Karuna Dharma

Karuna Dharma (; April 21, 1940—February 22, 2014) was an American Buddhist scholar and nun. She was the first American-born woman to become a fully ordained Buddhist nun in the Vietnamese tradition. She was the abbess of the International Buddhist Meditation Center of Los Angeles.

Biography Karuna Dharma was born Joyce Adele Pettingill on April 21, 1940, in Beloit, Wisconsin, to a Baptist family. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she met Ben Ting Fun Lum. They married and moved to Los Angeles where he was an aerospace engineer for McDonnell Douglas. She helped him establish the International Buddhist Meditation Center (IBMC) in 1970. She took full ordination in the Lieu Quang school of Vietnamese Thiền from Thích Thiên-Ân in 1976. This made her the first fully ordained female member of the Buddhist monastic community in the U.S. Following Thích Thiên-Ân's death in 1980, she succeeded him in directing the International Buddhist Meditation Center. and was greatly influential in their resettlement in the United States following the Vietnam War. Dharma interpreted the Prātimokṣa's prohibition on sexual misconduct as not applying to people in a committed relationship. She estimated at one point that one third of the community at IBMC was lesbian or gay.

During Venerable Karuna Dharma's lifetime, she ordained nearly 50 bhikkhunis and hundreds of Buddhist clergy and laity. She served as president of the American Buddhist Congress and vice president of the College of Buddhist Studies and the Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California. She founded Sakyadhita, the Buddhist-Catholic dialog, the Buddhist Sangha Council of SoCal, and the Inter-religious Council of SoCal.