Our Section of the Wall
Bringing the conversation on AI into Buddhist communities
AI isn’t an easy thing to turn toward. The scale of money and power behind it, the dizzying speed at which it’s developing, the reach it already has into our daily lives that most of us never invited…all of it understandably provokes strong emotional reactions. If AI brings up some mix of fatigue, skepticism, or overwhelm, or the urge to run away into the woods…you aren’t alone. We feel that, too.
But we can’t just leave AI to the tech companies that are creating it. We learned that lesson with social media, and the stakes are even higher this time around. This technology is already reshaping the inner and shared conditions of our lives faster than anything that’s come before. It’s changing how we pay attention, learn, speak, and make decisions. It’s changing how power is accumulated and exerted. It’s changing what we consider to be “real.” Whether we choose to use AI or not, its impacts will be felt by all of us.
Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, may be the biggest example yet of the world outside Silicon Valley speaking up. Given the challenges this technology poses for humanity, we all deserve a voice in the conversations shaping how AI is developed, regulated, and deployed. As the Pope rightfully points out, while a great deal of responsibility lies with the AI companies and policymakers to steer this technology in a direction that benefits everyone, “all are given their own section of the wall.”
We agree with the Pope. We collectively share a moral responsibility for meeting the challenges of AI. So, as Buddhists practicing turning towards suffering and its causes with compassion, we don’t think looking away from AI is a viable option. We need to engage, in whatever way feels available to us at this time, acknowledging that there is already so much happening in the world asking for our attention and compassionate response.
Buddhism & AI Workshops
We think that the first step towards skillful engagement is making space for conversation on AI to breathe within our communities, where we can make sense of it together and begin to grapple with what it asks of us.
What does it mean to bring our practice to this moment of uncertainty and rapid change around AI, so that we can move forward with clarity, wisdom, and care?
Over the past few months, we have been holding space for a number of Buddhist teachers and communities to turn towards this inquiry together – establishing a foundational understanding of how this technology works and exploring its spiritual and ethical implications for ourselves and our communities. We’re now expanding this offering to more teachers, sanghas, and Buddhist organizations across the U.S. and Europe.
In these workshops, we cover:
Why Buddhists should care about AI and what Buddhist practice uniquely offers at this moment
What AI is and isn’t, explained in simple language
How AI is affecting attention, intention, agency, and power, viewed through Buddhist lenses
Guided embodied inquiry and small-group dialogue on what “right relationship” with AI might look like (including for those choosing not to use AI) – and the pathways for getting more involved in efforts to shape it
While our workshops share a common foundation, we adapt the focus to each community, for instance, how AI intersects with climate or labor organizing work, or what shared community guidelines around AI use could look like.
If you’re a teacher or community leader interested in bringing this conversation to your community, please reach out via this short form and we’ll get back to you.
Updated Field Framework & Website
While we need more Buddhists engaged in the conversation on AI, fortunately, there are many who have been directly working at this intersection for some time. A major focus of ours has been on mapping the specific efforts of these organizations and individuals working on everything from Buddhist-informed theories of AI alignment to AI tools for supporting practice to multifaith policy initiatives articulating moral red lines for AI. We’ve spent months expanding this map of the field, which now gives a clearer picture of who is doing what within Buddhism & AI.
Check out our updated Field Framework on our newly redesigned website here.
Join Us Online for the Buddhism & AI Summit July 9-12th
Reminder that the Buddhism and AI Summit is coming up next month at the Gomde center in Austria, July 9th - 12th. This will be great exposure to some leading scholarship on the conceptual frontier of Buddhism & AI, including questions on consciousness, embodiment, and agency. For our European friends, we’d love for you to join us in person if able. And for those who aren’t local, there’s an option to join virtually.
With gratitude,
The Buddhism & AI Team
This lands for me as a practitioner because AI enters the same terrain as practice. It meets us at the level of attention, intention, speech, projection, and the unstable sense of self. Very old practice questions, arriving through very new machinery.
When I think about AI from the side of practice, I keep coming back to how quickly the mind turns what it meets into a mirror. We do that with people, with work, with fear, with ambition, with silence. AI gives us a strange new surface for that same habit. The question, for me, is whether practice can help us notice what is happening in us as we begin to relate to AI.