Abstract
We humans fear the machines will take over. They drive our cars, make our food, and take our jobs. They’re also increasingly giving us our sacred texts. An android named Mindar has been reciting the Heart Sutra in a Zen Buddhist Temple in Kyoto. On the outskirts of Beijing, in the Buddhist Longquan temple, a small robot named Xian’er dispenses wisdom for enquiring minds. And SanTO (abbreviation for Sanctified Theomorphic Operator) quotes Bible verses to provide comfort for elderly people, while a south Asian company recently revealed a robotic arm that could perform puja. My paper notes several of the current ways robots and texts are merging, but I work to fill in a historical background of the use of dolls (including androids, automatons, and robots) in religious services, and ways they have been reciting sacred texts and prayers for millennia. From Albertus Magnus’s 12th century android to the 16th century Spanish “Automaton of a Friar” to Thomas Edison’s 19th century praying dolls, the recitation of prayers and texts has long been an aim for religious technologists. Ultimately, technology is our divine breath, the animating, ensouling force of Homo sapiens, and dolls are vital technological tools that find their way into our rituals, personal devotional lives, workplaces, and social spaces. By looking to our evolutionary past, and the ways our tools have made us who we are, we can come to the digital present and future with new understanding about the machines, and our own cyborgian selves.
Presenters
S Brent Rodriguez PlateProfessor, Religious Studies, Hamilton College, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Traveling Texts: From Traditions to Religions
KEYWORDS
SACRED TEXTS, TECHNOLOGY, BODY, ROBOTS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, RELIGIOUS TRADITION, EVOLUTION
