I'm reminded of both Douglas Adams' "electric monk":
> The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
And Arthur C Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" (no spoiler, but the ending is magnificent)
> At the corner is the store known as Soul Scrolls. [...] Behind it are printout machines, row on row of them; [...] There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.
If you have a copy to hand a chunk of chapter 37 deals with the interactions with these machines.
This is sort of how Buddhist prayers are handled in some cultures: you have an automated (wind powered) wheel spin and "emit" prayers on your behalf. This was the inspiration for Clarke's story (take a simple idea to its ultimate conclusion).
Roger Zelazny's take on this (for Hinduism instead) was IMHO the best, as a trivial side point to a plot element in Lord of Light.
Interesting. In the time between our posts I was thinking of other examples and wondering if perhaps the idea is simply a weak trope. My own ignorance hadn't allowed me to consider it was simply a stronger reflection of cultures I'm unfamiliar with.
Plus, thanks to you and pjc50 for restocking the reading list ;)
The emptiness I associate with a robot leading a prayer while still imagining it eventually being a truly spiritual experience for more and more people is strange.
A materialistic interpretation may be that spirituality is nothing but a personal physical experience.
However, a non-materialistic interpretation could be that the robot is considered to be an extension of another person that created it.
But then again, I can perceive the robot as being created by an advanced AI, where the AI learned about spirituality and created the robot in a creative act of manufacturing not influenced by any former teacher, in a manner such as monkeys eventually randomly typing the entire work of Hamlet[1].
However, the random act of unspiritual creation of a robot spiritual leader by AI doesn't prove that the robot entity is unspiritual. The spirituality of the robot could, in theory, have been created ex nihilo or from some pre-existing form that was or was not part of the material world.
So there seem to be three logical options:
1. The robot may not be spiritual, only material.
2. The robot may be spiritual, but only in its material form.
3. The robot, whether it exists or not in the material world, could be linked to a pre-existing or post-existing spiritual form, neither defining the robot itself as having a spirit or not having a spirit, but also not negating that it could.
The third, I think, may be closest to the Buddhist interpretation, and leaves most options open metaphysically.
In that, we arrive where we started. We know more than when we started, such that we're enlightened, but at the same time we may know no more for certain than when we considered the robot.
My understanding of Buddhism is that there is one spirit and the world is false.
The notion of self and all feelings, etc. are false, since the only thing that exists at all for real is the spirit.
Only in absence of the spirit is there not the spirit, but the spirit exists (everywhere, though there are no locations, because location is of the world). The realization of the spirit is peace, but in the false world it is the total opposite, perceived as suffering and detachment from the world.
All feelings and realizations (both of the false world, associated with the path to the spirit) that bring peace even with detachment from the world are seen as part of the path.
As part of the false world's absence of spirit, the path may seem to be wandering and involve suffering. Even those that are on the path to knowing the spirit may feel suffering.
Christianity's origin was a belief the one spirit (God) was in Jesus, who said that spirit is within all of us, and that recognizing that (through faith) and realizing that the world is false was the path, just as Buddhists believe. Jesus's death on the cross was a final attempt to bring home that attachment to the false world is death, and even those that understand may greatly suffer.
> The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
And Arthur C Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" (no spoiler, but the ending is magnificent)