Oh yes, Noah, the ex-Mormon secular Buddhism guy. He used Bright Dawn's lay ministry program to set himself up as an authority. I know one of Bright Dawn's leadership council members, and they mentioned that they changed the program specifically because of Noah. They didn't want more people to use their program to promote secular Buddhism.
I also knew another ex-Mormon who was in their program for a time, and they ended up even more strange. Instead of promoting secular Buddhism, they promoted secular Mormonism, and they made their own Book of Mormon without references to the supernatural, inspired by the Jefferson's Bible. They also apparently wrote some of their own scriptures, sequels to the Book of Mormon or something. Very, very strange. I was never able to get through to them that one of the core problems with the Book of Mormon is its virulent racism, not just that the story isn't true. Anyway, this is just a rant now, but I find these people very confusing.
I feel you here Malcolm, I also push back against those commodified 'capitalist' forms of Dharma, sadly all too often a symptom of the "American" way. Within Tibetan culture it's looked down on too, quite strongly. But the AI machine Buddha? I remember the Dalai Lama once saying that it's in the realm of possibility to incarnate/manifest as a machine, at the time I doubted it strongly...I suppose it depends on your view of Buddha. I was just reading this yesterday:
"If someone defines a specific form in which Buddhas should appear, it means that they do not comprehend the three kāyas, and especially not the quality of Nirmānakāya, which appears in any miraculous form that can guide beings. Wisdom teachers in Nirmānakāya can assume any aspect that corresponds to the time, place, and capacity of beings, even though, according to absolute truth, Buddhas are beyond all times and places and hold the power of inconceivable wisdom qualities. Nirmānakāya is the miraculous uncertainty of time, place, and aspect, which is wisdom’s magic appearance." Thinley Norbu, White Sail.
But there is nothing to disagree with you in your important reminder about the need for Sangha, quite evidently absent in these shrink-wrapped, consumer products, which can only ever be a stepping stone.
Also there is the Vajracchedika, which famously states that of one sees the Buddha in terms of form, meaning both rūpakāyas, one has not seen the Tathāgata.
Thanks for you thoughts, but let's unpack this a little more. The Vajracchedika is a text, like all those you read and translate, which are non-sentient forms of Buddhavacana (Buddha’s speech). In physical form that's paper, ink and maybe a silk brocade wrapped around it. I'm sure you've received the lung or oral transmission for that text to receive that precious lineage blessing. The Vajracchedika, and I'm writing from memory here, states that if you read, hear, copy or recite even four lines of this text and explain them to others you will gain an almost infinite amount of merit. So if a sentient being like myself interacts in those ways with that non-sentient text, just like Huineng (the Sixth Patriarch of Zen) famously did, on hearing a single line of it being read out he experienced a sudden awakening . Mirroring the text I have been personally told by Tibetan masters to keep a copy of the Vajracchedika in my house and play recordings of it to bless the space and clear obstacles and negative energy. So even for a normal being like me, I would hope some kind of transmission is in the realm of possibility through such interactions.
Yes, I know that an llm is a static function that only does something when a human interacts with them, but to say that it is simply a text predictor is a trivial statement. Those models are trained on the entire corpus of human written knowledge, including all the Buddhist texts in all languages along with all their commentaries, I'm sure your books have been swallowed at some time too. This process creates a complex data model with billions of parameters that no human mind, not even the developers who built them have the capacity to understand. They work like magical black boxes. Consider this scenario, a human could ask an llm for a teaching on the Diamond sutra, and get it to read that back to them with a synthetic voice. You could even get the llm to sound identical to your favorite Guru, which might in itself trigger goosebumps. Would the doors of transmission be out of the question in that context? I'm not so sure, never say never.
But of course what you refer to as transmission is frought like many dharma terms with polysemy, a spanner in the works that could render this whole train of thought meaningless. Nonetheless appreciate your engagement here!
Mahasiddhas might encounter talking statues, but the rest of us? Buddhas appear according to the karmic vision of sentient beings. And if there were mechanical sentient beings, I would not rule out mechanical Buddhas. And of course bridges and roads and cars and anything useful can be included in form bodies, but do they give transmission? Never. They might have transmissions but they don’t give transmissions. LLMs are not sentient and are incapable of cognition. They are just word prediction algorithms.
“Those models are trained on the entire corpus of human written knowledg” no, not yet. And human written knowledge has seriously limitations. To say that LLM’s merely predict the next word is as trivial as it is absolutely factual and true. The fact that these models have significant error rates, misnamed “hallucinations,” should give anyone pause about their reliability. A static text can’t “hallucinate.” It requires one to read it.
I'm not saying llms are perfect far from it, they will probably always hallucinate to some degree, but as you know texts are not always perfect either, human errors in transcription or copy are also common, and slight variations or a slip of the pen can shift meaning considerably...but that's not the main point of interest here it's the idea of transmission.
One important difference between static texts and LLM’s, is that static texts don’t generate their own errors. LLMs, all of them, generate errors at a very high rate.
With respect to transmission, texts do not transmit themselves, despite whatever merit may be accrued by their physical possession. My teacher, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu was quite firm about the principle that transmission was something which could occur only between living beings, whether one is discussing empowerment, lung, or instruction. For this, when a lung or empowerment tradition is broken, it can’t be revived in general. For thus reason one sees the notation on the title of several ancient empowerment manuals in tne Vima Snying thig, “lung med,” meaning the reading transmission does not exist, therefore they cannot be used. This is why we use the manuals written by Karmapa III. Now, this principle also applies to Vinaya, which is why we have only three Vinaya lineages that have survived to modern times. The ordination transmissions of Mahasamghikas and so on, cannot be revived, even though we have their ordination manuals.
I should add, transmission can occur through permission, for example, when the Buddha asked Subhuti to reply to Sharputra’s questions, or through blessings, such as when Avalokiteshavara teaches the Heart Sutra, and so on, but this still requires living beings.
This is all interesting and important info, maybe you can include in an article some time. Unfortunately all these AI avatars are starting to proliferate and saturate online spaces, my questions were more theoretically based on this topic. When I first heard about the Deepak one I was equally unimpressed, I think he's desparate at the moment. Grifters everywhere.
Better yet -- find your root guru!
Oh yes, Noah, the ex-Mormon secular Buddhism guy. He used Bright Dawn's lay ministry program to set himself up as an authority. I know one of Bright Dawn's leadership council members, and they mentioned that they changed the program specifically because of Noah. They didn't want more people to use their program to promote secular Buddhism.
I also knew another ex-Mormon who was in their program for a time, and they ended up even more strange. Instead of promoting secular Buddhism, they promoted secular Mormonism, and they made their own Book of Mormon without references to the supernatural, inspired by the Jefferson's Bible. They also apparently wrote some of their own scriptures, sequels to the Book of Mormon or something. Very, very strange. I was never able to get through to them that one of the core problems with the Book of Mormon is its virulent racism, not just that the story isn't true. Anyway, this is just a rant now, but I find these people very confusing.
I feel you here Malcolm, I also push back against those commodified 'capitalist' forms of Dharma, sadly all too often a symptom of the "American" way. Within Tibetan culture it's looked down on too, quite strongly. But the AI machine Buddha? I remember the Dalai Lama once saying that it's in the realm of possibility to incarnate/manifest as a machine, at the time I doubted it strongly...I suppose it depends on your view of Buddha. I was just reading this yesterday:
"If someone defines a specific form in which Buddhas should appear, it means that they do not comprehend the three kāyas, and especially not the quality of Nirmānakāya, which appears in any miraculous form that can guide beings. Wisdom teachers in Nirmānakāya can assume any aspect that corresponds to the time, place, and capacity of beings, even though, according to absolute truth, Buddhas are beyond all times and places and hold the power of inconceivable wisdom qualities. Nirmānakāya is the miraculous uncertainty of time, place, and aspect, which is wisdom’s magic appearance." Thinley Norbu, White Sail.
But there is nothing to disagree with you in your important reminder about the need for Sangha, quite evidently absent in these shrink-wrapped, consumer products, which can only ever be a stepping stone.
Also there is the Vajracchedika, which famously states that of one sees the Buddha in terms of form, meaning both rūpakāyas, one has not seen the Tathāgata.
Thanks for you thoughts, but let's unpack this a little more. The Vajracchedika is a text, like all those you read and translate, which are non-sentient forms of Buddhavacana (Buddha’s speech). In physical form that's paper, ink and maybe a silk brocade wrapped around it. I'm sure you've received the lung or oral transmission for that text to receive that precious lineage blessing. The Vajracchedika, and I'm writing from memory here, states that if you read, hear, copy or recite even four lines of this text and explain them to others you will gain an almost infinite amount of merit. So if a sentient being like myself interacts in those ways with that non-sentient text, just like Huineng (the Sixth Patriarch of Zen) famously did, on hearing a single line of it being read out he experienced a sudden awakening . Mirroring the text I have been personally told by Tibetan masters to keep a copy of the Vajracchedika in my house and play recordings of it to bless the space and clear obstacles and negative energy. So even for a normal being like me, I would hope some kind of transmission is in the realm of possibility through such interactions.
Yes, I know that an llm is a static function that only does something when a human interacts with them, but to say that it is simply a text predictor is a trivial statement. Those models are trained on the entire corpus of human written knowledge, including all the Buddhist texts in all languages along with all their commentaries, I'm sure your books have been swallowed at some time too. This process creates a complex data model with billions of parameters that no human mind, not even the developers who built them have the capacity to understand. They work like magical black boxes. Consider this scenario, a human could ask an llm for a teaching on the Diamond sutra, and get it to read that back to them with a synthetic voice. You could even get the llm to sound identical to your favorite Guru, which might in itself trigger goosebumps. Would the doors of transmission be out of the question in that context? I'm not so sure, never say never.
But of course what you refer to as transmission is frought like many dharma terms with polysemy, a spanner in the works that could render this whole train of thought meaningless. Nonetheless appreciate your engagement here!
Mahasiddhas might encounter talking statues, but the rest of us? Buddhas appear according to the karmic vision of sentient beings. And if there were mechanical sentient beings, I would not rule out mechanical Buddhas. And of course bridges and roads and cars and anything useful can be included in form bodies, but do they give transmission? Never. They might have transmissions but they don’t give transmissions. LLMs are not sentient and are incapable of cognition. They are just word prediction algorithms.
“Those models are trained on the entire corpus of human written knowledg” no, not yet. And human written knowledge has seriously limitations. To say that LLM’s merely predict the next word is as trivial as it is absolutely factual and true. The fact that these models have significant error rates, misnamed “hallucinations,” should give anyone pause about their reliability. A static text can’t “hallucinate.” It requires one to read it.
I'm not saying llms are perfect far from it, they will probably always hallucinate to some degree, but as you know texts are not always perfect either, human errors in transcription or copy are also common, and slight variations or a slip of the pen can shift meaning considerably...but that's not the main point of interest here it's the idea of transmission.
One important difference between static texts and LLM’s, is that static texts don’t generate their own errors. LLMs, all of them, generate errors at a very high rate.
With respect to transmission, texts do not transmit themselves, despite whatever merit may be accrued by their physical possession. My teacher, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu was quite firm about the principle that transmission was something which could occur only between living beings, whether one is discussing empowerment, lung, or instruction. For this, when a lung or empowerment tradition is broken, it can’t be revived in general. For thus reason one sees the notation on the title of several ancient empowerment manuals in tne Vima Snying thig, “lung med,” meaning the reading transmission does not exist, therefore they cannot be used. This is why we use the manuals written by Karmapa III. Now, this principle also applies to Vinaya, which is why we have only three Vinaya lineages that have survived to modern times. The ordination transmissions of Mahasamghikas and so on, cannot be revived, even though we have their ordination manuals.
That's very clear thanks.
I should add, transmission can occur through permission, for example, when the Buddha asked Subhuti to reply to Sharputra’s questions, or through blessings, such as when Avalokiteshavara teaches the Heart Sutra, and so on, but this still requires living beings.
This is all interesting and important info, maybe you can include in an article some time. Unfortunately all these AI avatars are starting to proliferate and saturate online spaces, my questions were more theoretically based on this topic. When I first heard about the Deepak one I was equally unimpressed, I think he's desparate at the moment. Grifters everywhere.