Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media

The Pixel in the Lotus

Gregory Price Grieve, Daniel Veidlinger, Gregory Price Grieve, Daniel Veidlinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317950332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Buddhism, the Internet and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus explores Buddhist practice and teachings in an increasingly networked and digital era. Contributors consider the ways Buddhism plays a role and is present in digital media through a variety of methods including concrete case studies, ethnographic research, and content analysis, as well as interviews with practitioners and cyber-communities. In addition to considering Buddhism in the context of technologies such as virtual worlds, social media, and mobile devices, authors ask how the Internet affects identity, authority and community, and what effect this might have on the development, proliferation, and perception of Buddhism in an online environment. Together, these essays make the case that studying contemporary online Buddhist practice can provide valuable insights into the shifting role religion plays in our constantly changing, mediated, hurried, and uncertain culture.

1
Introduction

Daniel Veidlinger

When smartphone apps remind people when to meditate (Wagner and Accardo, Chapter 8, this volume) and Buddhist monks bless temples that are built out of pixels in online virtual reality systems (Falcone, Chapter 10, this volume), there can be little doubt that the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and other incarnations of digital technology are changing the face of religion in the world today (Cowan and Dawson 2004, 1). While shaped by culture, digital media also afford new ways of being human by reconfiguring relationships, multiplying actors, and increasing the velocity, frequency, and volatility of our daily transactions (Hassan and Thomas 2006, 42). If we are to understand Buddhism in the twenty-first century, then the many features of these changes must be incorporated into the academic study of religion. Consider, for instance, in 2001, just a few years into the public use of the Internet, the Pew Foundation’s (2001) “CyberFaith: How Americans Pursue Religion Online” demonstrated that already more than 25 percent of Americans were searching for information about religion online, and that number has been rapidly increasing. It is clear that all of the world’s religions, both great and small, are becoming deeply affected by the growing electronic network that spans the globe.

These considerations prompted the organization of a symposium about Buddhism and digital media at California State University, Chico, in November 2011, out of which the chapters in this volume emerged. We asked a simple, but what proved to be rewarding, question: “What is digital Buddhism?” To answer this query, this volume examines many facets of the relationship between Buddhism and digital media through a variety of methods, including concrete case studies, ethnographic research, cognitive psychology, historical investigation, and content analysis—in an attempt to map out the contours of this new and exciting field.

As is well known, religion and media historically have had a close relationship. The earliest uses of media starting from the oral transmission of myths to the printing of the first Bibles were largely in service of religion, and now the modern study of both religion and media is intersecting as scholars highlight the embodied and participatory nature of each. As the study of religion has shifted from a focus on belief systems to “embodied practices that cultivate relations among people, places, and non-human forces,” so the study of media has turned from a focus on message transmission to “embodied forms of participation in extended communities” (Morgan 2013, 347). What this means, as Walter Ong argues (1967), is that different media afford different religiosities. Ong suggests that religion began in an era of orality, was transmitted into visual form through the writing of manuscripts as well as the printing of books, and is now taking shape in the world in a new way via electronic media (Grieve 2012). A host of other thinkers have realized since Ong that along with other physical embodiments of religion such as dress, images, and sacred spaces, media “structure experiences of the transcendental,” as anthropologist Birgit Meyer has said (2006, 20), and therefore both religion and media should be studied in concert.

Over the past few years, a number of scholars have begun to study religion and new media (Brasher 2001; Campbell 2010; Cowan and Dawson 2004; Hojsgaard and Warburg 2005; Karaflogka 2006) and have questioned how these affect notions of community, authority, identity, and practice, but how does Buddhism fare in this conversation about digital religion? Not terribly well, for as Kyong Cho (2011) notes in his comprehensive survey of digital religious scholarship, these studies tend to approach the topic from a decidedly Western perspective. In fact, those pioneering the study of digital religion have often overlooked the large digital footprint of Asian religions, even though many forms of Asian spirituality, including Buddhism, yoga, and meditation have had an even bigger impact in the digital environment than in offline society. For example, while the Pew Foundation’s “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” (Pew Foundation 2007) indicates that American Buddhists account for only 0.7 percent of the nation’s population, research shows that Buddhist related activities constitute around 5.3 percent of online religious practice in the virtual world of Second Life (Grieve 2010), and other online environments register similarly high rates of Buddhist engagement, as Ostrowski delineates in Chapter 11. We therefore offer these chapters in order to begin to fill in this lacuna and hope that this volume will stimulate further research in the field of Buddhism and digital media.

We focus here on Buddhism and digital media not only because we feel that it has been understudied, but also because Buddhism in particular possesses historical, philosophical, and practical attributes that are salient to the topic at hand. In fact, digital media and Buddhism have shared an intimate but little-known link from the very beginning. Consider, the translation of information into a series of ones and zeros that is the hallmark of digital technology is only possible due to the invention of the idea of zero by Indian mathematicians in the middle of the first millennium who were probably inspired by the Buddhist idea of emptiness. The very word zero derives from the Sanskrit Buddhist term shunya, meaning “nothing.”

As the world’s oldest extant missionary religion, and one without a central authority, Buddhism has adapted throughout its history more completely than any other religion to the contours of the societies in which it has found itself, and as such can be used effectively as a prism through which to analyze the features of its host environment, be it China, Thailand, Tibet, America, or the Internet.¹ In fact, it has changed so completely in different environments that whether its various manifestations can even be considered the same religion has been debated at length (Hubbard and Swanson 1997). Besides this history that has primed Buddhism for a rich life in the new digital frontier, Buddhist philosophy has dealt more extensively than any other religion with the question of whether or not the world of experience is real (Newland 2009), and as such is a potent source for thinking about the nature of virtual reality, as Falcone does in Chapter 10. The centrality in Buddhism of desire and its dangers also provides a unique vantage point into the manifold desires generated by current ways of living in our mediated, hurried, and uncertain culture, where the decoupling of production from the physical world and the empowering of imagination to call forth virtual realities has replaced an earlier needs-based society with one powered by desire and consumption.

We also find that the way Buddhism questions the idea of a fixed Self dovetails well with the shifting identities that are a hallmark of life in the World Wide Web, as Veidlinger discusses in his chapter. Because of the importance of meditation to the practice of Buddhism, questions of the nature, extent, and meaning of embodiment in the digital world come to the fore in relation to this religion as well. Buddhism has also, more than other religions, long recognized the importance of upaya, or skillful means for disseminating the teachings, which allow for unorthodox practices in the name of strengthening the message of the Buddha, as Wagner and Accardo point out herein. The studies in this volume therefore ask how far the upaya-like use of Buddhism can slide before it becomes merely a gimmick. Are many of the incarnations of Buddhist-related themes in digital media actually skillful means for disseminating real Buddhism, or just dharma dilution and commercialization? Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that, as Prebish points out in Chapter 5, the first scholarly online journal in the field of religious studies was focused on Buddhism. These and many other points of contact between Buddhism and digital media will be discussed in the following chapters.

A Brief History of Buddhism and Media

There has been a great deal of discussion about how media affect the messages they carry, as summarized most famously in Marshall McLuhan’s maxim “the Medium is the Message” (McLuhan 1964). The strong version of this idea is that different communications media transform the very experience we have of space and time in different ways, and can eclipse the actual content of the message being transmitted. With this theory, the psychological effects of television, radio, the Internet, or any other medium are so great that they shape thought in specific ways regardless of the content they are conveying. The architecture of media can be thought of in a way similar to physical architecture, where the design of a building can radically shape the way the people living in it behave, allowing the flow of movement in some directions but not in others. There are forces at work in different media, based on the various ways they impinge the senses, that can override the discursive meaning of the content that they carry. The weak version of this theory, which is more commonly held, is that the medium is one crucial element among many that must be taken into consideration when analyzing the effects of an act of communication, along with the content.

Oral media, according to McLuhan, tend to create a tribal society, with nonlinear thinking, and a more emotional way of living, whereas print tends to detribalize society, because ideas can travel far and wide beyond the boundaries of a small group and unite disparate parties in common ways of thinking through joint readership. As writing and printing developed, people became exposed to more different viewpoints from different quarters, and what was considered strange and foreign gradually became more acceptable and more commonplace. This expands the vision of people in society and allows for social changes to take place with less resistance. It leads also to more linear thought and thus gives rise to the rule of reason over emotion, according to some media theorists (Goody 1977). Electronic mass media such as radio and television, because of their far-reaching, one-way broadcasts, can be used to consolidate power and authority in the hands of those who control the media, who now have the unprecedented ability to shape the thoughts of millions on a daily basis. As mass media develop, there is a clash between the expansive intellectual vistas fostered by easy access to a great many different ideas, and the tendency for those who control the media to use this one-way channel to consolidate their power by controlling what information is allowed to get to the people. Digital media, according to this scheme, have the ability to create virtual tribes of people who have not actually met, and unlike print or radio, these media engage many senses at once and allow for a much greater questioning of authority through twoway channels. The two-way information flow enabled by the Internet can foster greater criticism and lead to challenges from below to those on top who had in the past controlled access to the mass media (Lull 2000, 38). There are also more quotidian examples of how media might affect the development of religion and other cultural features. Consider the life of a young person in a small town in Kansas. Before the Internet, would this person have had easy access to Buddhist teachings? Most likely not. In that sense, the specific communications technology of the Internet affords the possibility that this person would come into contact with Buddhist teachings online, either through podcasts, videos, text, or other media. Here, then, the medium affects whether the message is received at all, regardless of whether it also affects the message itself.

In order to understand how media has influenced the development of Buddhism, its texts and its practices, we should start at the beginning and understand the communicative environment in which it emerged. The peripatetic shramana, or wandering philosopher, known as the Buddha knew that communicating his message to as many people as possible would be a key element in the success of his Dharma, or teachings. From the beginning, he stressed that monks should go forth and spread the teachings in their own language (Vinaya II, 139), and from that time, communication has played a crucial role in Buddhism. Buddhism, as the oldest extant proselytizing religion, has always had a penchant for utilizing the latest developments in communications technology to spread its message. The Buddha lived probably during the fifth century BCE in northeast India before writing was used in that region (von Hinuber 1989), and therefore all of his sermons were retained and passed on through an oral tradition that partook of the astonishingly sophisticated tradition of Vedic memorization (Staal 1986), and added some of its own techniques (Allon 1997). The Suttas all begin with the phrase “evam me sutam” which in Pali means, “Thus have I heard,” and stands as a vestige of their oral origin. Monks would spend many hours of each day memorizing texts, and much of their training and the very organization of the early sangha was structured to foster the memorization and transmission of the teachings (Veidlinger 2006a). The texts themselves were usually designed for memorization, and a number of their formal features developed to facilitate memorization (Collins 1992). For example, there is a great deal of repetition and use of stock phrases that could be put together like pieces of a puzzle by the well-trained reciter. There are also many verse passages that are often found embedded within prose passages, often conveying similar content. This use of meter as well as repetition assisted in the memorization and preservation of the texts as they were transmitted through time, and numbered lists such as the Three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, and the Eightfold Path are ubiquitous. Here, we already see evidence of one of the key elements of media theory, namely that the medium used to transmit a message will often have profound effects on the shape and form of its content. Many early Buddhist texts evolved to be easily memorized as much as to embody the Buddha’s teachings.

Once writing came to India in the middle of the third century BCE, it was the great Buddhist king Ashoka who was the first to use it in any appreciable way. He was quick to see the benefits of this new technology and placed inscriptions on rocks and pillars at key points throughout his kingdom that communicated his decrees to the people and helped to promote the Dharma as well. Most of the evidence of early writing in India in the centuries after Ashoka is likewise Buddhist in nature, such as donative inscriptions on stupas and other sites of Buddhist import (Salomon 1995). During all this time, there is little evidence that Hindus were using writing for any religious texts—quite the contrary, the great epics that were taking shape in the first few centuries BCE such as the Mahabharata show clear signs of oral composition and transmission, both in their internal structure, their use of oral formulas, meter, and the divergent textual traditions that emerged. The Theravada Buddhist tradition holds, on the other hand, that the Pali canon was written down at the Fourth Council held by learned monks in Sri Lanka during the first century BCE (Mahavamsa 33.100). If true, this would certainly be the earliest organized project to transmit religious texts in writing in the ancient Indic world. We know further that Mahayana Buddhism employed writing during its earliest stages of development, and indeed many of the oldest texts such as the Lotus Sutra and Perfection of Wisdom Sutras explicitly enjoin the faithful to write out copies of the texts and to honor them as the materialization of the word of the Buddha. The use of the communication technology of writing, then, was far more associated with Buddhism than with any other Indian religion (Veidlinger 2006b).

Moving a few centuries later in history, we find that one of the most important developments in human communication was a product of the Buddhist milieu in medieval China: printing evolved in Buddhist monasteries during the heyday of the religion in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) (You 2010, 56–62). It is likely that the admonition to generate merit by copying the Mahayana texts inspired Buddhists during this period to carve the pages of sacred texts such as the Diamond Sutra and the Lotus Sutra onto wooden blocks and print many copies in what were the first printed books anywhere in the world. Buddhism thus played a crucial role in the development of printing technology specifically, and of some of the first mass-produced ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Methodological Considerations
• PART II Historical Approaches
• PART III Buddhism, Media, and Society
• PART IV Case Studies
• Contributors
• Index