was a Jewish banker. And when she was 15, she was sent on one of the Kindertransports—the ships that were taking Jewish children out of Germany to various other places in Europe where they would be safe, hopefully. And she went to stay with some relatives in Scotland. She was still there when the war began, but before the war actually started, her parents managed to get out and flee to Shanghai, China. In 1941, Ayya Khema was able to join her parents in Shanghai by taking a Japanese freighter. This was before Pearl Harbor, a Japanese freighter from the UK to first India. And she said that when she arrived in Bombay, she was not allowed to go ashore because basically she was a stateless person. They had not given her a passport when she left Germany, and because she was not a citizen of the UK, she couldn't get a passport. And then the ship left and continued on to Shanghai. It was a pretty scary trip because, well, the ship could have been sunk by either side, even though it's flying a Japanese flag. If either side decided that it was something they wanted to sink, it would not go well.

So Ayya Khema spent the rest of the war years in Shanghai. At first it was actually quite pleasant. The second retreat I did with Ayya Khema, I went into my first interview with her and I was wearing a t-shirt that had a picture of the Potala Palace on it. The t-shirt didn't have the photograph on it, it had Tibetan writing. And Ayya Khema asked me as I walk in, "Is that Hebrew?" And I said, "No, it's Tibetan." And she asked me had I been to Tibet and I told her I had and we talked a little bit about Tibet. And I said, "Yeah, I took the train from Shanghai," and she immediately wanted to know all about Shanghai, because it had been a really important part of her childhood, actually, her late teens, early 20s. It was, for the first three years, actually pretty nice until 1944 when the Japanese threw all of the Westerners into a concentration camp. Her father died in the camp and she was finally liberated by the Americans in 1945. But there were so many refugees and she was a stateless person, a refugee, that she didn't get out until 1949. Now, if you know anything about the history of China in 1949, is when the Communists finally made their full takeover, and one of the last places they took was Shanghai. Ayya Khema was on the last boat out of Shanghai coming to America before the Communists takeover. Just like she'd been on the last of the Kindertransports out of Germany. Seems she had a knack for cutting it a little close at times.

So she came to America. She had married by then and had two children. Her family settled in Los Angeles and she was actually a teller in the Bank of America for a while. But eventually her marriage ended and at some later point she remarried. She and her husband and her son—I assume her daughter was living with the father—moved to an organic farm in Mexico and lived there for a while. Her second husband was an engineer and he eventually got a posting to Pakistan to build—and now I've forgotten exactly whether it was an aqueduct or a bridge, but something like that. And so they lived in Pakistan for a while. And then they drove to London from Pakistan. This is in the 60s. This is before all the hippies were doing this, from India to London in the 70s and 80s. She was one of the people actually blazing that trail.

On the way, Ayya Khema had heard of the Hunza people. They appeared to be a very interesting tribe that lived far up in the mountains. And so they drove up to visit the Hunza people. And when she got up there, they found out they needed a special visa to go there. But they didn't have any special visa or anything. They had just driven up there. They became friends with the King of the Hunzas and they remained in contact for quite some time. Anyhow, they continued driving west until eventually they arrived in the United Kingdom. They spent some time there and then they drove back to India. Even today, you're going to find very few people have made the Indian subcontinent to London and back again on their own in their own vehicle. But that was Ayya Khema. She was really quite an amazing person.

When she was in India, she wanted to learn about meditation. And so she sought out an Indian guru. Actually, the guru had died and the guru's mother was still there. And that's who she learned meditation from, a Hindu form of meditation. And then they shipped their Land Rover and themselves to Australia and settled on an organic farm in Queensland. So this would have been around 1964, I think, something like that. And they lived on this organic farm. She continued to do her meditation, but she said that she didn't really relate to it. She was doing it, but it didn't really work that well.

Eventually, one of her neighbors comes over and says, "Would you like to hear a talk by a Buddhist monk?" There was apparently a monk in town and he was going to be giving a talk. So Ayya Khema decided to go and she said she immediately knew she was home. What he had to say made so much sense, far more sense than anything else she'd been doing with her meditation practice. This monk was the Venerable Khantipālo^[2]. Khantipālo was also a very interesting person. In the Second World War, he was drafted. He was British and he was drafted and he told the army, "I'm not going to kill anyone. I don't care what you do with me, but I'm not going to harm anyone." So they sent him to Sri Lanka where he was a gardener and he encountered Buddhism and he became a Buddhist monk after the war, after he got out of the army. And he was now living in Australia and Ayya Khema really related to what he was saying. She began attending retreats that he taught and really, she had a knack for meditation. It was really something she was quite good at. Of course, she'd been doing a form of meditation, I think she said for six years at this point. So she had some background in meditation.

The most interesting thing about her time on retreat with Venerable Khantipālo was that she taught herself the Jhānas^[3]. The Jhānas were almost completely unknown anywhere, even in Asia. Yes, they appeared in the suttas^[4]. Yes, they appeared in the Visuddhimagga^[5], but nobody was teaching them. Nobody was talking about them. But Ayya Khema was a very voracious reader and she got the early translations of the suttas that were done in the beginning of the 20th century. And she got the quite excellent translation of the Visuddhimagga that was done in 1957. And she started seeing this stuff about the Jhānas. And she wondered what was going on. And so she began experimenting and found the first four Jhānas on her own. Ayya Khema has an autobiography. And although I'm giving her biography now, I would highly recommend that you read her autobiography. It's entitled I Give You My Life. And in her autobiography, she talks about being on a retreat with Khantipālo and deciding one night, "I'm going to find the fifth Jhāna." And so she did. She was a pretty amazing meditator. That's the best I can say. She found the fifth Jhāna and then she found numbers six, seven, and eight.

Eventually, Khantipālo requested that Ilse Ledermann—which was her name at the time—begin helping him by assisting at the retreats, helping with the interviews, things like that. And so she began teaching a bit. Eventually, she came back from a retreat one time and her son met her at the railway station with a note from her husband. And the note from her husband said, "You're more interested in this meditation stuff than you are in me. I'm out of here." And he'd left. Ayya Khema said she was very upset by this. But she also had to realize, she came to the realization he was correct. She was more interested in this meditation stuff.

Eventually, she had made contacts in Sri Lanka and was traveling there. She began inquiring around, "Who is a meditation master, who's a Jhāna master? I want to know if what I'm doing is correct." And the word came that the Venerable Nyanarama^[6] was the real deal. He was a Jhāna master. So she said to the ladies that she was staying with, "I need to go to the Venerable Nyanarama's monastery." And they said, "You can't go there. It's way back up in the jungle. You have to ride in a Land Rover for two days and then walk in." But she said, "I really need to go to the Venerable Nyanarama's monastery." "Well, you really can't go." "But I really need to speak to the Venerable Nyanarama." "Oh, if you just want to speak to him, he's coming to town for some medical treatment. He's staying at the monastery around the corner."

So they left the place where she was staying and they walked around the corner to the nearest monastery. And they went in and she asked for an audience with the Venerable Nyanarama and that was arranged. She said that her Sinhalese was not good enough and Venerable Nyanarama's English was not good enough. So they dialogued through an interpreter. And she basically was asking the Venerable Nyanarama about the Jhānas and told him what she was doing and so forth. She says when they were discussing the eighth Jhāna, the Venerable Nyanarama asked her a question and she said, "Just a moment." And obviously went into meditation and then came out and answered the question. Apparently correctly. The monk who was doing the translating was somewhat flabbergasted. He'd never seen anybody enter directly into the eighth Jhāna and then be able to talk about the experience. And so at the end, she asked the Venerable Nyanarama, "Well, 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 he put her to work immediately teaching Jhānas, teaching them to the nuns and to the laywomen. Nyanarama was a monk, so he wasn't particularly comfortable teaching women. But now he had a female teacher that knew the Jhānas and could teach it to the women. And so Ayya Khema became a Jhāna teacher.

At some point, I believe 1979, she decided that she had done everything that she wanted to do as a layperson. And that really the only thing truly remaining for her to do was to become a nun. So she took ordination in Sri Lanka. Now, at that time in Sri Lanka, women could only become ten-precept nuns. For full ordination for a monk, there are 227 precepts. And for women, there are 311. But the lineage of fully ordained Theravadan nuns had died out. There were wars all through the area. And you can imagine what would happen when an invading army comes in and finds a nunnery. Maybe you don't want to imagine it anyhow. The lineage of fully ordained nuns had died out. And that was fine with the patriarchy. They now had ten-precept nuns who could cook the meals and wash the robes and do menial chores for them. And so for the last thousand years, there had only been ten-precept nuns. Not only in Sri Lanka, but in all the Theravadan countries—Burma, Thailand, etc.

But Ayya Khema didn't want to be a ten-precept nun. Ayya Khema wanted to be a fully ordained nun. So she came back to America. Her daughter was living near San Diego. And she made arrangements to go to Los Angeles to the Chan Temple, the Chinese Zen Temple, and take full ordination in that lineage. Now the interesting thing is that the Chinese nuns' lineage traces its roots back to Sri Lanka. So she was tapping into the Sri Lankan lineage again. And she took full ordination. And then she was a fully ordained Theravadan nun. I mean, she just went back to being a Theravadan nun. She was one of the first fully ordained Theravadan nuns in a thousand years. This was Ayya Khema. She was not going to let something like old rules or the patriarchy stand in her way.

Ayya Khema was a force of nature. Sometimes they talk about people and say they broke the mold. They were a really unique individual. Well, there was no mold for Ayya Khema. I'm certain she was hand-carved. And so she became a fully ordained Theravadan nun. She returned to Sri Lanka and began convincing other ten-precept nuns that they too should take full ordination from the Chinese lineage. And as of today, there are over a thousand fully ordained Theravadan nuns in Sri Lanka. All started because Ayya Khema decided that's what she wanted to do.

Eventually, she was given a nunnery on an island in a lake in Sri Lanka. The island was called Nuns' Island. It was in a lake where there was also Monks' Island. Monks' Island had been an ongoing concern for quite some time. I believe there were Western monks there. And so Ayya Khema set up her nunnery there as a place where Western women could come and practice for three months or longer. And if they wanted, they could ordain as a nun. She said most of the women that came did not ordain, but they stayed three or four months or sometimes even longer. And this is what she was doing when I met her in 1985. She was the abbess of Parappaduwa Nuns' Island in Sri Lanka. And she would leave periodically to go to Queensland, Australia, where her son lived, and then go to San Diego where her daughter lived.

And it was during one of these retreats that some of her students from Nuns' Island set up a retreat for her to teach at Ruth Denison's^[7] place, Dhamma Dena, outside of Joshua Tree in Southern California. And one of my friends, my massage therapist, said to me, "You should take up meditation. It would be good for you." And I said, "Yeah, yeah," because that's what I told everybody that told me that. She was not the first. But then a few weeks or months later, she said, "Well, there's going to be a retreat down at Ruth's. You should go along Wednesday night to the San Francisco Zen Center. The teacher's giving a talk there. And if you like the talk, then you should sign up for the retreat." Okay. And so I go to the San Francisco Zen Center and it's Ayya Khema. I don't remember the topic that she talked about, but I do remember how clear her presentation was. And I asked her a question at the end and she had a very good answer. And it was like, "Yeah, this woman seems to know what she's talking about." So off I went on retreat.

So one of the pictures that I have is Ruth Denison on the left and Ayya Khema on the right. This picture is taken at Buddha Haus, which is much later than the time period I'm talking about, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. But these two women were quite remarkable. Both Germans, originally from East Germany, Ayya from Berlin and Ruth from a smaller place in East Germany. Ayya managed to escape because she was Jewish. Ruth Denison stayed in Germany and was captured by the Russians and hauled off to a work camp in Russia before she eventually escaped and came back to Germany and then to the West. And so both of these German women wound up being Buddhist teachers in the West.

And so this first retreat that I attended was at Ruth Denison's place in the California desert. And it was June and it was hot. It was about 112 degrees every day in the middle of the day. We'd wake up in the morning and it would be very pleasant for about the time it took the sun to come up. And then half an hour after the sun was up, it was hot enough you didn't want to be outside in the sun. Ayya Khema didn't particularly like that heat. I mean, she had been in tropical places but it was humid, and this was very dry heat. And she said that when she came back for her next retreat she wasn't going to hold it there. She was going to find someplace else.

Now at that time I thought I had meditated before, but I quickly learned that what I thought was meditation was not what Ayya Khema considered meditation. She was a very good teacher. And the first thing she taught us was mindfulness of breathing, which I had been playing with but not quite as rigorously as Ayya Khema was teaching it, and not quite the same way that Ayya Khema was teaching it. I found it very difficult. I found it very boring. I remember coming in and sitting down for the next meditation period thinking, "Oh no, not another 45 minutes of boredom." But okay. I kind of liked the walking meditation. That was a little more interesting. But I really wasn't doing very well until Ayya Khema showed us the body scan, the sweeping. Ayya Khema was a student of Robert Hover^[8] and Robert Hover was a student of U Ba Khin^[9]. And U Ba Khin was not only Robert Hover's teacher, but Ruth Denison's teacher and S.N. Goenka's^[10] teacher. So I'm learning the body scan from basically Goenka's teacher's lineage. And I could do that. There was enough activity that my easily bored mind had something to do. And so I also found that after I did a body scan, when I finished the scan and I went to my breathing, I could actually follow my breath. And I checked with Ayya Khema in my interview and she said, "Yes, that's good. This is what you should do." So that's what I did.

Two other points from that retreat. Ayya Khema was not publicly teaching Jhānas at that point. The "J-word", Jhāna, came up only twice during the retreat. The first one was an offhanded comment that Ayya Khema made where she said something like, "Yeah, I was surprised at how many of the women that come to Nuns' Island can actually enter the Jhānas." So I got the impression Jhānas were something difficult, right? And then in my first interview, I said I was having trouble following my breath but I liked the walking meditation. Could I only do walking meditation? She said, "No, it won't give you enough concentration to enter the Jhānas." Now, I had no idea what a Jhāna was or how you entered it, but obviously it required good, strong concentration. So I had that much knowledge of Jhānas by the end of that retreat.

The other really important thing, at the end of Ayya Khema's retreats, she would do refuges and precepts. Most teachers, if they do refuges and precepts, do them at the beginning of a retreat. But Ayya Khema saved it to the end. She wanted people to know what they were getting into. And so she had a very nice ceremony to do it. We were all instructed to go out and cut some flowers, desert flowers, and bring them in and put them in a little vase. Then we would go up one by one and bow three times to Ayya Khema and present the flowers. Then we would all do the refuges and precepts if we wanted to. Now, I was raised as a Presbyterian preacher's kid and by the time I went off to college, I was very suspicious of anything religious. It was just more Easter Bunny and Santa Claus stuff, as far as I was concerned. But I liked what Ayya Khema had to say. The thing that struck me as the most important was, I asked some question and she said, "There's nothing to believe here. The Buddha said, come and see for yourself." Nothing to believe? See for myself? Well, fancying myself as a scientific type, yeah, I could do that. And so I was kind of interested in this, but not interested enough to be taking any precepts or anything.

But in the talk she gave just before she offered the precept ceremony, in talking about the fifth precept, "I undertake the training to refrain from intoxicants," she said, "We are confused enough already. We do not need to ingest anything that makes us more confused." Now, at that time I was a pothead. You know, I'd been stoned five nights a week for 14 years. I mean, not every week, but yeah, something like that. And that made sense to me. If I really wanted to know what was going on, then I needed a clear mind. So I quit smoking pot immediately, just quit. I'd been trying to cut down or quit for several years. And now it was just like, oh, I had the right motivation. I wanted to clear my mind. So I went home with the determination, Ayya Khema said that we should meditate for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening every day. And so I went home with the determination to do that. And I managed to do it the first day. Okay, but yeah, it turned out to be a little harder to do it every day. But I did have a good hour sitting every morning when I got up. And that was good.

But over the next three years, my meditation practice kept getting less and less. I did find a group in San Francisco that was a weekly group and I went to that. And then I moved to Marin, but I was working in the city. And by the time I got home from work, it was too late to go to Jack Kornfield's^[11] group. And so my practice began to slide. Eventually I decided, you know, if I'm going to call myself a meditator, I actually have to meditate. So I got serious about it again, before I left on what turned out to be a year-long trip to Asia.

When I was traveling, getting to Thailand and in Thailand, I mean, one of the things we do when you're backpackers, you ask all the other people you encounter at every guest house, "Where have you been, what's good," so forth. And so I began hearing about this monastery in southern Thailand that had a 10-day retreat the first 10 days of every month. And so I made my trip such that I could go attend that retreat. And on that retreat, I stumbled into what I now know is the first Jhāna. Over the next two years, my practice was meditate and then get into the Pīti^[12], as I called it. Somebody had told me that what I was experiencing was Pīti. But I would ask each teacher I sat with, "What am I supposed to do with all this Pīti?" I actually don't remember what anyone told me. They said that, "Go back to your breath. Don't get attached." My reaction, being a stubborn type, was, "Yeah, they don't know what it is either." I eventually remember saying, "It's like I find myself in the magic castle. And I get in the first room and I wander around for 10 minutes and find myself back outside. There've got to be other rooms."

Then one of my friends hands me a flyer and says, "You want to go on a retreat? This teacher's really good." And it was for a retreat with Ayya Khema. This was 1990. And I was like, "Yeah, she was my first teacher. She was really good." So I go on the retreat and I walk in wearing that t-shirt with the Potala Palace on it. And Ayya Khema and I are having a very interesting conversation about Shanghai and China and so forth. And then she says, "Okay, enough of this. What happens when you meditate?" And that was the question she wanted to know. "Tell me about your meditation." And I said, "I can get to Pīti." And she said, "Oh, good, that's the first Jhāna. Here's how you do the second." Somebody knew what was happening. And furthermore, I knew what came next. That was a real turning point in my meditation career. I now had somebody that could explain to me what I was experiencing and what I was supposed to do with it. By the end of that retreat, I knew she was my teacher. And I made arrangements to come back for her retreat the next year, which was going to be a one-week retreat followed by a one-month retreat.

That was life-changing. When Ayya Khema would give a retreat, she would take a sutta. And she would basically talk about that one sutta for the length of the retreat or most of the length of the retreat. When I came back for that retreat the next year, the one week followed by the one month, the one week was sort of a general introduction to Buddhism. And she had about 40 or 50 people for that. And then we moved to another place that we could stay for the month. And I believe she had about 20 students for that. And she took the second discourse in the long discourses, the Sāmaññaphala Sutta^[13], the discourse on the fruits of the spiritual life. You can read that discourse in probably a half an hour. If you're a slow reader, it might take you 45 minutes. She taught on it for 25 days, really going into depth. "You know, the Buddha says this and this is what it means. And these are other suttas that talk about this," and really quite interesting. It felt like when I started that retreat, I had a bunch of Post-it notes of what I'd learned in my six years of practice. And the Post-it notes were like in an envelope and completely disorganized and sticking back to front. And by the end of that retreat, I had managed to organize everything I had already learned into three headings: Sīla^[14], Samādhi^[15], Paññā^[16]—morality, concentration, wisdom. And she had laid out the Buddha's teachings clearly enough so that I could take what I had learned and know which of those three headings it went under and how it fit with the other teachings. It was transformative. When I came back from that retreat, my friends could see that I was different.

And Ayya Khema was back a year later. That retreat was a month-long retreat in Santa Fe. And again, quite a powerful experience for me. It was a month-long and for the first week, you could come for the first week or you could come for the whole thing. And for the first week, there must have been, again, 40, 50 people. And she's doing interviews for everyone. Interviews with Ayya Khema were always one-on-one. She never did group interviews. And they were for as long as Ayya Khema wanted the interview to be. She would come into the meditation hall and at the end of the sitting after lunch, she would have all of the interview sheets in her hand. And she would say, "Okay, who is Bob? Bob, you come with me. It's Jane. Jane, you wait outside. Who is Sarah? Sarah, do you see Bob? Bob, do you see Sarah? Bob, when you're done, you tell Sarah to wait outside." She'd go through the whole group of people she wanted to see that day, lining them up. And somebody would come find you and tell you, "Wait outside." And then the other person would leave. You'd have your interview. You'd have your interview for as long as Ayya Khema wanted you to have an interview. It might be five minutes. It might be half an hour. It was totally up to Ayya Khema. And then she'd say, "Go find the next person," and you go find them. And she's doing this for 50 people. It was really quite remarkable.

So after the week was over, she continued. And for this particular retreat, she took the Great Discourse on Causation, in Bhikkhu Bodhi's^[17] translation or Maurice Walshe's^[18] translation. It's Dīgha Nikāya^[19] number 15. It's on dependent origination. And she spent about 12 days going through the 12 links of dependent origination in great detail. And what was brilliant was that she started with the end: old age, sickness, death, and all the rest of the dukkha^[20]. And said, "That arises dependent on birth." It's not birth causes old age, sickness, and death. It was "this arises dependent on that." I had never heard dependent origination presented quite that way before. And it made so much more sense. It was the first time I felt I really had not just a superficial understanding of the links of dependent origination, but actually some depth to it. This was the brilliance of Ayya Khema's teaching. She could take a topic that most people find difficult and present it in a very clear way. It was quite remarkable.

The next year Ayya Khema came down with breast cancer. She apparently had known that something wasn't right for quite some time, but she was too busy to do anything about it until it became apparent something was really wrong. And so she had a mastectomy and almost died. Let's see, at that point that would have been '93, so she's 70 years old. Between the first time I saw Ayya Khema and the second time, she had moved to Germany. The civil war in Sri Lanka had gotten bad enough that the infrastructure of the country had broken down. You couldn't send a letter, you couldn't take a bus. And her German students had come back to Germany and said, "We'll find a place for you." And so they found Buddha Haus back there. And so that's where she was living at that time.

She had the surgery. She wasn't doing well and her German students were coming to the hospital and begging her, "Ayya, please don't leave. We need you. We need you." And Ayya Khema was quite content to leave. She felt she had done whatever needed to be done. There really wasn't any need for her to stay any longer. But she decided to come back. She came out of her coma. And yeah, she didn't have the energy she had before, but she was able to resume teaching.

In 1994, she came to teach outside of Santa Cruz at Land of the Medicine Buddha. And again, it was a one-week retreat followed by a longer retreat, a 17-day retreat. I show up at that retreat and the registrar says, "Oh, I want to see you as soon as you get here." So, you know, I signed in and I go, "My teacher wants to see me. I'm cool." I go in and she says, "Oh, I'm glad you're here. You're going to be helping with the interviews." And I was like, "What? I don't know how to do interviews." "You'll learn." "But, but, but, but..." And she says, "I don't have the energy I used to have. You're going to help, Tony the registrar is going to help, and Ñāṇabodhi^[21], her monk that she brought with her, he's going to help. And we're all going to do the interviews. But don't worry. You'll learn." You know, I was planning to come on retreat and have a retreat. And suddenly I'm going to be put to work. Well, I was disappointed, but it turned out the best thing possible.

So for the first week, the four of us were doing the interviews. I remember I blew the first interview completely. A student, let's say to put it kindly, had psychological problems I was not capable of working with. Right. She wound up leaving the retreat because it was not a place where she needed to be. The second interview went really well. That was good. So after I did my half dozen or so interviews that evening, Ayya Khema found her energy going away during the day. So she didn't give evening Dharma talks. She would do the Dharma talk before lunch. And then she would just do Q&A in the evening. And so after the Q&A finished, the three of us who were doing interviews with Ayya would go to where she was staying. And we'd have our interview sheets and I'd say, "Yeah, Susie came and said this. And I said that." And Ayya would say, "Oh, that was good. You could have also said..." I remember one of the things she said was, "Ask each student how they're doing with their mettā^[22]." Ayya Khema was very insistent that people start each meditation period with some mettā, always mettā for themselves. And yeah, it would be good to do mettā for at least a few more people. And so one of the questions I had when people showed up: "Well, how's your mettā practice going?" And so in my notes, "Well, yeah, Susie's mettā is good. Joey's mettā, he doesn't like it, but I told him he should do it." And she says, "Yeah, tell them to just think it. If they think it long enough, they'll eventually feel it."

So that was the first week of the retreat. And then the remaining 17 days, there were, I believe, 19 students left. And Venerable Ñāṇabodhi, who had been assisting Ayya on all of her retreats since her surgery, he was like, "Do I have to do the interviews? Can I just go on retreat?" And basically the retreat manager, she was like, "Yeah, I'm tired of doing both." So suddenly it was Ayya Khema and I to do all the interviews. And this, well, this is why I'm a teacher today. Because I would do my interviews in the afternoon. And then after the Q&A session, I would go to Ayya Khema's room. And we would discuss the students and what I said and what I could have said and things like that. And then we would discuss the Dharma. And basically she was teaching me to be a Dharma teacher. It was really good that Ayya Khema decided to come back from that surgery. Because without that, I never would have taught. At the end of the retreat, Ayya Khema is already pushing me to teach a retreat. I said, "Well, if somebody will organize a retreat, I'll teach it."

Ayya Khema also was a bit peeved at the amount of New Age stuff that was coming down. You know, students coming in and asking New Age questions and she's like, "That's New Age stuff. I'm teaching Buddhism here." And I remember at the end of the retreat, she said, "I'm not coming back to California. There's too many New Age people here. This is enough." And so she wasn't coming back. And then in '96, her grandson, who lived in San Diego, was getting married. Her grandson had been on retreat with her in '95 in Germany. She had an English language retreat in Germany. I was supposed to go to that retreat, but I couldn't get the time off work. The company I'd worked for had been bought and yeah, that's another story. Anyhow, she was coming for her grandson's wedding. And she wrote to me and she said, "If you can organize a retreat on these dates, I'll teach it." It wasn't like, "Can you organize a retreat this summer?" or "Can you organize a retreat in June?" It was these dates. And it was phrased as, "Well, if you can organize a retreat, I'll teach it." But I took it as "You need to organize this retreat."

And so luckily at the previous retreat, Ayya Khema insisted that I start leading a sitting group of Ayya Khema's students. And so I had a small sitting group. And so we put it together to try and find a place to hold a retreat on those specific dates. We weren't making much progress, but Ayya Khema was friends with Norman Fischer^[23] at San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch and so forth. And so she contacted Norman Fischer and got permission to rent Green Gulch to teach a meditation retreat. Green Gulch had never rented out their facility to anyone else, but they knew Ayya Khema well enough and they had enough respect for what she was doing that they decided they would rent it out to her. And so one of the members of the kalyāṇa-mitta^[24] group and I basically organized the retreat with some help from the other members. And we put on a retreat at Green Gulch. And when Ayya Khema came she said, "I don't have energy really for doing interviews. You and another student of mine who was very advanced that I wanted to have teach, you two will do the interviews. And if somebody really insists on seeing me, then I will see them, but I want you two to do all of the interviews." And so Ayya Khema gave the Dharma talks and Kay and I did all of the interviews. I was rooming with one of my friends and I'm not a morning person. And so I was exhausted and my friend would go to the morning sitting and he would come back to our room, and I would do my first interview before he even got out of bed. It was a lot of work, but it went really well.

And once again, I said, "Well, if somebody will organize a retreat, I'll teach it." And one of my students organized a retreat. So I had to teach it and I taught my first retreat in February of '97. The retreat at Green Gulch had been in July of '96. And I wrote to Ayya Khema about it and that it was good. And so it was like, "Yeah, well, they've invited me. I guess I'll teach another one next year." And then I came home one day in July. Ayya Khema had been scheduled to come back and teach another retreat at Green Gulch in 1998. So I came home in July of '97 and there was a message on my answering machine from Ayya Khema. Ayya Khema did not make overseas phone calls. I could write a letter to Ayya Khema, write it on a computer at work and print it out, stick it in an envelope, mail it off. And two weeks later, I'd get a reply obviously typed out on a manual typewriter. But this was a phone call asking me, could I please call her at this number at this time, the next day.

So I called her and she said, "The cancer has returned. I took one round of chemotherapy. It was horrible. I'm now just taking some Tibetan medicine. My body's given out. It's time for me to go. I'm not going to be able to teach the retreat at Gaia House in November—I guess it was the end of October—will you please teach it?" Well, I'm stunned. I mean, my teacher just told me she's dying and she's also asking me to substitute for her. And I was speechless. And she says, "Okay, think about it and call me back tomorrow at such and such a time." Shortly after hanging up the phone, it was, "Of course, I'll go teach the retreat for Ayya." And so I called her back the next day and said I would teach. So in September, I quit my job that wouldn't give me time off to go to a retreat that I was teaching. I just quit and flew to Europe and went to see Ayya Khema.

She was in the hospital when I saw her. They had discovered the cancer metastasized and gave her at most another couple of months. And when I went to visit her, I could tell that she was in discomfort because when she moved, she would grimace, but she never complained. And all she wanted to do was talk about the Dharma and how I should go about teaching it. She was like standing on the train platform saying, "Well, the train's leaving. Bye." She was completely unconcerned about dying. It was just, "My body's given out. It's time to go." It was really inspiring to see someone that close to death knowing they were that close to death and completely unfazed by being that close to death. So we talked for about an hour and a half, I guess, and I left. And she passed away three weeks later, just as the sun was coming up on a Sunday morning.

She lived a very interesting life. When I was reading her autobiography, I was 50 years old. And when I got to the point in her autobiography where she was 50 years old, I said to myself, "My God, I've led a boring life." I mean, I'd been around the world twice. I'd done all sorts of stuff, but it was nothing compared to what Ayya Khema had done. And she hadn't even really begun to teach at that point. The best was yet to come, as they say. Totally amazing person, brilliant. She was your favorite Jewish grandmother, and she was also very German. If you had trouble with authority figures, she probably wasn't going to be a good teacher for you. But if you were willing to go on a retreat and do what she suggested you do, you were going to have a really great retreat. She had this German sternness, but she had this incredible mettā as well. She would do these wonderful guided mettā visualizations at the end of the evening. She would say, "Please put your attention on your breath for a few moments." And then she would do a visualization. And I'll do one at the close of this so you get a sense of what it's like. And they were especially good for people who are visual rather than auditory. The usual way of doing phrases works, but it works best for people that are auditory rather than visual. And the visualizations work best for people who are visual rather than auditory. And so there's actually multiple ways to do the mettā. And her loving and sweetness was there under this very stern exterior. And once you got to know her, you got to see the sweetness and the loving.

At that retreat in '94, the one where she taught me to be a teacher, Venerable Ñāṇabodhi, her assistant there, her monk, used to be a photographer. And he showed up with a video camera and he videotaped the retreat. And I was like, "Who's ever going to watch these videos? This is ridiculous." Well, after Ayya Khema died, she had founded Buddha Haus as a retreat center, and she also founded Metta Vihara as a monastery. And Metta Vihara put on an English language one-month retreat using those videotapes, and invited me to come. And so I went, and it turned out I was invited to do interviews. So there was Ñāṇabodhi who would do some of the interviews, and there was me who would do some of the interviews. And that was really my first teaching of the month-long course with the Ayya Khema videos. And when I was teaching at Cloud Mountain, I told them about what had happened, and they asked, "Can we get a copy of those videos? Can you do a month-long here?" So starting, I guess, in 2000, I began doing month-long retreats with Ayya Khema videos. And so Ayya Khema would do most of the Dharma talks. And I would do the Q&A after the Dharma talks, and I would do the interviews. The Dharma talks were 13 talks on Dīgha Nikāya No. 9, the Potthapāda Sutta^[25]. That got turned into the book Who Is My Self?. And then there were three more Dharma talks on the opening of the Mettā Sutta. "This is what should be done by one who's skilled in goodness and who seeks the path of peace. Let them be able, upright," etc. And there are 15 of these able, upright qualities. And Ayya Khema spent three days discussing these. And so we have videotapes of her teaching now.

Well, eventually one of my students says, "If I give you a transcript of those talks, will you turn it into a book?" I'm like, "Yeah, I guess so." And so next year she shows up and gives me the transcripts of the three talks. I already had a transcript of a talk that Ayya Khema had done on mettā. So I put those four talks together, along with 10 of Ayya Khema's guided meditations, and turned it into a book, The Path to Peace, which was published this summer by Shambhala. And it's a book on Sīla. The Buddha is teaching Sīla, Samādhi, Paññā. The book Who Is My Self? includes both Samādhi and Paññā, and a little bit of Sīla as well. And this book, though, is really a deep dive into what it means to do what's necessary to find the path to peace. How to live an upright life. I think the book came out quite well. It's available in all the usual places. You can order it directly from Shambhala. You can order it from Amazon and get it on your Kindle. You can get it on your Nook, from Barnes & Noble, etc.

And so that was Ayya Khema, the most remarkable person I ever met. The Reader's Digest used to have this ongoing series, "My Most Unforgettable Character." Well, yeah, for me, that's Ayya Khema. Totally the most amazing person I've ever met in my life. She completely changed my life in ways that are so much better than it ever would have been if I hadn't met her. So I'm going to stop. Oh, and as you can see from the picture, she comes up to my shoulder. So I'm a little over six feet tall, say six-one in that picture, and she was four-eleven. Yet my memories of her, she's taller than I am. She projected as very tall. And of course, I'm sitting on the floor because back in those days I could sit cross-legged on the floor. And she's sitting up a bit. So I'm looking up at her and who she was, she projected as somebody taller than six feet, even though she was only four-eleven. So I'm going to stop talking and stop the sharing and see if people have questions or comments. If you can raise your hand, then I will call on you.

Q&A

Eileen: Thank you for the talk and thank you for introducing me to Ayya. I had a quick question. In the beginning of your talk, you had mentioned that Jhāna practice wasn't practiced. It wasn't studied and it wasn't taught. But do you believe that people were actually experiencing Jhāna meditation, either not knowing what it was or having it be a mystery or something that existed under the surface of teaching?

Leigh: Yes, very definitely. Considering that about, I don't know, 20%—a quarter, I'm not sure the numbers exactly—of students that I get talk about falling into these states, not knowing what they are. They're sitting there doing their Vipassanā^[26] and they wind up with all this joy or something like that. So yes, they were definitely being stumbled into and not explained. I mean, that happened to me. It was only my second retreat I stumbled in. So, you know, I did have three years of practice before I stumbled in.

It also turns out that a lot of children do these states. They find one of these states and just go hang out in it. I had one student who knew the first four Jhānas from her childhood. And she'd be sitting there in the fourth Jhāna and her mother would go outside and say, "Stop goofing off," and send her out. But she was in the fourth Jhāna. And when she came on retreat with me and discovered, "Oh, this is what I was doing as a child," she was very deeply touched and thrilled. But yeah, if you work seriously following your breath for any length of time, the odds are fairly good you will stumble into one or more of these states. This is where the mind likes to go. You get quiet and you introduce some pleasure to the state. You're going to wind up in first or second Jhāna.

And so yes, the Jhānas were certainly being experienced even if the label was not being put on it. I remember at that retreat at Wat Suan Mokkh, the second retreat where I stumbled into the first Jhāna. At the beginning of the retreat, a Dutch woman raised her hand and said, "What's all this joy I'm getting when I meditate?" Of course, I had no idea until four days later, I'm stumbling into all this joy. And I go, "Oh, that must be what that Dutch woman was talking about." So clearly, people were stumbling in for centuries. The Buddha, remember, learned the Jhānas from his teachers. At least that's where we assume he learned them. But he stumbled into the first one on his own as a child. So people, I'm guessing, have been stumbling into the Jhānas continuously since from long before the Buddha ever came along. They say that mindfulness of breathing may go back 2,500 years before the Buddha. 5,000 years of people following their breath. So I'm going to say 4,900 years of people doing Jhānas. It's just where the mind goes. Ayya Khema would say, "You're not putting the Jhāna in there. It's already in there. You're just manifesting it by stopping covering it up." We have the neurological pathways. We all have neurological pathways for rapture, happiness, contentment, quiet stillness. The pathway is there, you just need a trigger. Well, mostly we get the trigger from outside. Your friend gives you a nice birthday present and you're happy. Well, it turns out you can get happy just if you get concentrated. You just use the concentration as your trigger rather than something external. So yeah, lots of Jhānas been going on even if they weren't being taught.

Eileen: Thank you.

Leigh: Mary.

Mary: I can't find the raise your hand button. So that's why I just raised my hand. It works. I find it very curious that this whole talk is on loving-kindness. I rarely have anybody really recommend loving-kindness as a practice. It's more like, "Well, yeah, if you have time, you go ahead and do that." It's more breath, breath, breath. And I'm not very good at following my breath. But I think I am good at doing loving-kindness. What is this thing about—now you're telling me that that's what she told you on her deathbed to write a book on it? Did she ever teach it herself? Or what? I mean, why aren't teachers actually really promoting this method of meditation?

Leigh: Yeah, so the book is her teaching it. I just took the transcripts of what she taught and put it into a book. I was the editor. It's Ayya Khema's voice. You'll have to ask the other teachers why they don't teach it. I could get into big trouble by speculating, but I have heard something about wrong speech, so I'm not going to go there. But I think loving-kindness meditation is extremely important. And in fact, if they came to me and they said, "You can only do one form of meditation, choose," I'd choose loving-kindness meditation. It feels nice. It allows me to think of lots and lots of people in a really nice way. It gets me concentrated and it leaves me in a really good mood afterwards.

I have done 10 weeks of Brahmavihārā^[27] practice once when I was at the Forest Refuge. I did four weeks of mettā practice and then two weeks each of Karuṇā^[28], Muditā^[29], and Upekkhā^[30]. And it was great and I got lots of insights, not while doing the practice. But when I stayed mindful afterwards, then the insights would show up. So I would say if you're only going to do one practice, do mettā. That's a really, really good practice. There's discussion amongst the scholars as to how far mettā can take you. You can find some suttas that would indicate that it can only lead to rebirth in the Brahma realms. But you can find a large number of other suttas that I would say would lead you to the third stage of awakening. To get fully awakened, you're going to have to make the breakthrough to not-self. And mettā is a relative practice. You give mettā to yourself and to others. So it's not an anattā^[31] practice. So you're going to need to do some anattā practice. But I think it can take you to the third stage of awakening. I mean, think about it. If every action you made was propelled by mettā behind it, what your life would be like? No, it's really good stuff. So Ayya Khema felt it was really important. She taught a lot of other practices, but she felt that was the one that everybody needed to do at the start of every sitting.

Mary: Well, I'm assuming that you're meaning that Jhānas really aren't included in the mettā practice.

Leigh: Jhānas aren't included in the mettā practice, but if you're good at mettā practice, it's easy to find the Jhānas. Because they will get you concentrated enough so that you have the concentration for entering the Jhānas. And they'll put you in a positive state of mind that's going to be very helpful for entering the Jhānas. So yeah, people who like doing mettā generally find learning the Jhānas easier than people who like any other practice.

Mary: Thank you very much.

Leigh: You're welcome. Other questions or comments? Eileen.

Eileen: Hi, thank you very much, Leigh, for this talk. I love hearing about Ayya Khema. And I've read some of her materials, but mainly I love her visualizations. I really have benefited from them so much. And I think, you know, and I hope other people will benefit from them as well. Not many people teach it that way. She's repeating phrases. But her visualizations, and I hope it's okay to say that I found some on YouTube and places like that, that I could just listen to. It really, really made the practice much more meaningful to me. And I think, what I think about mettā is it's very portable. I take it with me to the grocery store and try to put out mettā to the people there, and when I'm teaching my classes. And so it really does, I think, uplift my heart. And I think it uplifts other people that I'm interacting with that they don't maybe know what that word is, but they seem to feel the energy. And that's what it is to me, it's an energy that makes me happier and seems to make other people happier. So I appreciate all you're sharing about the loving-kindness practice. Thank you.

Leigh: You're very welcome. Yeah, it does the same for me. It really puts me in a very nice, powerful place. I'll put another link in the chat. This is to Ayya Khema's guided mettā meditations. There's a couple dozen on Dharma Seed. And I would suggest that you start by listening to the ones from 1996 and 1995. The audio quality is better. The quality of what Ayya is saying is fantastic throughout, but the audio quality is better with the later material. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of them right there. And on my website, there are transcripts of these and we have transcripts of 10 of them in the book, The Path to Peace.

Someone put another question in the chat. "Where are you living and teaching now?" I'm living in Oakland, California. And I'm teaching on Zoom. I know the president said that the pandemic is over, but I don't believe everything the president says, no matter who the president is. I just know too many people that have come down with COVID, even though they were fully masked on an airplane flight. So, at the moment, all of my retreats are on Zoom. There's a retreat schedule on my website. I can put the link to my website in the chat as well. And if you click on schedule, you can find what I'm teaching. Both of the retreats for this year, the remaining two retreats are full, but you can put yourself on the waiting list if you want. And the ones next year haven't opened for registration yet.

Someone said, "I love that you shared what your life would be like if everything was motivated by loving-kindness." So, the Buddha's Eightfold Path, number two, right intention. What is right intention? Intentions of renunciation, intentions of non-ill will, intentions of harmlessness. Or we could say, what is right intention? Letting go, love, and compassion. Think about living on a planet where that was the motivation for everybody. Wouldn't that be a spectacular place to live? People are now trying to get more, they're letting go. And they're motivated by love and compassion. Yeah, powerful.

Other questions? Last chance.

Guided Meditation

Okay, so we've talked about these wonderful guided mettā meditations. I suggest you listen to Ayya, but right now you're going to have to listen to me. The one I'm going to do, I think, was Ayya Khema's favorite. I say this because there were a couple of times where it was clear that this was a more important time for doing mettā, like at Green Gulch, she gave the mettā for their Sunday talk. She gave the talk and then she gave the mettā and this is the one she chose. So I'm going to do my version of what Ayya Khema, I think, considered her favorite form of mettā.

So in order to begin, please put your attention on your breath for a few moments.

Now look into your heart and you will find a very beautiful flower garden. A flower garden full of the most amazing varieties of flowers. Lots of flowers.

Now imagine that you go for a stroll through the flower garden of your heart enjoying its beauty. Its visual beauty and its olfactory beauty.

Now think of someone that you really care about and pick a nice bouquet of flowers from the garden of your heart and present it to this person and see the joy on their face.

Think of other people you're close to. Bring them to mind one by one and for each of them pick a nice bouquet of flowers from the garden of your heart. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Think of your acquaintances, people like your neighbors, your coworkers, people you see in stores you frequent. Again, pick a nice bouquet of flowers for each one as you think of them one by one. Thank you.

Think of someone you find difficult and pick a nice bouquet for that person as well and present it to them nicely.

Pick flowers to give to everyone on this Zoom meeting. It's a big garden. There's lots of flowers.

Now start picking flowers for everyone in your neighborhood and then everyone in your town, your city. Lots of flowers. You can pick flowers for everybody on the continent. There's that many flowers in your heart.

Notice how much larger the flower garden is than when you started. There's enough flowers for everybody on the planet. Just keep picking nice bouquets to give to anyone and everyone you can think of. Think of places you've traveled, places you've seen in a documentary or on the news. All those people, give them flowers from your heart.

Now put your attention back on yourself, back in your heart and notice how much larger the flower garden has become. It's way bigger than when you started. It's a funny thing about love. The more you give it away, the more you got.

So thank you. Thank you for coming and sharing my reminiscence of Ayya Khema. November 2nd will be 25 years since she left us and next August will be 100 years since she arrived. So yeah, some auspicious anniversaries coming up. Highly recommend her books, highly recommend her Dharma talks. There are 400 of them on Dharma Seed. And the link I put to the guided mettā meditations, that's on a page that basically has links to all of those talks better organized than they are on Dharma Seed. So anyhow, and enjoy your book. I think it came out alright. So thank you very much for coming.