The Android and the Fax: Robots, AI and Buddhism in Japan

Abstract

In March 2019, a temple in Kyoto, Kōdaiji, unveiled to the public ‘Mindar’, a robot developed in collaboration with Ishiguro Hiroshi, a well-known robotics professor at Osaka University. The android is presented as the manifestation of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. It can move, speak, and record what it sees. Mindar delivers sermons based on the Heart Sutra and, according to the temple’s priest, it will keep evolving and its knowledge will become endless. Mindar has received mixed responses from visitors, from those who cry during the sermons to those who feel it inappropriate for a robot to preach in a temple. Media coverage has mainly focused on the potential for Mindar to change the image of Buddhism in Japan, a tradition often portrayed as antiquated and mainly focused on funerary rituals. By examining the declarations of Mindar’s creators and varied responses of its visitors, and drawing on observation of Mindar’s practice, this chapter explores the interaction between AI, robotics, and Buddhism in contemporary Japan. It highlights the affective potentialities and possibilities of AI, in particular as they relate to emotional connections between humans and robots, and the implications for Buddhism in contemporary Japan.