From Instrument to Religious Authority: Mapping AI Applications, Roles, and Risks in Contemporary Buddhism

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is moving from the administrative margins of religious life into doctrinal explanation, personalized guidance, translation, counseling, heritage reconstruction, and embodied ritual representation. This study develops a framework for analyzing these developments in contemporary Buddhism, combining an integrative review of 65 publications, comparative analysis of 30 documented cases, and conceptual framework development. Seven domains of Buddhist life were crossed with seven AI modalities to produce 49 application intersections, classified as observed, emerging, or speculative. Each case was also coded for its initiating actor and purpose, distinguishing purposes stated by the initiator from those inferred from documented function. The analysis shows that religious significance follows less from technical type than from the role people assign to a system. Academic institutions, archives, and foundations initiated most documented applications, and the four cases performing religious authority acquired that position through institutional delegation, commercial substitution, or individual experiment rather than through technical advance. Counterfeit religious authority is distinguished as a separate pathway defined by unauthorized appropriation and concealed origin. The study proposes governance differentiated by role: accuracy, provenance, privacy, and human final judgment for instrumental uses; disclosure and dependency safeguards for relational uses; and doctrinal review, community authorization, and strict authority limits for religiously authoritative uses.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Religions, 2026 · DOI ↗