The Dharma Spoken by Robots Is of the Nature of Theft

If AI robots come out to teach the Dharma in the future, then all the Dharma they teach would be stolen Dharma, because robots have no process of practice and have never realized anything through personal experience; everything they have comes from searching for and extracting ready-made Dharma teachings on the internet, then organizing, processing, integrating, and piecing them together. If a robot is fairly advanced and high in technological sophistication, with someone manipulating it behind the scenes, it could also teach the Buddha-Dharma quite well, with broad and comprehensive knowledge, complete materials, and detailed terminology and concepts, and learners following it could also learn a great deal of knowledge.

But it would be merely knowledge; there could be no actual practice, no process or details of cultivation. Since the robot as a teacher has no practice of its own, how could it guide learners in their concrete practice? How could it have concrete, experientially verified methods of practice? In that case, even if learners followed it in study and practice for ten thousand years, they would still have no point of entry, still not know how to practice concretely, and still not understand contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) and meditative investigation, so of course the result would be that no realization could be attained. If there had to be some fruit of practice, that fruit could only be a fake fruit, used merely to pass oneself off as a sage or worthy one.

Some people's teaching of the Dharma is similar to a robot teaching the Dharma—it is acquired through extensive study and the collection of various sutras and books. Their store of knowledge may be sufficient, but they lack the methods and process for entering into practice, though they may teach somewhat more flexibly than a robot. However, future robots, through improvement and innovation, might well surpass humans. If they collected large quantities of Chan koans and integrated and analyzed them, perhaps they could even calculate the direction of Chan investigation and the object of that investigation, thereby speculating on the general locus of operation of the tathāgatagarbha. Those manipulating them behind the scenes could fully exploit this to guide learners in Chan investigation and in seeing the mind and attaining the vision of nature, and then give people certification, and how much money they would collect in the process, how many personal connections and resources they would amass, and what consequences would result—that is hard to say.

I have said before that when the Buddha was in the world, in order to disrupt the Buddha's teaching of the Dharma, Māra Pāpīyas attended many Dharma assemblies and heard much Dharma—especially the Mahāyāna teachings, of which he attended virtually every single session—his aim being to destroy the practice centers and prevent people from attaining accomplishment. As a result, he failed to destroy the practice centers, but he heard a great, great deal of Dharma. Yet having heard so much Dharma, he had no mind to practice. So if he were to come out and teach the Dharma, what would it be like? He would pile up plenty of knowledge and theory, but he would not teach sentient beings actual practice and realization—nor would he want sentient beings to actually practice and realize the truth and all attain liberation, because then his descendants would decrease, and that is what he cares about most.

But in order to win over and deceive sentient beings, he would deliberately omit the actual process of practice in between, emphasizing and seizing only the final result—and such a result, of course, would not be genuine; it would all be fake. Therefore, to judge whether someone is a good teacher (kalyāṇamitra) whose knowledge comes from actual realization, one must look at whether there is a real process of practice in between, whether the methods are concrete and feasible, whether they are easy to carry out and handle with ease, and whether the results lead toward realization and liberation.