Sante Poromaa

Sante Poromaa
Sante Poromaa
Title	Sensei
Personal life
Nationality	Swedish
Religious life
Religion	Zen Buddhism
School	Soto and Rinzai
Lineage	Harada-Yasutani
Senior posting
Based in	Stockholm Zen Center; Zengården training temple
Predecessor	Bodhin Kjolhede Roshi
Website	www.zazen.se

Sante Poromaa is a Zen Buddhist priest and teacher, in the lineage of Harada-Yasutani. He was born in 1958 in Kiruna, Sweden. He commenced his Zen training in the early eighties, as a student of Roshi Phillip Kapleau. When Roshi Kapleau went into semi-retirement, he also became a student of Kapleau's successor, Bodhin Kjolhede Roshi.^[1]

Poromaa was ordained as a Zen priest in 1991. He finished his formal koan training in 1993. In 1998, he was authorized to teach by Bodhin Roshi, and has been teaching full time since then. Together with his co-teacher Kanja Odland Sensei, he has been instrumental in the growth of a network of City Zen Centers in Sweden, Finland and Scotland, as well as Zengården, a full-time training temple in rural Sweden.

Poromaa offers regular sesshin (meditation retreats) at Zengården, in English. He also gives public talks on Zen and contributes to Swedish public life through participation in panel discussions on current social, philosophical and religious issues.

Although an artist by training, Poromaa has had a life-long interest in science. His investigations of the possibility of finding common ground between the Buddhist and scientific worldviews led to the publication in 2009 of his book “The Net of Indra – Rebirth in Science and Buddhism”.