Religious Subjectivity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence:The Reshaping of Religious Experience under Technological Rationality from a Buddhist Perspective

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from being an external instrument to an environment that increasingly mediates attention, interpretation, and judgment. In religious life, this shift is not merely practical; it is structural. It reconfigures how religious experience is organized, how authority is distributed, and how religious subjectivity is formed. This article examines these transformations through a Buddhist philosophical lens, arguing that the rise of “algorithmic rationality” (a data-driven, predictive, optimizing mode of reason) reshapes the experiential conditions presupposed by Buddhist practice—especially the cultivation of mindfulness (smṛti), concentration (samādhi), and wisdom (prajñā). Drawing on core Buddhist doctrines—dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), non-self (anātman), the dynamics of craving and grasping (tṛṣṇā/upādāna), and the ethical primacy of intention (cetanā)—the paper analyzes how AI reorganizes the field of experience by: (1) externalizing and commodifying attention, (2) delegating hermeneutic labor to machine mediation, (3) accelerating temporality and weakening the pedagogical value of “slow practice,” (4) introducing a new form of authority that is opaque yet persuasive, and (5) intensifying subtle forms of attachment to metrics, personalization, and cognitive convenience. The article distinguishes the legitimate instrumental use of AI from its deeper tendency to colonize meaning-making and proposes a Buddhist-informed normative framework: “technological non-appropriation,” “digital restraint,” and “contemplative accountability.” It concludes that Buddhism can engage AI constructively only by reasserting the irreducibility of liberation to optimization and by safeguarding the soteriological structure of practice against the reification and outsourcing of subjectivity.