Sayadaw Ottamathara has been a monk and a Buddhist master of the Theravada current since 2002. After receiving an honorary degree from Yangon University in 1994 with a B. A. in English, he opened his own small business, which he ran for seven years. He gradually began to dismantle his business after he started practicing meditation and used all his assets to establish the "Avijj à Vijja" (Ignorance to Wisdom) Sharing Foundation, a free multimedia distribution center for audio, video and reading material on meditation. In 2007, Sayadaw established his first meditation center in the top four floors of an eight-story building in downtown Yangon, which became home to about 100 meditators. He later opened the ThaBarWa (Natural) Meditation Center in Thanlyin, Yangon, a 50-acre site that could fulfill his desire to support all those who came seeking help or a place to practice meditation. This center now houses about 3,000 people from all over Myanmar and abroad. In accordance with his philosophy, the center offers shelter and assistance to any person in need for any reason, including monks and nuns, as well as the sick, the elderly, the homeless, orphans and those facing any other social or financial problems, until the end of their lives. Now Sayadaw Ottamathara has established more than 30 new meditation centers throughout Myanmar and abroad and acquired 70 other pieces of land, with the same intention of providing a safe place for people to practice meditation without limits, where they can focus solely on meditating and doing good deeds.