"Buddha's Teachings" - in 1,000 years, how will they know?
Ren_in_black
Georgia Veteran
This may have already been mentioned in another thread but on Facebook, at least here in America, I have seen a big rise in popularity of social media pages with names like Buddha's Teachings or even just The Buddha.
Unsurprisingly they are full of quotes that are not from recognized teachings but are mostly just self-help nuggets. Many of them are benign and may even be good advice, but I realized that this whole large language model, or whatever AI is supposed to do on the research side, is not going to be able to differentiate between this stuff down the road.
Obviously Buddhism looks very different for us than it did for people 2,000+ years ago, but I think even just a few centuries from now, the concept of Buddhism may not look like anything we would recognize today.
Comments
Maybe it'll be in a better state than Christianity?
Buddhism has changed and will continue changing until the world has forgotten the Buddhadharma. Then, a new Buddha will arise, and turn the Wheel of Dharma
Books last quite a long time, in paper form. There are people who have bought all the volumes of the translated Pali Canon. In digital form, who knows how long the files will be copied and re-copied.
But perhaps online archives like Access To Insight will stay the course and provide the authentic words of the Buddha to LLMs.
True, but my concern is that the search engine won't be able to differentiate between the digital copies of established teaching and the self-help content labeled as Buddha's Teachings, for example. These social media pages don't have to explain that they are inspired by the Buddha rather than sharing the actual teachings; there's no requirement (that I've seen) for them to alert a search engine what their source is.
Fifty years from now, if a serious researcher found a concept that grabbed them, they could hopefully see that "oh, this comes from an old social media platform, what I'm reading can't be verified as a teaching." But a big search engine may not have that same power, because the content won't necessarily be flagged as such.
So if someone asked Google AI to give them a list of Buddhist concepts, the search engine will find the correct digital files but it may also accidentally mix in the social media stuff at the same time, which slowly distorts the original teachings, perhaps to the point where they would be unrecognizable to people living today.
Thus have I heard:
Through realisation, as they have known throughout the millennia.
The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path...
the nature of suffering and the way to its cessation.
We all stray from the path at times, and most of us come to see that we have.
Some realise it sooner than others, yet the light of awareness always finds its way through.
Hopefully AI will improve on its reliability in time.
Well in the short term we have to rely on the results of hard won practice. Enlightened bodhi. Enlightened body of dharma and a few nomadic synthetic zeniths and other Mahayana heretics.
Anyway I am off to the pure-lands to look for temporary perfects to Grok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Land_Buddhism