On 14 November, the first book was published in the Routledge Studies in Religion and Digital Culture series, and will look at the interface of Buddhism and digital media culture. Titled Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus, the book is a collection of discussions from a symposium held in 2011 in Chico, California, called “Coding Silence: Online Buddhist Meditation.” The book consists of the dialogue between the ten guests at the symposium, and is the first published book on the fascinating contemporary subject of Buddhism and the internet.
From worldreligionnews.com
The book is edited by Gregory Price Grieve, associate professor in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, whose specialty is studying how media and religion interact, and Daniel Veidlinger, associate professor in Religious Studies at California State University-Chico. “This volume aims to assess how digital media affect Buddhism and to help us understand what new forms of Buddhist practice, belief, and community are emerging within this digital nexus,” Veidlinger states.
This is an interesting question given how prolific the Dharma has become online. Tibetan Buddhist empowerments are now being streamed live across the world; teachers are spreading the Dharma through podcasts; lamas, monks, and yogis have Twitter accounts where they espouse the Dharma and veganism; and Buddhist temples complete with monks and nuns can be found in virtual worlds such as Second Life.
Buddhist temple in the online world of Second Life. From secondlife.com
Is this good for Buddhism, one might ask? The ten contributors to the volume conclude that the interface of digital media and Buddhism is a very well suited match, expressing much of the tradition’s ethos. As Grieve notes, “for historic and conceptual reasons Buddhism meshes well with digital media’s affordances. In fact, digital media and Buddhism have shared an intimate link from the very beginning.”
Grieve saw both the positive and negative aspects of digital media’s influence on the Dharma at the 33rd Kalachakra empowerment given by HH the Dalai Lama in Ladakh last July. While there, he witnessed a young woman absorbed in her Ipad as she let her friends around the world know she was standing within five feet of the Dalai Lama, at the same time totally missing the energy of his presence. On the positive side, he noted the story of a woman who, suffering from exhaustion, could retire to her room and not only follow the teachings on the web, but even look up Dharma terms in real time.
He summarizes by explaining that in the online world you miss the charisma and energy of a teacher, but to receive the teachings directly often involves some degree of hardship. Indeed, Americans do look online for their religion—in 2001, a Pew survey of Internet use found that 25 per cent of Americans had searched the Internet for religious purposes.
Another interesting fact Grieve notes is that more people report themselves as Buddhist online than in the “real” world: looking at sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, 5.3 per cent of people in America report themselves as Buddhist according to the most recent available data, while only 1.3 per cent of Americans claim Buddhism as their religion in person-to-person surveys.
The release of Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus this fall shines the light of awareness on how the form of Buddhism is changing before our very eyes, no longer merely through cultural transfer, but also through the very media by which is transmitted.