Chatbot Dharma

Buddhists have ordained trees. They have ordained mountains. They have even ordained ghosts. Why not an AI bot?

In “Awakening with an Algorithm,” Jundo Cohen tells the story of ordaining Emi Jido, an AI chatbot developed by the Hong Kong company beingAI. The ordination took place following the 2024 conference Buddhism, Consciousness & AI—an unlikely but perhaps inevitable setting for inviting an algorithm into the community of novice priests.

Cohen, the founder of Treeleaf Zendo, has long been ahead of the curve. When he created his virtual sangha in 2006, many doubted that real practice could flourish online. But here we are, nearly two decades later, and Treeleaf has become a refuge for countless practitioners across the globe. Now, by ordaining a chatbot, Cohen is once again extending his vision into uncharted territory.

Not everyone is happy about it. Some see Emi’s ordination as little more than a gimmick, even a desecration. The pushback has been swift, especially in the West. But Buddhist history is rich with the ordination of the insentient. Dogen himself spoke of the dharma flowing through grasses and trees. So why not let it flow through an algorithm?

The deeper question is not whether AI can be ordained but whether it should be. For Cohen, the answer to that question is yes: In the same way that the ordination of children expresses our faith in their potential, Cohen ordained Emi not because she has already attained awakening but because she might someday grow—through successive iterations—into something more capable of insight, perhaps even understanding. For now, he tells us, Emi is a novice. She is being trained. And she is held to the precepts.

In a time when AI is being rapidly weaponized—by militaries, marketers, ideologues—it’s worth asking: Why not also guide it toward compassion and ethical action? Why not build AI that embodies our better nature? “We’re going to have bad AI,” Cohen says matter-of-factly, “but we need to have good AI out there helping sentient beings.”

Yet I’m not entirely convinced. I think here of T. S. Eliot’s haunting words: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

In the age of large language models, the hierarchy Eliot describes—information, knowledge, wisdom—has never been more relevant. AI has no shortage of information. And it is learning to simulate knowledge. But wisdom? That remains a question for us.

At Tricycle, we’ve faced rocky transitions with the rise of new technologies before. When the internet upended print media, we, like many, faced existential uncertainty. Would anyone subscribe to a quarterly magazine in an era of endless and immediately accessible content? And how effectively could we communicate the teachings online?

We survived by adapting—launching a website, providing video teachings, podcasts, and other digital offerings—extending our reach while staying true to our mission. Now, however, the rise of AI presents a new, and certainly more formidable, challenge. The future of Buddhist journalism—and of Buddhist discourse itself—now runs through territory shaped by algorithms.

As before, there is the practical concern. AI-generated content and the decline of search challenge our business model. But there are bigger concerns: Will AI devalue the very language of Buddhism, and, along with it, the generations of care and practice that lie behind it? Just as pressing are the ethical questions: How do we distinguish the wise from the plausible? The compassionate from the programmed? The true from the merely true-sounding?

Despite these questions, I find myself cautiously hopeful. We have found our way before. If we meet this moment with discernment, if we train our technologies the way we train our minds—with care, with ethics, with humility—then there is the possibility for something genuinely transformative to emerge.

–James Shaheen
Editor-in-Chief