Buddhist monk finds a digital road to the Latino world

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Bhante Sanathavihari, a monk who lives at the Sarathchandra Buddhist Center in North Hollywood, begins his weekly guided meditation sessions by explaining the concept behind Loving Kindness meditation. He tells his listeners that they can keep their eyes open or closed and that they don’t have to cross their legs if it’s too uncomfortable.To get more buddhist culture, you can visit shine news official website.

“Wherever you are, it’s fine,” he adds in Spanish, reassuring his audience of about 100, scattered across Mexico, Central America, South America, Spain and the U.S., that distance is no barrier to Buddhist practice.

Sanathavihari’s far-flung meditation students, tuning in via the videoconferencing platform Zoom, are part of a growing body of Latino Buddhist adherents in the strongly Catholic and Protestant Christian realms of Mexico and South and Central America, where Buddhist temples or even communities of believers are rare.

For Sanathavihari and his students, social media is not only a convenience but also a primary way to bring Buddhism to the Spanish-speaking world. “I think it all can be put at the feet of technology. Everyone in Latin America has mobile phones, so they have the whole world available to them.”Buddhist monk Bhante Sanathavihari, based in Southern California, uses social media to reach Spanish-speaking Buddhists in Latin America and elsewhere. Photo courtesy of Prasanna Yamasinghe

Sanathavihari, 33, whose birth name is Ricardo Ortega, was raised Catholic in Los Angeles. He spent nine years in the military, including three deployments in Afghanistan, before being ordained as novice in the Theravada Buddhist tradition at age 29. In July, he went to Sri Lanka to receive his higher ordination.

He happened on the idea for offering classes in Spanish when Latino students, who make up about half of those at the weekly meditation sessions at the Buddhist center, complained they were having trouble understanding the instructors, who are mostly Sinhalese, the majority population of the island nation of Sri Lanka.Their native language was Spanish,” said Sanathavihari of the students. “The monks’ first language was Sinhala, and they were teaching in English. I was trying to explain things to them to help them out, and they were like, ‘You should do things in Spanish.’ The monks also said I should do things in Spanish.”

He began by making a YouTube channel called Monje en la Modernidad (Monk in Modernity), stocked with videos explaining Buddhist practices and texts in Spanish, along with interviews with other Spanish-speaking Buddhists about social and historical topics.

His success on YouTube prompted Sanathavihari to found a Facebook group that now has more than 600 members as well as virtual meditation sessions and a study group for about a dozen aspiring practitioners.Juan Valdes, a Mexican-American who has come to the Buddhist center for five years, said Sanathavihari’s work is filling a critical void. “The way they regard him and talk to him and go to him for advice — I don’t see anyone else doing that in Spanish,” said Valdes, who is considering becoming a monk.

In addition to social media, Sanathavihari is spreading the word through the time-honored practice of translating religious texts. Having created a manual on chanting in Spanish, he has translated “Returning to Tranquility,” an introduction to Buddhist thought by his teacher Madawela Punnaji, and is currently translating another book by Punnaji about Buddhism and psychotherapy. His longer-term goal is to translate the sutra, or discourse by Buddha, on Loving Kindness from Pali, the language of ancient Buddhist scripture.

“Most people I’ve encountered, what they know about Buddhism is from movies, pop culture or on the internet from memes,” he said. “Very few people look at the sources, whether it’s Pali, Sanskrit or Chinese. Latinos just don’t have access to those materials.”