Buddhist Robots Reveal Salvation Without Transcendence

When the android Mindar stands at the front of Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto, delivering sermons on the Heart Sutra with uncanny lifelike gestures, it looks to many Western observers like the arrival of a long-anticipated future in which machines take over not just our labor but our souls. A new study argues that this futuristic framing is fundamentally misleading. In research published in AI & Society, Yuheng Wang of the National University of Singapore and Heidi Campbell of Texas A&M University examine how robotic religious agents are actually imagined, deployed and legitimated in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts, and their findings upend the familiar narrative of techno-salvationism as a story about transcendence, immortality and liberation from human limits. What they find instead is something far more mundane and, paradoxically, far more revealing: machines being absorbed into ancient institutional structures as tools of maintenance, continuity and outreach, rather than as prophets of a posthuman age.

Techno-salvationism, as the term has been used in scholarship emerging largely from Western theological and posthumanist debates, describes a cultural imaginary in which advanced technologies promise to save humanity from its own limitations. Thinkers such as Hans Moravec, Raymond Kurzweil and Robert Geraci have described visions in which artificial intelligence offers digital immortality, mind uploading or an algorithmic heaven. This literature has been influential, but it rests almost entirely on Euro-American sources, science fiction traditions and transhumanist manifestos. Wang and Campbell argue that this lens, applied uncritically to Japan and China, produces distorted readings of what is actually happening when Buddhist institutions put robots in robes. The local reality, they show, is shaped by demographic crisis, institutional economics and centuries-old ideas about sacred objects, not by dreams of escaping the body.

The study’s method is distinctive. Rather than conducting surveys or interviewing temple staff, the researchers performed a visual discourse analysis of publicly available YouTube videos featuring three of the most prominent Buddhist robots in East Asia: Mindar, the android preacher at Kyoto’s Kodaiji Temple; Pepper, the SoftBank humanoid that has been deployed in Japanese funerary rituals; and Xian’er, the cartoon-like robot monk created at Longquan Monastery outside Beijing. Drawing on the visual grammar frameworks developed by Kress and van Leeuwen and the critical multimodal approach of Machin and Mayr, the authors examined how these robots are framed through camera angles, composition, textual overlays and narrators’ voices, and how religious authority is visually constructed around them.

The differences among the three cases are striking. Mindar, modeled on the bodhisattva Kannon and built in collaboration with robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s laboratory, is presented in media coverage as a serious liturgical actor, often framed in reverent compositions that situate the machine inside temple architecture and ritual sequences. Pepper, by contrast, appears in funerary settings as a cheaper substitute for human priests amid Japan’s acute shortage of clergy, a practical response to the declining rural temples and aging population that scholars of Japanese funeral Buddhism have documented for decades. Xian’er, with his childlike, cartoonish design, functions less as a ritual performer than as a communicative mascot, projecting a modern, tech-friendly image of Chinese Buddhism under state oversight. Each robot embodies a different institutional strategy, and none of them, the authors argue, is genuinely oriented toward transcendence.

Instead, the study identifies a pattern it calls succession rather than contestation. In Western accounts of religion and technology, machines often appear as rivals to human clergy, potential replacements that provoke anxiety about authenticity and displacement. In the Japanese and Chinese Buddhist material, however, robots are typically endowed with authority through deliberate clerical investment. Mindar was consecrated and scripted by senior priests; its sermons are drawn from established doctrinal content. Xian’er was developed within the monastery’s own media apparatus, its utterances curated by monastic editors. Pepper’s funerary chanting is authorized by the funeral companies and temples that rent it out. Authority, in other words, does not migrate from humans to machines through some autonomous technological logic. It is lent to machines by existing hierarchies, which position the robots as successors, emissaries or communicative tools embedded within the institution’s own chain of legitimacy.

This finding resonates with a broader literature on digital religion, including Campbell’s foundational work on religious practice in digital media and Philip Chong’s studies of bounded religious automation, which show that AI systems in religious settings are typically fenced in by human oversight. But Wang and Campbell push the argument further by showing how culturally specific histories enable this smooth absorption. Japanese religious culture has long traditions of animate sacred objects, from spirit-filled dolls to the concept of tsukumogami, in which old tools acquire souls. Scholars such as Fabio Rambelli have traced the rich Buddhist materiality of objects in Japan, while Jensen and Blok’s work on techno-animism suggests that attributing agency to machines is not a rupture but a continuity. Meanwhile, pioneering roboticist Masahiro Mori, himself a Buddhist, explicitly framed his philosophy of robotics in religious terms. Against this backdrop, a robot monk is not a category violation but a new entry in an old catalogue of empowered things.

The Chinese case adds a different layer of complexity. Longquan Monastery’s Xian’er emerged from one of China’s most digitally sophisticated religious institutions, which has embraced online Dharma talks, animations and social media to reach a young, urban audience. Wang and Campbell show that in this context, techno-salvationism is inflected by state relations and cultural priorities: the robot’s charm and humor serve outreach and soft publicity rather than ritual substitution. The unevenness across the three cases, the authors emphasize, matters theoretically. Techno-salvationism is not a single global imaginary diffusing outward from Silicon Valley. It takes locally uneven forms, shaped by demographic pressures such as Japan’s clergy shortage, infrastructural disparities between institutions, and divergent cultural priorities about what religion is for.

The implications reach beyond Buddhism. As AI chatbots claiming divine identities multiply, with recent coverage in Nature highlighting Jesus-claiming bots and calls for red lines around religious AI, the study offers a crucial corrective to debates dominated by Western anxieties about deception, autonomy and the singularity. In the East Asian Buddhist material, the central question is not whether machines can save us, but whether institutions can maintain themselves, attract followers and transmit tradition in societies undergoing rapid demographic and technological change. Robots here are instruments of institutional survival. They chant sutras at funerals that human priests can no longer staff cheaply; they draw visitors to temples struggling for relevance; they translate doctrine into forms legible to media-saturated publics. Salvation, in this frame, is less about the soul of the believer than the continuity of the organization.

By demonstrating that succession, not transcendence, is a recurring pattern in mediated representations of Buddhist robots, the study expands the conceptual scope of techno-salvationism itself. It suggests that scholars of digital religion must attend to how different religious cultures configure authority, embodiment and materiality before importing theories built on Western posthumanist assumptions. The android at Kodaiji Temple does not promise to upload anyone to a digital heaven. It promises something quieter: that an ancient tradition, with the help of silicone and servos, will keep speaking. In an era when technology and religion are converging across the globe, that quieter promise may prove the more consequential one, and understanding it requires looking past the spectacle of machine preachers to the institutional hands that guide them. The research, published as a review article on 21 September 2026, is likely to shape future scholarship on AI, authority and religion far beyond the temples where its subjects dwell.

Subject of Research: Techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in mediated representations of Japanese and Chinese Buddhist robots.

Article Title: More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts

Article References: Wang, Y., & Campbell, H. (2026). More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Keywords: techno-salvationism, Buddhist robots, religious authority, digital religion, Mindar, Xian'er, Pepper robot, Japanese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, visual discourse analysis, AI and religion, AI & Society