by Rohana R. Wasala
Dr Yuval Noah Harari, who lectures in World History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, thinks that to understand the role of traditional religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the 21st century world we need to distinguish between three types of problems: 1) Technical: e.g., how should farmers in arid countries deal with severe droughts caused by global warming?, 2) Policy: e.g., what measures should governments adopt to stop global warming in the first place?, and 3) Identity: e.g., should we even care about the problems of the farmers on the other side of the world?, or should we narrowly focus on problems faced by the people of our own tribe and country?
Harari’s opinion is that though traditional religions are largely irrelevant to technical and policy problems, they are extremely relevant to identity problems; and in most cases, rather than being a source of a potential solution, traditional religions are a major part of the problem! Harari doesn’t mention Buddhism in this section. This may be because he doesn’t include Buddhism in the category of traditional religions, and identity is not relevant to Buddhism at all, or in other words, Buddhism is not relevant to identity problems This is the exact opposite of the image of Buddhism made current in Sri Lanka by its local detractors. (My references to historian Yuval Noah Harari are based on his 2018 book ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, Penguin, Random House, UK.)
President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s dedication to research into the linking of AI and Buddhism with a view to propagating it in the world might be well meant. But it is misplaced piety. AI is an immensely useful tool that can be applied in relevant fields by specialists for great results, but it cannot be used as an organic extension or expansion of human intelligence or consciousness or mind (which are similar looking, but are distinctly three different faculties); it would be an unrealistic and impossible task to try to do so. Traditional religions, according to Harari, embody cosmic dramas which are denied by the prevailing political and social philosophy of liberalism. Liberalism, however, has recreated the drama within human beings. In his opinion. ‘The universe has no plot, so it is up to us humans to create a plot, and this is our vocation and the meaning of our life’, writes Harari, who is a professional historian. That is, a la Harari, a historian’s job and the meaning of their life is the creation of a plot for the drama within the human being.
Ancient Buddhism, thousands of years before the age of liberalism, Harari argues, ‘went further by denying not just all cosmic dramas, but even the inner drama of human creation. The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That’s the truth. Get over it’. (p.351)
That is how the Oxford educated historian Dr Noah Yuval Harari, summarizes an essential teaching of Buddhism without explicitly referring to the following found in Buddhism: The Three Characteristics or Tilakkhana. These define all component things, or sankhara: they are anicca (transient), dukkha (unsatisfactory), and anatta (soulless, insubstantial). This is not a negative view of the world, but a realistic one. Harari touches on some more points of Buddhism. Unfortunately, how many of few impassioned monolingual Sinhala speaking Buddhist monk preachers quarrelling over the real meaning of what the Buddha taught will be able to even make sense of such a fairly simple thing as Harari’s rudimentary understanding of Buddhism, I wonder? It is the silliness of some monks who have no proper grasp of the Buddha’s teaching who endanger the survival of the Buddha Sasana by doing politics and depending on politicians to protect it. Having said this, I must immediately add the following qualification: there are many highly educated, virtuous, and well-behaved young monks deeply learned in Buddhism ministering to the Buddhist laity and serving the country at large in silence. The above-mentioned handful of wayward monks have become what they are because they lack the guidance they need and deserve. But that is a problem that the Sangha hierarchy must take responsibility for.
Artificial Intelligence offers an infinity of better uses than as a means of exploring the truth content or the efficacy of gaining spiritual goals found in a religion. This applies to Buddhism too, though basically it is not a religion.
The ultimate truth that Buddhism guides the seeker to find for themselves cannot be realised with the help of an artificial tool. Self-realisation cannot be achieved through a machine. As to propagating Buddhism abroad, there is no need for AI or any other modern technology to be specially used for that, which cannot also be used for the propagation of other religions.
Actually, if AI is used to establish the veracity of each religion by its adherents as the sole custodian of what it claims to be the Absolute Truth in contravention of the claims of rival religions, the advent of AI will definitely spell doom to all religions including the Buddhist religion. But the ethical philosophical essence of Buddhism cannot remain in circulation unless it survives in the form of a religion. Unique among religions, Buddhism recognises two kinds of truth: sammuti sacca or conventional truth and paramattha sacca or absolute truth. Will a machine make this distinction? Any technology savvy adherent of a religion will be able to use AI to establish their religion’s claim to the possession of the Ultimate Truth, but the problem is that a similarly skilled different believer of the same religion, by feeding a different sample of selected data as they understand it from their so-called sacred sources, may arrive at a different form of the Absolute Truth they propagate. That is the situation that has continued down the ages causing sectarian conflicts within a religion and between religions, sometimes involving death and destruction with the gods they worship and offer prayers to for protection nowhere to be seen as is now happening in the Israel-Gaza theatre.
My opinion for what it is worth is that there is hardly anything that the most pious protector of Buddhism could do to save Buddhism in Sri Lanka or propagate it in the world through AI. There are at least 500 million Buddhists in the world, most of them belonging to the Mahayana tradition. Sri Lanka’s 15 million Theravada Buddhists are a small minority in global terms. But Sri Lanka has the historic distinction for being the venue where the Tripitaka of the Theravada or the Elders’ tradition was first committed to writing in the 1st century BCE and for having maintained its still prevailing Buddhist religious establishment unbroken since the 3rd century BCE. So Sri Lankan Buddhists do have a very important role to play in global Buddhist missionary movements. However, AI is not likely to have any central role to play in such a sphere.
The good uses that AI can be put to in diverse fields such as medicine, space exploration, archaeology, agriculture, economics, defence/military, espionage, and so on and so forth, are limitless. As numerous are its possible abuses at the hands of antisocial elements with the necessary expertise in its application. For example, AI tools can be misused for making deep fake videos to misrepresent the message of a well-known personality, such as a prominent monk in order to sabotage his work or merely to defame him. This is a legitimate concern that the president hints at in his original proposal, where he says proper legislation must be put in place before the envisaged AI programme is implemented.
Finally, it may be submitted that the money set aside for the proposed AI for Buddhism research programme (which could be seen as discriminatory towards adherents of other faiths in addition being open to criticism by the Buddhists themselves as counterproductive) should be better spent on providing easy access to (preferably, free) online education for all students of the country irrespective of the urban rural discrimination, social and economic status discrepancies, race, religion or language differences. Let’s protect the Buddha Sasana from politics.
from The Island https://ift.tt/A1yE9ZT
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