5. Buddhist Communication in the Digital Age
The Buddhist mentality to spread its teachings to distant lands in the past finds great support with digital technology in the modern age. Digital technology has now put the Theravada Pali Canon and Mahayana texts in multiple languages at the fingertip of anyone with internet access. In the scholarly community, the Journal of Buddhist Ethics established in 1994 was the first online peer reviewed journal in Religious Studies (Prebish, 2016, p. 82). Online information and Buddhist content is now abundant. A search on Google using the keyword “Buddhism” yields 327,000,000 entries while “Buddha” results in 359,000,000 entries (as of 30 June 2022). This of course, is only a search of English content and not in other languages. With the development of social media, Buddhism has made its presence online with countless programs on the various platforms in multiple languages. Numerous apps promoting Buddhist teachings, mindfulness, meditation, and inspirational sayings have also been developed and can be downloaded from app stores. Some of the more notable apps include “Insight Time” which includes 45,000 free meditation sessions complete with ambient music. For a membership fee, the user can gain access to special mediation courses lasting 7-10 days (Maina, 2022). Another Buddhist app, “Calm” aims to do exactly what its name implies—helping users to deal with stress and sleeping problems through various calming exercises, breathing techniques, and stories recited by well-known people like Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey (Ibid).
Buddhist leaders of all levels have also been taking to the internet to spread the dhamma. Most well-known is the Dalai Lama who is present on multiple platforms, including social media. The Dalai Lama joined Twitter in February 2010 and amassed 55,000 followers after the first two days on the microblog. The Dalai Lama’s audience is international, interreligious, and intercultural. Thus, it is not surprising that the Buddhist leader mostly uses his Twitter platform to promote Buddhist inspired humanistic and spiritual values across cultures and religions, which enable his tweets to be well-received by his followers. For example, the Dalai Lama’s tweet on January 6, 2020 states: As human beings, all 7 billion of us are born the same way and die the same way. Physically, mentally and emotionally we are the same. We all want to live a happy life and avoid problems, but in a materialistic culture we overlook the importance of love and affection.
This tweet, like the vast majority of his tweets, are non-religion specific, aimed at common human issues, concerns, and aspirations, and therefore reverberates easily with a global audience. The Dalai Lama’s strategy of appealing to people of all religions (and non-religion) and cultures are highly conducive to promoting interculturality where people are inspired to relate to each other first and foremost as human beings with specific and profound similarities rather than based on superficial exterior differences (Le Duc, 2020, p. 112). When the coronavirus pandemic broke out causing global havoc and concerns, the Dalai Lama sent out the following message on April 14, 2020, succinctly putting the pandemic into a wider perspective to encourage his followers to see beyond present hardships and obstacles. He writes, “As a Buddhist, I believe in the principle of impermanence. Eventually, this virus will pass, as I have seen wars and other terrible threats pass in my lifetime, and we will have the opportunity to rebuild our global community as we have done many times before” (Quoted in Le Duc, 2020, p. 121). Despite the global preoccupation with the Covid-19 pandemic the last several years, almost all of the Dalai Lama’s tweets to his nearly 20 million followers are meant to speak to any human situation, culture, and time. For example, the tweet on August 10, 2020 states: “As soon as I wake up in the morning, I remind myself that nothing exists as it appears. Then I think about sentient beings who want happiness, but experience suffering. I generate compassion for them, determined to help them as much as I can to eliminate their negative emotions” (Ibid).
Indeed, the Dalai Lama is not alone in recognizing the potential of information and communication technology to promote Buddhist thought and teachings to the masses. For Buddhist leaders, the ongoing communication of Buddhist teachings to a new generation is a special preoccupation. In this regard, a number of studies have been implemented in order to determine effective ways to appeal to the next generation. For example, in Thailand where Buddhism accounts for 90 percent of the population, many Buddhist-oriented schools have been researching how to adapt the dhamma to the contemporary milieu in order to generate greater accessibility and garner more interest from younger audiences (Schedneck, 2021, p. 285). In Thai media, there are ‘monk celebrities’ who try to appeal to a wider contemporary audience with more entertaining content and humor. However, the reception of their communication strategies has been mixed (Schedneck, 2021).
In his study of Buddhist communication to the new generation in Thailand, Nattapong Yamcharoen (2014) found that Thais tend to follow Buddhist personalities that appeal to them. The young audience who mostly access Buddhist content via mobile phones also prefer interesting and simplified content rather than abstract and dry presentations of Buddhist teachings. Moreover, the younger generation also wants to have content that are relevant to their contemporary life situations. The study also revealed that because much of the Thai youth is now online and receiving Buddhist content via digital media, there needs to be more effective strategies to disseminate information from Buddhist individuals and institutions on digital platforms. In addition, Yamcharoen also identified long-term pattern of Buddhist communication, including: 1) Supporting Buddhist individuals and organizations in promoting Buddhist values; 2) Providing Buddhist communicators with better technological skills; 3) Promoting knowledge of integrated communication and increasing proactive public relations via integrated online communication; 4) Producing a new generation of Buddhist communicators to the society; 5) Working to reduce the rural-urban digital divide to ensure more equal access to online Buddhist content; and 7) Encouraging the older generation to be good role models in display of faith and behavior.
Thus, the history of Buddhist communication has always played out on a variety of highways and byways, from the ancient paths of India, the Silk Road of Central Asia, to the information highway of the digital age. In every instance, the purpose has remained the same—to eliminate suffering in the world and to support the human desire to achieve lasting happiness and liberation.
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