Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue in Brazil: An Interview with Patricia Palazzo Tsai

As part of interfaith week, we are interviewing a number of people connected with Practical Theology Hub about their work on interfaith dialogue. In this interview we ask our Topic Editor for Buddhism, Patricia Palazzo Tsai, about interfaith dialogue and Buddhist traditions in Brazil.

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Patricia Palazzo Tsai – a Brazilian Mahāyāna Geluk Buddhist practitioner. I am serving as Topic Editor for Buddhism of Practical Theology Hub, Legal Director of Associação Buddha-Dharma in Brazil, Legal Director of Sakyadhita São Paulo, and I also teach at the undergraduate program of Buddhist Theology at Instituto Pramāṇa. Besides all this I am conducting my PhD research at Universidade Metodista de São Paulo, and I am also part of Scholars at the Peripheries research group and Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics at the University of St. Andrews. 

We often associate Brazil with Catholicism, but there are also Buddhist communities there. How did Buddhism come to Brazil? How many active practitioners are there?

Buddhism arrived in Brazil through the efforts of Japanese communities at the beginning of the 20^th century. Back then, other religious traditions were outlawed and therefore not accepted, so Buddhism was essentially a religion for those closed, Japanese communities. Later on, other Buddhist traditions arrived including Chinese, Tibetan and Thai. In terms of numbers, there are over 243,000 Buddhists in Brazil (according to 2010’s census, less than 10% of the total population), and many of those self-declared Buddhists are not part of any community. However, it is a hard task to gather information on the number of active practitioners, because there is little communication between the different Buddhist traditions.

3. How have Buddhists in Brazil interacted with the non-Buddhist community? Are there organizations which foster interfaith dialogue and/or interfaith understanding? Is this mostly an academic movement or are ordinary believers and practitioners also involved?

Some non-Buddhist communities are open to dialogue, but they are few, so interaction between Buddhists and other religious communities is scarce. Many ordinary practitioners won’t invite you to share the same table if you don’t share the same identity markers. Some Buddhist communities lack the desire to enter dialogue as well, so interfaith dialogue basically happens in an academic setting.

When not in an academic context, it is almost confined to religious leaders at different conferences or events. There are some organizations that are trying to break the ice by promoting interfaith dialogue as something central, but this usually implies a focus on dialogue with Christian traditions. Regarding Buddhist traditions, that I know of, Associação Buddha-Dharma is one of the few organizations trying to promote interfaith dialogue from a grassroots level, with social projects and attempts to build bridges of engagement with other traditions.

4. How have you personally been involved in Christian-Buddhist dialogue in Brazil and elsewhere?

I grew up in a Catholic family, and when I became a Buddhist, I understood that there is an urgency in promoting interfaith dialogue in Brazil. Since the community I am part of is incredibly engaged in action, our idea was to achieve social change and peace by promoting interfaith dialogue. Furthermore, since many believers don’t have access to theological programs we created two institutes – Instituto Pramāṇa, for Buddhist Theology, and Instituto S. Didymus, for Christian Theology – with the goal of amplifying access to the needy and teaching them about interfaith dialogue and cultures of peace, thus leading them to create their own social projects as well. We are also engaged in developing our undergraduate programs on other religious traditions in order to open more doors for interfaith dialogue in Brazil, and in bringing interfaith dialogue into public and private schools as well.

5. Moving forward what are the challenges and opportunities for interfaith dialogue in Brazil?

Brazil is an immense country, so it’s very geography can be a challenge but also an opportunity for interfaith dialogue. The challenges come from the religious leaderships and even ordinary believers, that do not wish to engage, or even attack those who do so. And the religious market is also a concern, since it promotes only neoliberal values, not really putting effort into solving common problems and bringing union.

It is important to note that there is a lack of investment and/or concern from public authorities, so this challenge ends up creating opportunities for organizations and religious traditions to come together and try to promote and disseminate interfaith dialogue.

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You can find out more about Patricia’s work through her LinkTree and Academia.edu profile.

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© Practical Theology Hub and Patricia Palazzo Tsai, 2022.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “Lighting the Way” by S.Yume is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.