Ayya Khema: From Berlin Refugee to Buddhist Nun

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 September 2026

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Ayya Khema (1923–1997) was a German-born Theravāda Buddhist nun, teacher and author: a Jewish child who fled Berlin in 1938, ordained in Sri Lanka at fifty-six, founded monastic centres in Australia, Sri Lanka and Germany, and helped convene the first international conference of Buddhist nuns. She is not Khemā of the Pali Canon.

That last point has to come first, because the two names are identical and the search results routinely run them together.

She is not Khemā, the Buddha’s disciple

Khemā was a nun of the Buddha’s own community, some two and a half thousand years ago — the one he named foremost among his nuns in wisdom, who answered King Pasenadi’s question about what becomes of a realised one after death. Her verses, her discourse and the later stories told about her are on our page about Khemā and Dhammadinnā.

Ayya Khema is a twentieth-century German woman who was given that name when she ordained in Sri Lanka in 1979. Ayya is a form of address for a nun — roughly “Venerable” — and the Pali word khema means safe, secure. Nothing on this page is about the ancient Khemā, and nothing on that page is about this one.

The two lives touch at exactly one point, and it is a real one. Hellmuth Hecker’s Buddhist Women at the Time of The Buddha was published in English by the Buddhist Publication Society as The Wheel 292/293 (1982), “translated from the German by Sister Khema” — and its foreword is signed Sister Khema, Wat Buddha Dhamma, Wisemans Ferry, N.S.W., Australia, January 1982, at the forest monastery she had helped to establish. One of the booklet’s chapters is titled “Khema of Great Wisdom.” The modern Khemā translated the life of the ancient one — and that same booklet is cited as a source on our page about her.

Berlin, Glasgow, Shanghai

She was born in Berlin in 1923 — the German National Library’s authority record gives 25 August — into a Jewish family. In 1938 she left Germany on a transport of two hundred children and was taken to Glasgow. Her parents had already gone to China; she rejoined them in Shanghai, and when the war reached the city the family was interned by the Japanese. Her father died in the camp. It was liberated in 1945. Kate Wheeler, reviewing Ayya Khema’s autobiography for Tricycle, records that most of her relatives were murdered by the Nazis, and that Ayya Khema concluded that hating Germans for it would only damage her, and so did not.

The accounts of the escape do not agree in their details, and it is better to say so than to pick. Tricycle’s own editorial note dates it to 1938, with a transport of two hundred children to Glasgow; Wheeler, reading the autobiography, dates it to 1939 and says a Jewish family took her in; her student Leigh Brasington says she was put on the last children’s transport out of Germany, went to relatives in Scotland at fifteen, and travelled on to Shanghai by Japanese freighter in 1941.

Four years after the camp was liberated she emigrated to the United States, married, and had two children.

The long way round to the Dhamma

Between 1960 and 1964 she travelled through Asia with her husband and son, and it was then that she learned to meditate. Brasington fills in the shape of those years from what she told him: an engineering posting to Pakistan, a drive from Pakistan to London in a Land Rover in the early 1960s, a return to India — where she first met Hindu meditation — and then an organic farm in Queensland, Australia.

It was in Australia that a neighbour asked whether she would like to hear a talk by a Buddhist monk. The monk was Ven. Khantipālo, and by Brasington’s account she “knew she was home.” She practised with him, then assisted on his retreats. She began teaching meditation in 1975, and in 1978 helped to establish Wat Buddha Dhamma, a Theravāda forest monastery near Sydney.

Ordination, and the ordination Sri Lanka could not give her

In 1979, aged fifty-six and already a grandmother, she ordained as a nun in Sri Lanka and received the name Khemā. What was available to her there was ten-precept ordination — the status of a sil mata — because the Theravāda bhikkhunī lineage had lapsed centuries before and full ordination for women was not then possible. Why that happened, and where each tradition now stands, is the subject of our page on bhikkhunī ordination.

She did not leave it there. Brasington, who was her student for twelve years, says she later took full ordination at a Chinese temple in Los Angeles — in the East Asian lineage that had preserved the women’s ordination line unbroken — and then “went back to being perhaps the first, fully ordained Theravada nun in a thousand years.” That is his hedge, and it is worth keeping. Wheeler’s review of the autobiography records the step too, without a date. The specifics that circulate online — a named temple, a year — we could not confirm from a source that states them, so they are not here. What is not in doubt is that she encouraged other Sri Lankan women to seek full ordination too — Brasington counts her among the people who revived it — and that she died three months before the large Bodh Gayā ordination of February 1998.

What she built

Sri Lanka

In Colombo she set up the International Buddhist Women’s Centre as a training centre for Sri Lankan nuns. More ambitiously, she established a nunnery on Parappuduwa, an island at Dodanduwa in the south; Sandy Boucher’s obituary says the government offered her the island. She was living there on 1 January 1987, when she signed the acknowledgements of All of Us, twelve Dhamma talks given on the island and later printed as a book. The project did not survive her: Brasington attributes its closure to the civil war.

Germany

She had been away from Germany for some fifty years when her students asked her to come back. In 1988 she and a small group of them formed the idea of a place to practise and pass on the Buddha’s teaching in Germany, and chose the Allgäu, roughly midway between Stuttgart and Munich. The Grüntenhof was found at the end of that year, converted through the spring, and she gave her first meditation course at Buddha-Haus in late May 1989. The Jhana Verlag followed in 1990 to publish her books, and a Buddha-Haus city centre in Munich in 1994. In 1995 the community bought an alpine inn with seven and a half hectares of land, and in June 1997 opened Metta Vihara — described by her community as Germany’s first Buddhist forest monastery, and by Boucher as the first Theravāda monastery in Germany. The first ordinations conducted in the German language took place there.

Sakyadhita, and speaking for nuns

In 1987, at the Kalachakra Temple in Bodh Gayā, she was one of the organisers of the first international conference on Buddhist nuns — “Buddhist Nuns in Society.” That conference established Sakyadhita, the International Association of Buddhist Women; Sakyadhita’s own account names her, alongside Chatsumarn Kabilsingh and Karma Lekshe Tsomo, as the women who gathered there to talk about the difficulties women faced across the Buddhist traditions. The Ceylon Daily News memorial notice adds that the Dalai Lama was the conference’s keynote speaker. It is the same organisation Tenzin Palmo would later serve as president.

In May 1987, she spoke at the United Nations in New York on Buddhism and world peace. The memorial notice published in the Ceylon Daily News after her death calls her the first Buddhist nun to address the UN; we have not found a second source that states it, so we report it as that notice’s claim rather than as settled fact. She also ordained nuns of her own — the same notice names Sister Sanghamitta of Switzerland, Sister Dhammadina, Sister Vayama of Australia and Sister Uppalavanna of Galle, names drawn, like hers, from the early tradition.

What she taught

Her teaching was plain, unmystical and often funny, and three strands run through it.

The first is mettā, loving-kindness, which she insisted begins with oneself — not as self-indulgence but as a practical precondition.

The second is anattā, not-self — the subject of the Bodhi Leaves talk the Buddhist Publication Society printed in 1984, and the idea behind her best-known title, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere.

The third is the one that set her apart. She taught the jhānas, the stages of meditative absorption, at a time when, as Boucher put it in her obituary, contemporary Western Theravāda teachers generally ignored them. That emphasis was hers and her students’, not the Theravāda world’s settled position — one teacher is never a tradition — but it is much of the reason her talks are still edited into books three decades after her death.

She wrote around twenty-five books in English and German, translated into seven languages. Being Nobody, Going Nowhere (Wisdom Publications, 1987) received the Christmas Humphreys Memorial Award in 1988. Her autobiography appeared in German in 1997 and in English in 1998 as I Give You My Life, translated by Sherab Chödzin Kohn; Wheeler’s review called her judgements of herself and others decisive and unapologetic, and wondered aloud what had been “crushed and left behind” by so formidable a will. The Path to Peace, edited from her talks by Brasington, was published in 2022.

Two claims worth handling carefully

“The first Western woman to become a Theravāda Buddhist nun.” Tricycle prints it in her author biography. It is loose. The Buddhist Publication Society’s own biography of Nyanatiloka Thera records that the German Else Buchholz came to Ceylon in 1928 and became a ten-precept nun (dasa-sīla-mātā) at Anuradhapura under the name Uppalavaṇṇā, and stayed in Ceylon for the rest of her life — half a century before Ayya Khema ordained. The stronger and better-supported claim is the one Brasington makes about her full ordination, and he hedges even that.

Her birth name. The sources disagree. The German National Library’s authority record files her under the variant name Ilse Kussel; Kate Wheeler, reading the autobiography for Tricycle, gives Ilse Rosenthal. We have not found a source that reconciles them, so we give both rather than choose.

Her death

She died on 2 November 1997 at Buddha-Haus, in the hamlet of Uttenbühl in Oy-Mittelberg, the community she had founded eight years earlier; Boucher’s obituary gives the cause as breast cancer, which had been part of her life for several years, and says she went with a sense of fulfilment. Spiritual leadership of the community passed to Bhante Nyanabodhi, and Buddha-Haus, Metta Vihara and the Jhana Verlag are still going.

Hers is a particular kind of Buddhist life, and not the one the genre usually celebrates: no childhood in a monastery, no lineage behind her, a first ordination at fifty-six after a refugee childhood, two marriages, two children and a farm. That she is still read says something the tradition keeps having to relearn — that it is possible to start very late and still finish the work. For the wider story, see women in Buddhism and the life of a Buddhist nun; for contemporaries, Tenzin Palmo and the lay master Dīpā Ma; for the country where she ordained, Buddhism in Sri Lanka; for how the teaching reached Europe at all, Buddhism in the West; and for others who shaped it, famous Buddhist teachers.