Growing Pains, Budding Flowers: The Hispanic Association of Buddhism

By Raymond Lam | | Buddhistdoor Global

I met Ricardo Guerrero in July last year, during a landmark conference between Buddhists and Carmelites in Avila, Spain. It was an unusual conference by any standards: few Buddhists have much knowledge of Saint Teresa’s Carmelite Order, and Spain has had relatively little exposure to Buddhism. The conference’s premises and ambitions—to engage in genuine, non-missionary interfaith dialogue in the globalized age of Pope Francis—requires deeply original thinking. But Ricardo, a Spanish-speaking Buddhist leader immersed in Hispanic Christian society, is no stranger to original thinking. Ricardo believes that he has always seen life in a Buddhist way. Born in 1964 and growing up Catholic, like so many children in Spain, he couldn’t find satisfactory answers to his questions about theism. “Many people in Spain see Catholicism as very close to power. The Spanish Church was complicit with the Fascist regime until 1979 and collapsed after Franco’s death. For us, the Church is historically compromised.”



The statistics seem to match: in Spain, fewer than 50 per cent of people profess to be Catholics, while only 18 per cent consider themselves practicing Catholics. This is a drastic decrease in numbers for a country that, only several centuries ago, was exporting Catholicism around the world through colonialism and helping to reshape the entire continent of Latin America in Catholicism’s spiritual image.

As for Ricardo, he left the Church at 18. In 2000, he went to Sri Lanka where he met the monk who would become his master, Ven. Nandisena—an Argentinian-born monastic who ordained in 1991 at Taungpulu Kaba Aye Monastery, in Boulder Creek, California, under Ven. Silananda. It was also Ricardo’s first time in a Buddhist-majority society, and he found the atmosphere of Colombo more welcoming than that of Madrid (he remembers, in particular, the many smiles of strangers). After reading about the Buddhist tradition and becoming a practitioner, he grew confident that it was the right spiritual path for him. Together with Ven. Nandisena, Ricardo founded the Asociacion Hispana de Buddhismo (Hispanic Association of Buddhism) in 2012, with the goal of spreading Buddhism in South America. With the majority of the Spanish-speaking population living in South America, Ricardo chose to use the word “Hispanic” for his organization, rather than simply “Spanish,” taking into account the entire Hispanic cultural family. Notably, the Buddhist presence in South America dates back to the early 1900s and is actually older than the Buddhist diffusion in Spain, which really only began, very modestly, after the end of the Franco regime. Expressly non-sectarian and ecumenical, the focus of the organization is to translate the Pali Canon into Spanish, although texts from different masters have also been translated. The association also offers meditation courses, classes on Buddhist thought (up to 40 sessions per year), and teaches mindfulness within the Buddhist philosophical framework.