BDE’s special issue on women, Mujeres y budismo en los países de habla hispana, is a unique project. Since it tells the story of Buddhist women in Spanish-speaking countries, it highlights problems specific to these women that might have been overlooked in English-language media. In Anglophone Buddhist feminist circles, including the broader Sakyadhita community, discourse […]
hispanophone
Circles of Practice: Spanish-speaking Buddhist Women
In the previous entry on our series introducing Hispanophone Buddhism, we covered Montse Castellà Olivé, founding president of the Spain chapter of Sakyadhita. Sakyadhita is commonly known as one of Buddhism’s most prominent women’s advocacy and research organizations. Since 2020, Sakyadhita Spain has hosted ten “circles of practice,” known in Spanish as círculo de práctica […]
Havana Zen: A Japanese Tradition Arises in Cuba
One of the fastest-growing schools of Buddhism in Cuba is that of Japanese Zen, which has enjoyed a long and rich history in Latin America. It found roots in other countries earlier, most famously Brazil thanks to waves of immigration by Japanese people since the early 20th Century. However, thanks to a visionary pair of […]
Mahayana in Cuba: Chinese Forebears
Lined by small restaurants, shops, laundromats, cultural societies, medicinal establishments, and leisure and education clubs, Barrío Chino in Havana is perhaps the largest “Chinatown” in the Latin American world, with a history dating to the 19th Century. This is the locus where the earliest recorded presence of people practicing Buddhist customs in Cuba can be […]
The Presence of Theravada Buddhism in Cuba
Think of Cuba, and one might see in the mind’s eye fine cigars and cocktails by the beach, ironic and decontextualized Che Guevara art, and romantic hotels and bars in the midst of Havana’s scenic buildings and streets. Yet there is something unusual developing in this misunderstood and oft-romanticized country: an interest in the Buddhist […]
A New World: Hispanophone Buddhism in Europe and the Americas
The term “Buddhism in the West” can be rather misleading. Too often, this umbrella term denotes Buddhism in the Anglophone world; namely, Buddhism in the US, Canada, and possibly Britain and Australia. But below the US, in Central America and South America, as well as in the former colonial heartland of Spain, the sphere of […]