A Place for Nuns: Ayya Khema's Institutional Legacy

When Ayya Khema was ordained in Sri Lanka in 1979, full bhikkhuni ordination in the Theravada lineage was not available to her at all, the female ordination line having died out there centuries earlier, so the standing available to a Western woman entering Theravada monastic life remained structurally limited whatever her own training or seniority. Her response was institutional rather than purely personal: founding Parappuduwa Nuns Island at Dodanduwa gave women a dedicated place to pursue intensive practice and ordination on terms that did not depend on a male monastic hierarchy's ordinary accommodation, and Buddha Haus and Metta Forest Monastery in Germany extended the same project to a European setting. The 1987 International Conference of Buddhist Nuns pushed the same problem onto a wider stage than any one centre could, gathering Buddhist nuns from multiple countries and traditions to compare notes on a shared structural disadvantage, and its direct result, the founding of Sakyadhita as a standing worldwide organization, turned a single conference into ongoing infrastructure rather than a one-time gathering. Read together, her career traces a consistent argument made in institutions rather than only in her twenty five books: that the absence of a clear monastic path for women was a solvable problem, and that solving it meant building the missing structures rather than waiting for existing ones to change.