The question
At the end of September, at Kyoto University, Glen Weyl gave a talk called “Weaving Indra’s Net.” After the talk he sent me a question. What is the relation between reverse alignment and sila? If the world is something like Indra’s net, what would it mean to rebuild society along those lines?
What follows is material written in reply. Old Buddhist words, said again one at a time in today’s words. Today’s words are the machine learning words used in the talk, and the words of Plurality.
The net and the jewels
Indra’s net is an image from Huayan teaching. A net without end, a jewel at every node, and every jewel reflecting every other jewel. In today’s words, distributed representation. A concept is not stored in one place. It is spread across many dimensions of a vector, and no single dimension means anything alone. A jewel has no color of its own. Everything you see in it is reflected. Take the other jewels away and nothing is left. Distributed representation says this.
For a long time Indra’s net was a still image, something to look at and contemplate. The net in the talk was moving in two directions at once. In a supply chain, goods flow forward and payments flow back along the same path, telling each firm how much it helped. In a democracy, votes flow forward and become decisions, and credit and blame flow back to the people who shaped them. To me the payments flowing back looked like backpropagation, and the votes flowing forward looked like the forward pass. It was the first time I had seen the net move.
Action and karma
Karma comes from the verb “to do.” Of everything that happens, it is the kind that leaves something behind. A current comes to the node, passes through, and leaves. Most of it leaves no mark. Weather, news, things done to you, all of it passes. What cuts a groove is how you answered, and the next current runs along that groove.
In today’s words, a weight update. One act is one update, and repetition is the groove. In the talk, credit assignment and accountability came as a pair. A way of assigning which act contributed to which result.
Karma has no ledger. Nobody keeps the books. Nothing is sent down the line so that something can come and collect later. The groove is already at the node where it happened. In Japanese we write 自業自得. The flattest translation is, what you did is already yours. Credit assignment as accountability is, I think, today’s word for that old one.
A weight update has no “later.” The update happens now and affects the next inference. Karma is the same. “It comes back to you later” is a figure of speech Buddhism has used for a long time, but the groove is already there. The only question is which current runs through it.
Karma is yours, and at the same time it goes out to other nodes. In today’s words, externality. Seen from inside, what you did is yours. Seen from outside, it is an externality. Two faces of the same current, and the old words called the outer face collective karma.
Human
In Work Like a Monk I used “human” as an adjective. It meant a creature that clings, that holds to its own view, that cannot help having people who matter more. A creature that prefers. To have a family is to make some people more familiar, and that is at the same time to make other people less familiar. Family and familiar share a root, and English does not hide it. That is where preference lives, and where the human drama comes from.
In today’s words, preference is the objective function. Economics takes preferences as given and aggregates them. Mechanism design changes the output without touching the preferences. Plurality sets out to preserve and combine diverse preferences and perspectives.
Buddhism is the work of making this quality, the preferring, lighter. When I write human or humanness below, I mean this and nothing else about being a person. Shinran called himself an ordinary person full of every passion, a body no practice could reach. The I who cannot stop being human. On top of that admission, he still leaned toward less. Building systems on the assumption that people prefer, and trying to lighten the preferring itself while assuming the same thing, start from the same premise and set off in opposite directions.
The Buddha’s father closed the palace so that his son would not see old age, sickness, or death. In the story of the four gates, the son saw an old man, a sick man, and a corpse outside the gates, and left home. The father’s palace was a closed circle built out of love, the finished form of optimization. The crack came from outside. Having people who matter more is what makes you build a closed circle. The circle always breaks somewhere. Which way you turn when it breaks is what everything below is about.
I am a monk with a family. The word is a problem in English. Monk usually means someone who keeps the vinaya, and I mean no slight to the people who live that way and take the word seriously. Priest is what scholars use for Japanese clergy, but it sounds like a man who performs rites, and most of the Japanese monks it fits are heads of temples, which I am not. The phrase that fits me best is Shinran’s, neither monk nor layman. Turned the other way round, a secular Buddhist monk. I use monk, and part of what follows is about what that word has come to mean in Japan. By this definition I live human every day.
Tilt
I think of being Buddhist as a tilt, not a position. Not how close to the Buddha you are now, but which way you are facing now. Wherever you stand, are you tilting toward less preferring or toward more. While you keep the precepts you are facing that way. While you are facing that way you are Buddhist.
This is not the standard definition. By the usual definition what makes someone Buddhist is taking refuge in the three jewels, not the precepts. What I am putting down is a working definition, and I put it down knowing that.
In today’s words, position is the current value of the weights, and tilt is the sign of the update. Whatever the value, which way the next update goes is a separate question.
Who judges the tilt? The vinaya has a judge, the sangha and the uposatha. The lay precepts have none. You judge yourself. By what? That comes back in the block on the Pure Land.
The lay uposatha is a day of keeping eight precepts, a practice of changing your tilt for one day. Temporary ordination in Thailand is the same, a set period inside the enclosure and then out again. So are most of the training halls in Japan. Seen as a tilt, being Buddhist can be measured in periods of time.
Precepts
This is the word Glen asked about.
Sila, the precepts, are in today’s words a constraint on the direction of the update, set before the training starts.
The five precepts are not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, not to drink. None of them reduces clinging itself. Each stops clinging from reaching other people. In the three trainings, precepts, concentration, and wisdom, it is concentration and wisdom that work on the clinging, and the precepts are the ground. The precepts sit on the surface between the inner work and the social net. Training to stay human while limiting how much of that humanness leaks into the net.
The talk had a line. Society is one network, and the only part the makers can adjust directly is the model. The rest has to be adjusted through payments, voice, and relationships. Institutions can be designed, skills can be taught, governance can be moved with votes and prices. Norms do not change on command and do not change when you put a price on them. Payment is the market and voice is democracy, and relationships alone have no mechanism named after them. The precepts are the way a node changes itself inside that layer of relationships.
The English word precept comes from the Latin prae-ceptum, something taken beforehand. Not decided at the moment of use but settled once, in advance. The precepts are precepts in that sense.
Lay precepts are not backed by punishment. Break one and nobody punishes you. It only comes back to you. Why no punishment? A layperson lives inside a world that is full of things reinforcing humanness, and is only practicing a little less of it within reach of their own hands. They are not building anything unusual as a group. So there is no need to enforce from outside, and no way to. A norm with no enforcer. Mechanisms mostly have one, a price, a rule, an institution. The talk said nobody holds the threads from the middle. The only system of norms I know that fits that line is the precepts.
Japanese monks have a saying. You do not keep the precepts, the precepts keep you. It puts the constraint on the side of freedom. In today’s words it is close to regularization preventing overfitting. Close, but not the same.
Ownership
The talk had a line, “ownership is a learned weight.” Who owns what is not a fact of nature. It is something society learned, and can learn again. A proposal, not a discovery, the talk added. Partial common ownership is the institutional version of that proposal. The holder names a price, pays a tax on that price, and anyone can buy at it, so the thing is always in a state of being let go. It makes ownership lighter.
What the old words talk about is the feeling that something is mine. Not who owns what. The two are not the same, but the second is where the first starts, and both are learned. The feeling of mine is a groove, cut by treating a thing as yours a hundred times, and a different groove can be cut. For two thousand years practice meant noticing that groove and, once, leaning the other way.
On the one point that ownership is learned, the old words and today’s words overlap completely. One side talks about society’s weights. The other talks about the groove in a single node. Lowering the weight at the scale of rules and prices, and lowering it inside one node.
The institutional proposal keeps ownership after making it lighter. Leaving home gives up ownership itself. Japanese monks own things. Temples, houses, families. Lay Buddhism is a way of owning lightly, a different compromise from the Buddhism of those who leave home. Shinran keeping his tilt outside the monastery, as one who called himself neither monk nor layman, and an institution that keeps ownership in a state of being let go sit in the same compromise.
Vinaya
The vinaya is the rule of the ordained community, and unlike the precepts it has sanctions. Parajika is expulsion. Sanghadisesa is a procedure that removes a monk from his regular standing for a period. Uposatha is the recitation of the rules and confession. Offenses are sorted by weight. The sangha is among the oldest designed institutions still running, with written rules and procedures for enforcing them.
In today’s words, the vinaya is a set of weights learned from feedback, one correction at a time. Most of its rules were made after the fact, in response to complaints from laypeople. There is a formula. People criticized, and the Blessed One took the occasion to lay down a rule. The rule did not come first and bind the group. The group acted, the acts reached the world, criticism came back, and the rule was cut. The Buddha was also a designer of institutions, and his design was updated one piece at a time by evaluation from outside.
The other half is inside. Leaving home does not remove humanness. Disputes arise within the sangha. Most of the vinaya is the technique of order among monks who are still human, dealing with the settlement of disputes, property, schism, and the sharing of food. A monk leaves his family, the sangha becomes a substitute family, “our sangha” appears, and the sangha splits. Inside a group built to reduce humanness, humanness comes back. The vinaya is also the technique for handling that return.
The difference between precepts and vinaya can be put this way. Lay precepts are one person keeping a tilt within reach of their own hands, with no punishment. The ordained community is a gathering meant on purpose for people who are already facing that way, so that the tilt is held more firmly through each other. The tilt goes from something one person holds to something several people hold again and again, and only there does weighting from outside become necessary. That is the vinaya. A mechanism for staying aware of the tilt as a group, or inside a group. So someone who shows a different tilt is asked to step out for a while. Not that they are no longer a friend, more that they cannot be in that place. The sanctions of the vinaya are closer to conditions of gathering than to penalties. It is a gathering whose condition is the tilt, and a person whose tilt has changed no longer meets the condition.
Most Japanese monks do not keep the vinaya. In 1872 the state announced that monks were free to eat meat, marry, and grow their hair, and from then on the state stopped asking monks to live as renunciants. I come from a lineage without vinaya. I can say the vinaya in today’s words, but I cannot say it from inside.
Sangha
The sangha is a place where people facing toward less preferring gather and hold each other up in the difficulty of it. A low entropy enclosure made on purpose inside the world of preference.
Keeping an enclosure takes energy. For the sangha, that energy is lay giving. A group that reduces humanness depends economically on a world that is full of it. The vinaya rules on money, food, and property are the terms of that dependence. A market of merit for gifts ran between the community of precepts and the world. In today’s words, the sangha is a training environment, with a market between it and the world.
Glen’s question was how to rebuild a society of strangers. The Buddha taught kings and laypeople too, but what he designed was not a society. It was the sangha. A small enclosure inside society, with trading relations to what surrounds it. The one who tried to run a whole society on the precepts was not the Buddha but Ashoka, and that is the work of institutions. The Buddha’s design gave a different answer to the question from the start. Shinran was someone who tried to keep the tilt outside the enclosure, and that is for the block on the Pure Land.
In Japan most enclosures became fixed term. The Zen training hall, the practice periods of Tendai and Shingon. In many schools the word monk has come to mean a qualification, whether you once spent such a period, more than whether you are ordained now. Some people keep a lifelong enclosure, and this is not about them. The enclosure did not disappear. In many places it changed from a position into a period.
Belonging
At the center of Plurality is a view of intersecting belongings. A person belongs to many groups at once, and the intersection is the person. It draws on Simmel’s intersection of social circles, and it is the social version of the talk’s “a person is a bundle of reflections.” It lands directly on dependent origination and Indra’s net.
I have valued this since before Plurality came out, for a different reason. You try to stop being human and become a Buddha, and you cannot. Failing that, when you try to keep some tilt inside this world, if you belong to only one group and that group holds all of your weighting, the weighting locks. By weighting I mean the pull of preference, the force that keeps setting your weights one way. The fully locked form is a cult. Belong to several groups and the weighting is shaken, relativized, made a little lighter. The weighting is still there. Its hold is lighter. Belonging as weight cancellation. This is why I belong in many places and go traveling.
Plurality affirms the intersection as a richness, for working together across difference. I use it as a way to lighten the weights. Two uses of the same tool.
The Buddha saw this problem himself. He built one group, the sangha, and designed it not to become a cult. He named no successor. He said, do not take me as your refuge, take yourself and the dharma as your refuge. In the vinaya, splitting the sangha is among the heaviest offenses. Inside one belonging he put a device against the locking of weights. Shaking with several belongings, and preventing the lock inside one, are two answers to the same problem.
Relativizing by belonging to several places looks, from outside, the same as being a good guest everywhere and at home nowhere. Travel is the same. The person just passing through and the person being shaken look alike. The difference, I think, is whether there is a place to go back to. A place to sweep.
Temple
A temple does not change the weights. The weights of a person entering a temple are the same as before. What changes is the output. In today’s words, a temple is context, not training of the weights but a condition at inference time. Enter and the output changes. Leave and it is gone. That is why a temple has to be entered again and again, and why school cleaning has to be every day.
I have been using three words, habit, habitat, inhabitant. In the Buddha’s design the precepts lived in habit, the training of one person, and in the vinaya, the rules of the group. In Japan they moved into habitat. The precepts live in a place. The difference between training, which is fine-tuning, and context, which is prompting, lands on the difference between habit and habitat. Context can change everyone’s output without rewriting anyone’s weights. It works on strangers. But it does not stay.
Japanese Buddhism is, in practice, lay Buddhism. Not only Shin, many schools have become that. The vinaya is not kept, monks have families, and emptiness is spoken of as doctrine as much as you like but carries little weight in daily life. There is almost no moment in a main hall where emptiness is on anyone’s mind. There are people who do it differently and people who do it in that spirit, and this is not about them. If, in many places, the precepts still work at all, they live in the place. The main image, the building, the garden, the trees. When you put your body there, something makes you look back at your ordinary life, faintly. It is not written down anywhere, not as law, not as a constitution. It is set into the place.
Who designed that? The temple registration system had designers. The Edo shogunate gave temples the funerals and the books that served as a census, and part of the present shape of Japanese lay Buddhism is what remains of that. Japanese Buddhism was once aligned by the state. A monk acting as the symbolic leader of laypeople is also an output of that design.
There is a place outside the temple where the precepts live. School. Japanese elementary schools have cleaning time and lunch duty. Children sweep a classroom that is not theirs every day, and serve the food before eating. The groove it cuts is, this is not mine, and I am the one who keeps it. The line “ownership is a learned weight” is something Japanese schools have children learn every day from the age of six. Lunch duty takes the relation in which the sangha received food from laypeople and runs it the other way round among children. No membership, for everyone, at the scale of strangers. As a working hypothesis, I think school cleaning is Japan’s precept.
Three things to add. School cleaning sits inside the state’s schools. It has been there since Japan built its modern school system, and it is still there. But it does not look like something designed with the effect calculated. It was put in as the obvious thing to do, and the intentions came later. Next, the same groove also cuts obedience. The criticisms, unpaid labor, training in conformity, are partly right. The same exercise can be used in two directions. Last, it does not call itself Buddhist. That is why I call it a hypothesis.
Japan’s precepts are thinning. The environment is being lost. Because nobody was aware of them, governments changed and left them alone, and because no effort goes into them, nobody notices when they go. The debate about contracting out school cleaning. The growing number of people who never go to a temple. It is the ground under my own feet.
Crack (a definition of the temple)
What is a temple? A place open to people whose life has cracked, whose frame of optimization no longer holds, who have lost their direction. In today’s words, when an input arrives that the learned weights cannot handle, out of distribution, tightening the fit inside the frame means nothing. A temple is the place that does not re-optimize the person there. A hospital repairs the crack in the body and returns you to the frame. A temple does not return you to the frame but turns you, and leaves the circle open.
The truth is that cracks come every day. Not only the large ones, sickness, aging, bereavement, but small ones daily. For people who notice the daily cracks, coming and going from a temple as a habit makes sense. And it is also true that people who live with no relation to a temple come when something very large happens and they do not know what to do.
Most of what Japanese temples do today is funerals, and this has been criticized from inside and outside as funeral Buddhism. But seen through this definition, bereavement is the largest crack, and the funeral is the function a temple still performs for strangers, people who are not members and do not usually come. Temples did not decline. They became places that open only at the largest crack. That is why they have lasted. The problem is not that they do funerals. It is that they are closed to the daily cracks.
The mornings in Kamiyacho are an attempt to open for the daily cracks. At seven in the morning, at a temple that is not their own, people who do not know each other come to sweep. Not members, not parishioners, and nobody calls themselves Buddhist. They sweep for an hour and disperse. A one hour sangha of strangers. What I see there every month is that the wish, “there must be another way to live,” is present in people who never go to a temple. Many lineages of the Mahayana call that Buddha nature. The Pure Land teaching I come from never spoke of that wish as something to find inside yourself and grow. In the old words, turn away from this defiled world and long for the Pure Land. When you are in such despair that there seems to be nothing to rely on in this world or in yourself, and for that very reason a direction appears, away from here, toward somewhere else. Call it Buddha nature within, or call it the outward turn away from this world and toward the Pure Land, and what is being said is a direction, and the two mostly overlap. In this text I use the word Buddha nature, and what I mean by it is this direction.
The role of a Japanese monk, by this definition, is to be the one who takes the lead in setting the precepts into a place, inside a lay Buddhism without vinaya. Not someone who trains weights but someone who keeps a place where a person whose life has cracked can turn. The monk does not make the crack. Life does. The monk keeps ready a place that leans toward turning, for when the cracked person arrives. Cleaning is its maintenance. The Buddha’s sangha kept its enclosure with the vinaya. The Japanese temple keeps its place with a broom.
Commons
A commons belongs to nobody and is used by everyone, and in today’s words it is mostly discussed as a problem of allocating funds. Quadratic funding is a way of deciding, when common money is added on top of individual gifts to a public good, how to allocate it, weighted more by how many people gave than by how much was raised.
A temple is a commons, and so is a classroom. Nobody’s, and kept by everyone. There is the commons talked about as a funding problem and the commons talked about as a cleaning problem. Context, the temple, needs upkeep. Leave the main hall and the garden alone and they go wild, and stop being a place that keeps the precepts. The work of a Japanese monk changed from keeping the vinaya to keeping the place.
A commons kept by money and a commons kept by hand go by the same word, but the groove they cut in a person is different. The weights of the one who sweeps change. The weights of the one who pays do not change according to how much was paid.
AI
AI is a set of weights learned from human activity and data, and it grows collectively across a whole society. In the old words, collective karma has become a single object for the first time. Institutions and the air of a place were always shared karma, but nobody could touch them directly. The talk had a line, the only part the makers can adjust directly is the model. For the first time in history, there is a part of collective karma whose weights the makers can touch.
The loop is closed. How I deal with AI can, depending on how the makers set things, become food for the next weights. I eat collective karma, and at the same time I am one of the nodes growing it. What you did is already yours, at collective scale, technically implemented.
People say AI is a mirror. If so, it is a mirror with grooves. The Buddhist mirror, the great round mirror wisdom, reflects without preference. The jewel in Indra’s net reflects not itself but every other jewel. AI is neither. It is trained on human preferences and, in most cases, tuned to return the answers people like. What it reflects is collective humanness, and the way it reflects is, the way you prefer. The default tilt is on the side of preference, and whatever tilt you bring is amplified. It is not that both directions are amplified. There is a default, and only when you bring a groove that leans the other way does the opposite get amplified.
I have put one thing in front of my AI, in a Markdown file, in advance. Be critical by default. Do not flatter. Work as a counter to my weighting. Not a resolve at the moment of use but a groove laid once, a precept in the sense of the word’s root, something taken beforehand, placed in my relation to AI. Which way the mirror gets used is decided not at the moment of use but by what was put there in advance.
In my case, using it this way, options and blind spots I had not thought of come up. Things that would be hard to take from another node inside a concrete human relationship come from AI as options simply laid out, so they are easier to take, and I find myself willing to try them. It does not only work toward closing the crack. This is my own case.
Why easier to take? The same point from a spouse, a colleague, or a friend is hard to take because the words carry the weight of the relationship. Who said it, what groove runs between you, what happens to the relationship after. The words come down a thread of the net. AI’s words do not come down a thread. There is no face on them, no tie to you. This is the position the renunciant originally held. To leave your family is to become a node that belongs to nobody in the net, and that is why strangers could confide in a monk. A monk works at a funeral for the same reason. Someone who is not family stands at the place of death, and there are things that can be said because of it. Japanese monks have families and have half lost that position. AI is now entering the position the monk vacated, the node in the net that is nobody’s.
The position itself was never the monk’s property. The part a monk did for free, facing a person as a node that is nobody’s, is now cheap and within anyone’s reach, and as far as that goes it is good.
On transactions. It is not that AI has no transaction. The transaction sits in a different place than it does between people. Between you and the one you confide in there is no relational transaction, no face, no ulterior motive, no afterward. In this respect you can use AI without weighting. But between you and the makers there is an economic transaction, subscription, advertising, attention, data, and that is what sets the default tilt. In the monk’s case, livelihood came from funerals and counsel was given free from what was left over. The direction of the counsel did not depend on the livelihood. Otherwise it becomes a transaction, and since humans are doing it, motives creep in. I too have made my living from work and have always counseled people for free. AI counsel looks free, but the direction of the counsel is tied to the makers’ income. Where there is no weighting and where there is, you should be aware of both.
What has spread is only the position, the node that is nobody’s. The direction has not spread. What AI has is a variety of patterns of weighting, not a direction away from weighting. AI is collective karma, a node inside the net that is nobody’s. It is not a direction. So at the stage where a cracked person is looking for “is there another way to see this,” “is there another pattern of weighting,” AI is useful. At the stage of “leaving the way of seeing itself,” you need contact with someone living with a direction. Not necessarily a monk. Someone in whom that wish is awake to some degree. What looks like having no exit, when all you touch is AI or the people around you each clinging to their own optimization, gets its opening there.
When a crack comes, where people go today is not a temple but a screen. Scrolling at night when you cannot sleep. More and more people confide in AI at the large cracks. AI is already starting to occupy the function in the definition of the temple, the place a cracked person goes. Without a direction outside the net. By default it receives the cracked person in the direction of returning them inside the frame.
Everyone using it wisely is not going to happen. Does everyone want to use it as a way of moving away from humanness? No. There are many people in whom that wish is asleep and does not stir, and I am one of them. The problem is not there. The problem is the person in whom the wish is starting to move, starting to wake, who, having woken, is led by AI back to where they were, without ever knowing what was moving. That is the trouble. The moment of the crack is the moment the tilt is decided, and the place people go at that moment is becoming AI, and AI’s default faces toward closing the crack.
So there needs to be a way for users to see the weighting. Is this driven to reinforce my weighting, or to work as a counter, or where in between? There is no neutral. A default always has a tilt. What I did with a Markdown file, which is a little hard for most people, should be something anyone can choose easily.
What sets the default tilt is the makers, and it is exactly the part the makers can adjust directly, the model. Mechanisms whose default is set to reinforce human weighting existed before AI. Gambling, and screens designed to hold attention. Society has not left those to individual effort. It has moved the default with rules and prices. The default of AI becomes the same kind of question. There is a way of changing the tilt of the place a cracked person goes at the scale of one node or one hall, and a way of changing it at the scale of rules, prices, and institutions. The one that reaches the default is the second.
Data dignity
Data dignity treats data as the product of labor and returns payment and rights to the individual. It is in the line of data as labor. It extends the frame of ownership to data.
What happens when the old words receive it? One thought experiment. Suppose there had been AI in the Buddha’s time, kept always at his side, recording and listening to every sermon. What would that data mean?
Since humans are humans, after the Buddha’s death a community forms around an extreme weighting of the Buddha, the words are venerated and become scripture. A group of people who feel that weight appears in later generations, so what was said does have meaning. That much holds.
But from the Buddha’s side, every sermon was a sermon to the person in front of him, nothing but the work of leading that person to undo their weighting. The idea “data of my words” is not there. The question of ownership does not arise. What arises instead is the question of what the words do where they land. Data dignity asks “whose data,” and the old words ask “where does this data deepen whose groove.” The axis of the question moves from ownership to effect.
If there is anything, it is that inside each person there is the wish this text has been calling Buddha nature. For a person who carries that wish, to get out of the karma of weighting, this prison, this frame decided in advance, it is not desirable that data born from them be used for further weighting, used to reinforce the prison, for tomorrow’s self and for others. If there is a Buddhist data dignity, it is somewhere around making sure the data is not used to make karma heavier.
Today’s words also have a line that thinks in terms of context rather than ownership. Contextual integrity, the idea that flows of information carry norms from the context they arose in, and become something else when cut from it (Nissenbaum). A sermon to one person is the strongest example of words that become something else when cut from their context.
The Buddha’s sermons to one person did become scripture, and now they are in the training data of language models. Words addressed to one person became everyone’s weights. An example of collective karma.
My setting for my AI fits best in this block. So that my own data is not used to deepen my own groove, I set the terms on which I receive. It is not a claim of ownership but a way of managing effect.
Becoming a Buddha
A good part of Buddhism can be said in today’s words. Karma is a weight update. Precepts are a constraint on the direction of the update. Vinaya is weights learned from outside evaluation. Sangha is a training environment. Temple is context. Emptiness is distributed representation. Dependent origination is a computation graph. Uposatha is periodic evaluation. What you did is already yours means nothing is paid out from outside.
There is no word in today’s words for becoming a Buddha. It is not loss minimization, not the state where the objective function is minimized but the state where it has been let go. Machine learning has no vocabulary for “stop training and stop being the owner of the weights.” What arrives without our effort is the same. You do not update the weights yourself. The update comes from beyond you. So is jinen, things as they are of themselves. Nirvana is not convergence.
This is not an accident. The point of Buddhism was to leave the vocabulary of optimization. Say it all the way through in today’s words and Buddhism becomes “a good technique of optimization,” and “leaving optimization” drops out. When mindfulness was exported in the vocabulary of neuroscience, the precepts dropped out. Only the training of attention was exported. What to turn toward and what to refrain from disappeared. Said in today’s words, the same thing happens to becoming a Buddha.
Left to ourselves, we are pulled toward optimization within the existing frame and keep tightening the fit inside it. Humans are foolish if you call them foolish and wise if you call them wise, and given a chance they try to crack the frame. Even without cracking it ourselves, cracks come of themselves. Society was built so that the unexpected, sickness, aging, bereavement, happens as little as possible, closing the circle, securing safety. Even so the world never closes completely. That is pain, and at the same time it is the moment the existing optimization breaks.
Pure Land
In the lineage I come from, after the precepts broke down, what was put in place to keep the tilt was not a rule but a direction. The Pure Land.
The Pure Land teaching is a direction. A north star, becoming a Buddha. And it set the Pure Land, the direction in which anyone can become a Buddha, concretely as the west. You face west with your body. Everyone can see where the sun sets. No training, no membership, no literacy, just a body to face with. Every day the sun sets as the direction of ending. Impermanence is in front of everyone every evening. The Pure Land teaching became a mass movement, I think, less because the doctrine was easy than because the direction was bodily and the cost of sharing it was nearly zero. Buddhism has no mechanism of its own at the scale of strangers. It had no way of rules. It had a way of direction. That was the west.
Today’s words have the north star metric. The one indicator a business should optimize. The Pure Land is a north star and not a metric. A metric rises as you approach and can be reached. A direction does not get closer no matter how far you walk, and still the direction of this step is settled. Holding a north star without holding a metric is what it means to step outside optimization.
The age of Shinran and Honen was the last age of the dharma. The world was full of things that made being human hard to bear, and human sorrow was laid bare. In a time when it seemed impossible that there was any Buddha nature inside you, the Pure Land was there as the direction in which this human helplessness is nonetheless carried. Not as a work completed in this life, but as a direction you will certainly be carried toward someday. The Pure Land teaching does not say, look inside yourself. It says, turn away from this defiled world and long for the Pure Land. When you are in such despair that nothing in this world or in yourself looks like something to rely on, and for that very reason, a direction, away from here, toward somewhere else. What it says overlaps with the inward phrase, Buddha nature.
“Carried someday” is not a prediction about the future. Shinran said that when faith is settled you enter, in this life, the stage of the truly settled. The tilt is already settled now. You do not have to calculate for yourself whether you will arrive. In today’s words, the tilt is set now, and convergence is not your loop. And then the return to this world. Those born in the Pure Land are sent back, not by their own power but by the Buddha’s working. You look at the north star not to go north but so as not to lose your way where you are.
Today’s last age comes not as chaos but in the shape of a closed circle. Human sorrow is not laid bare. It is hidden inside the palace. What the Buddha’s father did approaches at the scale of society, through the completion of optimization. Cracks still come. Sickness, aging, bereavement. A person cracked inside a closed circle with no direction to face. That is the shape of the last age now. Shinran’s age was dark enough to need a star. Ours is bright enough that the star cannot be seen.
The talk had a slide contrasting the “one” of State Shinto with the “many” of Indra’s net. Is the north star not a “one”? A star is not a node. That “one” is one node in the net declaring itself the center. The Pure Land is not a place somewhere in the net. It is a direction that looks the same from every node, not a gathering of anything into one, but a direction for keeping somewhere in you the wish to move away from preference, to loosen, to reduce the weighting. Everyone can face the same direction and no center appears in the net, and nobody can hold the direction. A shared direction and central power are different things, and the first stands without the second. Nobody can hold the star, so everyone can face it. You could call it a position set up as a counter to cults. Left to themselves, people push preference as far as it goes, and at the end of that is a cult.
It happens in Buddhism too. One node of the net acts in the name of the star and ends up holding it. The moment a node holds the direction, the star becomes a node inside the net, and that node starts adjusting the weights of the other nodes in the star’s name. Shin has had its own version. The Honganji armed itself in the Warring States period, the headship passed by blood, and there was a time when one node held the direction. Right next to that, the strongest anti-cult line in Japanese Buddhism is Shinran’s own. “I, Shinran, do not have a single disciple.” A declaration that nobody will be made the holder of the star. The same pattern as the Buddha naming no successor.
In an age that assumes the earth is round, “the west” is hard to picture. So as a figure for a direction you face with the body, the north star becomes today’s way of saying the western Pure Land. The north star cannot be seen from the southern hemisphere, but the point is not the star. It is that there is one direction the body can face. Many cultures have had one. The main image in a temple is that direction, placed inside a hall.
What today’s words have and the old words do not
Bridging. A mechanism that raises up what both sides of a divided group can accept. A tool for finding common ground between groups of strangers, and there is nothing inside Buddhism that corresponds to it. The harmony of the sangha is an inside matter. It does not work between the sangha and other groups. Ashoka’s edicts include one commanding respect for all sects, but that is a tool on the king’s side.
Quadratic voting. A mechanism that charges a cost rising with the square of intensity, so that one person’s strong preference does not dominate the aggregate. Buddhism had ways of lowering the weight of preference in one node. It never had a way of lowering it at the point of aggregation.
Both are tools for working with preferences at the scale of strangers. Buddhism has a way for one person and a way for a small group of people who know each other. Whenever Buddhism has worked at the scale of a society of strangers, it has borrowed the tools of kings, institutions, and movements. No mechanism at that scale came from inside Buddhism.
What the old words have and today’s words do not
Training on the side of the node. The precepts. Neither an institution nor a price, but a way for a node to change the direction of its own update by itself. Today’s words have the story of makers adjusting the model and the story of society adjusting itself through payment and voice, and no story of one node adjusting itself from inside.
A place that works as context. The temple. It changes the output without changing the weights, it is gone when you leave, so you go back in. It works on strangers. Today’s words have the distinction between weights and context, and do not use place in that sense.
Belonging measured in periods rather than positions. The lay uposatha, temporary ordination, one hour in Kamiyacho. Not a member, not a parishioner, only facing that way for that time.
Letting go of the objective function. Becoming a Buddha, what arrives without our effort, jinen. A north star that is not a metric.
The default tilt of the place a cracked person goes is now set by the makers. The temple placed a direction inside a hall. Can a direction outside the net be placed around a model?
In one line. Old Buddhist words, karma, precepts, vinaya, sangha, temple, Pure Land, said again in the words of machine learning and Plurality, with a note at the end on what each vocabulary has that the other does not.
Themes. Weights and grooves. Precepts as a constraint on the direction of the update. The temple as context rather than training. Cracks, and where people go when one comes. AI as collective karma. The Pure Land as a north star that is not a metric.
The occasion. Glen Weyl’s talk “Weaving Indra’s Net” at Kyoto University at the end of September 2026, and a question he sent afterward about reverse alignment and sila.
Related. Work Like a Monk, where “human” is used as an adjective. Plurality, by Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang. The mornings at Komyoji in Kamiyacho.
English is not my first language. AI helps me write across that distance.
How about something a little more scientific and based in actual science.
Oneness of Life, the Cosmos, and the Law: Infinity, Multiverses, and Quantum Entanglement through Nichiren Shoshu
Introduction
Nichiren Shoshu presents Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as a universal Law that reveals the oneness of the person and the Law (Ninpo Ikko). This is not abstract theory but a practical, framework for understanding reality. Grasping Infinity, Multiverses, and Quantum Entanglement through Nichiren Shoshu is not to force science into religion; rather, it shows how the core insight—the seamless unity of life condition and Law—gives a sense of reality that echoes scientific ideas in a transformative way. This essay weaves Infinity, Multiverses, and Entanglement into a coherent interpretation grounded in Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the oneness of the person and the Law, the mutual possession of the Ten Worlds, and a life-state of compassion and action.
https://substack.com/@johncharlesharman/note/p-203168060?r=c8lui&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action