Buddhism & the Internet

Tasso Kallianioides

Two and a half thousand years have gone by since the prince Siddharta Gautama Shakyamuni sat under the Bodhi tree in northeast India and had a direct experience of the nature of mind. During this time his teachings and methods, which lead us to the same experience, have spread throughout the world adapting and fusing with the different cultures they encounter. In this way various traditions and flavours have developed focusing on different aspects of the teachings as well as on the different styles that are applied. In the last forty years the development and spread of Buddhism has surged dramatically. Triggered by the invasion and occupation of Tibet by the Chinese and amplified by the development of technology and the various means of mass communication, Buddhism reached western culture where people have accepted it as their own. Again, as history has shown, it is in the process of adapting, and it's outer form is changing according to the needs and characteristics of the people who embrace it. There is however a new factor in this instance of the dharma's migration, something that has not been encountered before. A whole new set of media and methods of communication that have come about through the technological advances of the past few years, making the world smaller and accelerating the rate at which information travels and becomes available to us.

The internet has changed our lives. Since the mid-nineties there has been a virtual explosion of services available to us through the network of computers that make up the World Wide Web. Email has replaced regular mail as well as the telephone for a large part of our communication needs and information on virtually anything we can think of is at the touch of our fingertips. Chat rooms are full with those in need of reaching out, finding common points of interest and opportunities to share experiences and exchange ideas. People have found a new means of expression that has also taken technology past its initial calling and into the realm of art, indicating an inevitable evolution. To say that the internet is simple a set of computers linked together is an incomplete statement. It has proven to be greater than the sum of its parts in the way that every complex system manifests and behaves. Like the weather or the stock market it is becoming more and more chaotic and non-linear as it grows, which makes its control and predictability quite difficult if not impossible. Malicious viruses and worms run free alongside benign programs like spiders and crawlers that catalogue the web reporting back to their respective search engines. Given this level of complexity, the effect one program or data package has on another cannot be completely determined and what will appear next is only limited by one's imagination and the current capability of technology and infrastructure. On a different level, the internet has also become the cause of many debates and arguments on free speech, morality and ethics. It has forced people to deal with issues such as decency, where its subjective nature was quickly realized after an attempt to define its meaning.

Buddhism quickly found its way into the pages of the web. The new medium presented an ideal opportunity for teachers, organizers and those interested alike. This presence has expanded so much that today a search on Buddhism, on one of the most popular search engines, will result in 850 000 listings. Various groups and a centers can present themselves to the general public, advertise their activity, and expose millions of "surfers" to the Buddha's teachings. Those interested can now easily research all different schools and traditions, find a local group they can contact and register themselves on mailing lists thus effortlessly staying up to date with current Dharma events. Newsgroups and chat rooms also provide forums of communication and exchange of information regarding teachings and practice. One can easily look up the biography and background of teachers, increasing the opportunities of finding a good match to one's own style and interests. Instant messages are the perfect tool for staying in touch, allowing practitioners to immediately see who is currently online and send them a messaage to ask a quick question or simply say hello. Teachings on a large number of topics either directly translated from texts or transcribed from lectures are available en masse.

This is quite a different situation from that of one living in Tibet ten centuries ago. If we consider that Marpa the Translator had to cross the Himalayas on foot just to get teachings we can see how drastically different todays situation really is. Today we can sit in front of a computer, run a search on Buddhism, read teachings, get information, find a center and contact it through email, then order a book for further eading, all without getting out of our chair. This is a very fortunate situation and opportunity we have. However, like everything else in our modern lives we can easily becomne used to expecting instant gratification without having to exert any significant effort. One would think that returning from India, Marpa really felt a sense of accomplishment; the fact that he had gone through so much in acquiring them had contributeds, at the very least on an outer level, in realizing how precious the Buddha's teachings really are. With today's generation where everything is readily available it seems to be a lot easier to take that fact for granted.

Even though the Internet provides easy exposure to the Buddha's teachings, it most certainly does not eliminate the need for direct contact. Only certain information can be acquired indirectly, and the teacher, especially in the Diamond Way, is still essential to our development. His or her guidance is irreplaceable. Enlightenment cannot be accomplished through intellectual understanding, through concepts and ideas that words convey. What is passed on to the student by the teacher is a living experience which can only be referred to by words and not replaced by them. A practitioner working towards the highest goal must traverse the path one step at a time and move forward having not only understood the information but also having gained the necessary experience through practice which supports it. To enable this development, empowerment, oral transmission, and detailed instruction are needed, all of which have to be given directly. Streaming video and audio could not replace the teacher's presence, and in this respect not only the Internet, but every medium of indirect contact falls short.

On the other hand, when the teacher-student relationship has been established, then the various tools such as email become valuable means, enabling communication and magnifying the teacher's reach on a practical level. This can be clearly seen if we look at how Lama Ole Nydahl maintains contact with his thousands of satudents via email. Being constantly on the road, the Internet provides an effective and inexpensive method of advising and guiding.

Using our Diamond Way centers as an example we can also see how web technology has become an essential part of every modern organization's infrastructure. We have come a long way since 1994 when the San Francisco center created the first of our homepages. Today over 180 websites are currently online representing 350 centers and groups worldwide that comprise the Diamomnd Way Buddhism Network (DWBN). Developed entirely based on volonteer work, it offers information and material on meditation, the lineage, teachers and many other interesting topics in more than 24 languages. Newsletters and mailing lists provide communication services in seven languages generating a volume of 150 000 emails flowing through its servers each year. Occasional web casts of Lama Ole's lectures and live chats with his students bring them closer together breaking the physical barriers of distance. From an administrative perspective, productivity would seriously drop without the laptops that accompany everyone on the road and plug into the regional service providers, which in turn connect them to the Internet backbone enabling the software tools at their disposal. The interaction of technology and Buddhism on a practical level can be easily seen and we all have personal and direct experience of it. However, there is also a different perspective we can gain by abstracting and considering the situation from a beyond personal level. The Buddha teaches that everything we experience, all appearances, inner and outer, arise from the space of the mind and manifest as its natural expression. Science is coming closer by the day to this view and already supports the fact that space can be defined as potential. Together with what appears, awareness is always present to experience everything - a clear, radiant quality inseparable from everything that arises. When this awareness mistakes the object of the experience for something separate, duality appears and through the force of attachment and aversion conditioned existence comes to be. This shows that despite how much we can evolve, regardless of how cutting edge our technology is, as long as we are not aware of mind's nature, the Buddha's teachings will always apply and be necessary and irreplaceable methods for our development. We can say with enough confidence that they will continue to be passed on from teacher to student based on the fact that they have persisted for so long and have survived conquest and persecution. We can also say with confidence that they will adapt to our current technological society and touch our lives, inspiring us. They enable us to grow due to the fact that they work directly with what defines us as sentient beings regardless of our level of sophistication and technological advancement. Adapting to these conditions we can see a high-tech version of the Dharma starting to emerge but this does not change the essence of the teachings in any way nor does it affect the method of their transmission. Their effectiveness and applicability are unaltered because the raw material they deal with has been unchanged since the Buddha's time and the goal they lead to is constant and beyond change.

Looking closely at the Internet's physical infrastructure, zooming into the hardware, the computers and routers, the cables and fibre optics, we find infinite particles travelling through space. We find frequency fluctuations carryying bits of disassembled message traveling at the speed of light towards a destination where they can become meaningful to the recipient. But there is nothing substantial there. Again no "thing" can be found anywhere reconfirming once again that space is information.