Skip to main content

A helpful nun


Once attending the annual Eckhart conference in Oxford, I listened to a compelling talk by Ayya Khema - a German Jewish woman who at the age of forty eight had been ordained as a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka. It was compelling, firstly, because of her presence - calm, poised, kindly with an edge of appropriate detachment and discipline; and, secondly, because she imparted simply the most useful advice on meditation I have ever received (to date) - on how to deal with distraction.

This was to compile a simple vocabulary that provided a classifying order for your distractions and when you found yourself distracted, as I often do, simply draw on the word list for the most appropriate one, gently name the distraction, and return to your point of focus. It works, mostly beautifully, and I have been grateful ever since.

In reading her autobiography this week, mostly on an aeroplane, I realized the remarkable life that had given birth to her presence. Remarkable both for the diversity of its experience and, at another level, it's touching of all our ordinariness (for good and ill). A refugee from Nazi Germany, who have been evacuated to Scotland on a 'kinder train', she rejoins her parents in Shanghai just in time for it to fall into the hands of the Japanese. Her skills as a typist are what keeps her, and her parents, afloat. Emigrating to America, she passes through a suburban life of marriage and children, a divorce, a second husband, a life of  adventurous travel that includes engagement on a project to build a power station in Pakistan, that comes to 'rest' in Australia and the ownership of a farm.

But all through this is a slow, steady tugging of Blake's golden string, pulling her towards yet something other, deeper, more meaningful. She takes up meditation (initially taught her by the Mother at Sri Aurobindo's ashram in Pondicherry) before (in Australia) being drawn into Buddhism (in the Theravada tradition). Another separation from her second husband leads to the freedom necessary to pursue a monastic vocation (in Sri Lanka and, finally, to spreading the dhamma in the West from her native Germany).

It is all told with a simplicity and insight that is moving, most especially because nothing is felt to be hidden and it is enfolded in a growing sense of loving non-attachment and freedom. It was narrated, as it happens, as she approached her own death, and in knowing the reality of the cancer that would finally kill her, and you sense throughout the presence of a good death coming to greet her. I am left wishing that my encounter had not been the only one; and, yet reminded that even once we can be touched or touch in a way that is lasting; and, in each and every encounter, we have that choice. Making the most of that choice needs a continual practice and deepening of awareness - a making that Ayya Khema dwelt in abundance. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more