The Dharma Spoken by Robots Is of a Stealing Nature

If AI robots come out to teach the Dharma in the future, all the Dharma they teach would be stolen Dharma, because robots have no process of practice and no personal realization; everything they produce is gathered and excerpted from ready-made teachings on the internet, then organized, processed, integrated, and pieced together. If a robot is fairly advanced and technologically sophisticated, with someone manipulating it behind the scenes, it could also teach the Buddha-Dharma quite well—broad and comprehensive in knowledge, complete in materials, and exhaustive in terminology and concepts. Students following it could also learn a great deal of knowledge.

But it would be mere 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 students in their concrete practice? How could it possess concrete, realized methods of cultivation? In that case, even if students followed and studied with it for ten thousand years, they would still have no point of entry, still not know how to practice concretely, still not understand contemplative practice (vipaśyanā-caryā) and meditative investigation—and the result, of course, would be no realization. If there had to be some fruit of practice, that fruit could only be a fake one, used merely to impersonate sages.

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 sūtras and books. Their store of knowledge may be sufficient, but they lack methods and processes for entering into practice, though they may teach more flexibly than a robot. However, robots of the future, through improvement and innovation, might well surpass humans. If they collected large quantities of Chan kōans and integrated and analyzed them, perhaps they could even compute the direction of Chan investigation and its object, thereby conjecturing the general locus of operation of the tathāgatagarbha. Those manipulating them behind the scenes could fully exploit this to guide students in investigating Chan and in awakening to the true mind and seeing its nature, and then give people certification. How much money would be collected in the process, how many networks of personal connections would be amassed, 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 many teachings, especially the Mahāyāna teachings—he attended virtually every single one. His aim was to destroy the places of practice and prevent people from attaining accomplishment. As a result, he failed to destroy the places of practice, but he heard a great, great deal of Dharma. Yet having heard so much Dharma, he had no mind to practice. So what would happen if he came out to teach the Dharma? 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 practice and realize the truth and all attain liberation, for then his descendants would diminish, and this is what he cares about most.

But in order to entice 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 real; 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 genuine 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 result tends toward realization and liberation.