Daniel Veidlinger.  From Indra's Net to Internet: Communication,
Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas.  Contemporary
Buddhism Series. Honolulu  University of Hawai'i Press, 2018.  284
pp.  $68.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-7340-0.

Reviewed by James Taylor (The University of Adelaide)
Published on H-Buddhism (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Ben Van Overmeire

Indra's Net is a metaphor for the reflective cosmological view that
permeates the Hindu-Brahmanical world, symbolizing the universe as a
web of transient connections and interdependencies. This conception
was eventually absorbed into the early Mahayana philosophy.
Essentially this book discusses the nature of online Buddhism and its
evolution in terms of the transmission of meanings and practices
through various communication networks over time. In the present
time, the author tells us, the "Buddha's concern with propagating his
(doctrinal) message lives on in the wired world" (p. 4).

The book then discusses issues pertinent and apropos to the late
modern world as practicing Buddhists (in diverse Buddhist cultural
systems) confront a new lived space. In this changing milieu,
cyber-Buddhism (with various Buddhist internet sites) has emerged
since the 1990s as a response to the needs of an increasingly mobile
and fragmented transnational (mostly urban) new social order. Arising
from the experiences with modernity are new spatial possibilities
engendered in large part by these hypertechnologies, especially the
internet; digitalization potentially and markedly transforms
religious space. The book is a contribution to the realization of the
transformative possibilities embedded in a postmodern digital
religion following the trajectories of the ancient communicative
systems. It extends these early philosophical traditions into a new
world of communication via electronic space.

In general, it must be stated that the book is not new in its
thematic coverage of cyber-Buddhism and the new (virtual) religious
technologies of communication. The book though is intriguing in its
use of identifying historical links to a new digital future. It is
nevertheless rather fragmented in its argumentation and weakly
supported by somewhat scattered use of theory. It nevertheless
succeeds at another level as thought provoking, if somewhat
speculative. Unfortunately, the work either is oblivious to or
consciously omits other related thematic sources. As an example, one
wonders why the author overlooked my earlier work on
cyber-Buddhism.[1] This includes a not dissimilar consideration in
regard to the way new electronic space/communications (in a
postmodern urban milieu) has influenced the religious landscape and
in the way we now perceive normative articulations of religious
practice. Neither does the author make reference to my 2008 Buddhism
and Postmodern Imaginings in Thailand (especially chapter 4), as it
looks at a new (virtual) religiosity (especially chapters 5 and 6)
regarding digital Buddhism, the changing nature of religiosity (how
devotees interpret meaning and practice in their religion), and the
increased reliance on an electronic (communicative) space through the
use of the internet.

Perhaps not surprisingly (as Daniel Veidlinger has worked with
Gregory Grieve), Grieve's work is well cited, though not his new
work, _Cyber Zen: Imagining Authentic Buddhist Identity, Community
and Practices in the Virtual World_ (2016). But in discussing virtual
(social) space and the implications for digital religion, the author
should have referred to the pioneering work on virtuality (and the
new possibilities of net life) in the 1990s by sociologists and
cultural theorists, such as Rob Shields's edited collection _Cultures
of the Internet, Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies_; the
collection by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows,
_Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological
Embodiment_, especially chapters by Mark Poster and Kevin Robins; and
work by Mark Nunes (his article "Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace" and
his new book, _Cyberspaces of Everyday Life_).[2] Indeed, we are at a
time of importance in technological history, which arguably may be
compared to the watershed emergence of an urban-centered merchant
culture in tribal societies at the time of the Buddha (discussed in
chapter 3 of Veidlinger's book). It may be appropriate then to
consider a new Jaspersian Axial Age where personalized transcendence
and experience through the medium of new optical technologies
replaces traditional embodied religious communities with online (web)
communities. The discussion in chapter 2 on the Axial Age, given that
the book is "suggestive," could have taken this imagining a lot
further than (an interesting) historical narrative (p. 229).   

Veidlinger's argument also needs to be framed in relation to textual
Buddhism (orthopraxy and orthodoxy), as virtual/cyber communication
challenges how we think, feel, and act on being religious. There is a
broader ethnographic context missing in the book that needs to
consider changes occurring in everyday practices (symbolism, meaning,
and rituals). The net in fact produces multiple orderings of time and
space that transcend online/offline boundaries (see the work of
Christine Hine, _Virtual Ethnography_ [2000]). It is not enough to
say that this communicative environment has the ability to shape
ideas and the nature of the "self" (in a Buddhist sense) without
considering how this is articulated on the ground and evidenced in
social practice (p. 226). In a postmodern argument we can say that
the Buddha, metaphorically speaking, is in the arcades and the
shopping malls ("dreamscapes"), and in cyberspace as well as
traditional centers of religious learning, village temples, frontier
forest hermitages, etc. The author states (using a comparison to
biological evolution) how the environment is a determinative process
that we see occurring in the technological world as well; and of
course there is ample evidence that technology has an effect on the
way we perceive the world (that is, how we understand conventional
reality). What should be taken into account here is the notion that
Buddhism (as with other world religions) and religious change more
generally could be seen as biosocial adaptations to changing
environments (see Stephen Sanderson's _Religious Evolution and the
Axial Age: From Shamans to Priests to Prophets_ [2018], though
published too late for consideration by the author under review).

It is simply incorrect at one level to say that village or rural
Buddhism in Theravada countries had little connection to the outside
world until more recent innovations in telecommunications and to
imply in general that the "rural environment" encumbers social
relations with the world outside (p. 221). Theravadin villages in
Southeast Asia have of course long been influenced by external agents
and have undergone internal transformations through their mobile
interactions with the outside world (Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burmese,
Sinhalese, etc.), as Stanley Tambiah had earlier noted in his
"caravans of history" in his book _Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in
North-east Thailand_ (1970), cited by Veidlinger. But if we compare
changes to urban political and ritual centers then we can make this
distinction. Indeed, communicative networks (especially early modern
systems, railways, printing, etc. brought about through influences of
colonialism since the late nineteenth century) may have been limiting
cultural change, but these did not create impermeable communities.
This is why anthropologists (since Thomas Kirsch in 1977) have
explained endogenous Buddhism/s as syncretic, consisting of
interactive religious strands.[3] Perceiving Buddhism as ossified or
impervious neglects the transformations as well as the transmissions
by nomadic/missionary monks through various "way stations" (for
example, Sinhalese Buddhism and Mon in Burma) and in the manner of
regional dispersed segmented pupillages--a picture that is part of
the mobile preteritic vitality of Theravada Buddhism. Here I can only
speak of the "southern school" of Buddhism. However, what has
occurred in late modern times is the speed of these interactions and
social and cultural changes and in religiosity brought about by new
electronic or virtual communications as articulated by such thinkers
as Paul Virilio and more recently Thomas Sutherland in relation to
spatial ecologies, speed-space, or time-space compression.[4] Indeed,
though not considered in the book, this would be useful in a
discussion of late modern hyper-communications to underpin the
author's argument. But to be fair, the author never claims to take a
late or postmodern position in his analysis except in a fleeting
reference to the present "postmodern era" and a mention of
Jean-François Lyotard in relation to advances in communication and
information technologies (pp. 146-47, 195).

Ancient capitalism is discussed in the book (chapters 1 and 4,
mentioning early trade routes, religious crossovers, the fifth
century BC, and the rise of an Indic entrepreneur urban-dwelling
class) but not taken further in the discussion of late modern
capitalism and implications for new communications theory. It may
have been useful to consider how this is articulated within a Marxist
logic (as in David Harvey's _The Condition of Postmodernity_ [1989]).
Veidlinger notes that as people become ever more digitally connected
across the world (especially through the use of new fiber optics)
"delivering messages at light speed" that "we can expect a radical
shift in perspective amongst those who have access to this network"
(p. 31). Speed (as mentioned above) is connected to time, the latter
something the late modern cyber-Buddhist devotee has less and less
of. Although not pursued, this argument to online access implies
local/global inequalities in an information and communications
network dominated by the reach and influence of global capital that
privileges some classes (and nations) but not others and even allows
authoritarian leaders to control information and pursue propaganda
and misinformation. However, as in Thailand and other heavily
regulated countries, people now have access to various alternative
counter-statist electronic social media and are able to get around
single gateways as in the use of a live OS that can be installed onto
a USB drive to mask the host system information from both the ISPs
and the websites. (These are systems that one can plug into any
computer and boot as if it is an alternative operating system without
damaging or changing the machine. It is alleged that none of the
activity will be logged on the machine because it will bypass
everything, except of course for RAM.) Cyberspace is potentially also
then a (third) space of resistance. At the same time, relevant to
this discussion, digital space also opens up the possibilities for
the emergence of varieties of new Buddhism/s that may contest
normative (place-based) religion.

The Buddhist notion of "selflessness" (chapter 6) is not just that
there is no organic or psychological (ultimate) "self" (Atta) as
Veidlinger notes but also that we should not become fixated on this
notion of self/identity, which leads to the substantiated delusion of
ownership or self-importance (pp. 180-81). There is a "one who knows"
(citta) and a recognition of the truths of the human condition.
Insight practice is to understand the changeability and ultimate
emptiness of the _khandhas_, the five elements that constitute the
totality of an individual's mental and physical existence. This all
raises the question of how computer-mediated communication can enable
the practitioner to become a "stream enterer" (Sotāpanna) and
achieve the ultimate fruition and results of normative Buddhist
practice.

We also need to keep in mind that there is not just one Buddhism but
many Buddhisms, as the author includes in the book on his discussion
on various vinayas, national Buddhism/s, and practices. Trevor Ling
first referred to "Buddhisms," in _Buddhist Trends in Southeast Asia_
(1993), as a means to express the plurality and diversity of
(Buddhist) religio-cultural forms within national contexts. Indeed,
the emergence of cyber-Buddhism in the twenty-first century is one
such reflection of a felt need in the late modern world, where
devotees normally spend most of their time online. Tom Boellstorff's
book, _Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human_ (2015) (especially pertinent is his chapter 5 on
"self" and "personhood"), is a brilliant ethnographic analysis that
would have nicely complemented the brief reference made to this
virtual world in regard to Buddhist impermanence and to Buddhists
engaged in it. Boellstorff notes the dilemma among some of his
informants as they come to terms with their virtual and actual
selfhoods. 

As contemporary societies become more interconnected and intensified
through globalization, Veidlinger claims, people become more aware of
their own impermanence (annica), a condition "instantiated strongly
on the Internet" (p. 180). Then, later, he notes that "we can see
that the dynamic space opened up by computer-mediated communication
is fostering an environment in which unprecedented opportunities
emerge for the realization of core Buddhist concepts such as anitya
(annica) and anatman (anatta)" (p. 197). Interesting as it may be to
conjecture given the changing social space, as Buddhists is it
feasible to envisage insight (or even Enlightenment) gained directly
online by the "denizens of cyberspace" analogous to actual normative
experiences gained from grounded Buddhist practice given that the
core of Buddhism is located in realizing the truth of "suffering" or
"unsatisfactoriness" (dukkha) (p. 164)? There is thus something
utopic (or eutopic) about how this book portrays computer-mediated
communication. Undergirding it is a belief that the internet may lead
one to (a comfortable) transcendence and where (as I have earlier
noted, and equally speculative) the new prophets of this new
(postmodern) electronic religion are the Buddhist "webmasters," now
the religious specialists or "virtuosi" for giving definitions, even
taking the place of place-based monks as disseminators of religious
(insight) knowledge.[5]

Chapter 7 is a study of internet use and provides some interesting
national data and related discussion, but again I have some
discomfort in the conclusion to this chapter that the survey
user-data about religious beliefs and online behavior implies that
the more time spent on the internet, the "more likely one is to have
an affinity for Buddhism," and that this allows or affords its users
to unwind the sense of attachment to individuality/self, or with the
connection of online practice with the complexity of the Buddha's
teachings on Dependent Origination. I agree that there are arguments
that this is of course "likely to play an important role in the
attractiveness of Buddhism to the wired segments of society" (p.
219). In fact, online Buddhism is more likely to facilitate (virtual)
connectivity and to lead to a new sense of religiosity, even to what
we may refer to as postmodern Buddhism located in these virtual
technologies for the communication of simulated religious ideas and
practices. Being "online" is a medium of reproducing actual
discourses that are generated within real-life (embodied)
communities--at least for those who are able to have access to the
internet. There are numerous examples of Buddhist teachers (mostly in
the West) who now actively teach online (and posted as YouTube
videos), who could have been used as ethnographic case studies.
Face-to-face interactions may now rarely take place, except through
the virtual online (especially in the Covid-19 pandemic) using
various cloud platforms.

It is the nature of the imagination that is key to understanding the
new communicative technologies, a virtual potential new (third) space
and one that potentially may generate not just cultural change but
societal change as a whole. It is the totality of this axiological
"radical interconnection" that is missing in the book (p. 220).
Instead we are offered fragments of thought throughout the eight
chapters. Nowhere do I get the sense that these new communications
technologies can capture a sense of an exciting new (hyper-real)
religiosity, or even religious environment reflecting the sociality
in late modernity or postmodernity. However, we can envisage a
Buddhism as some kind of "fractal dreaming" (Robins's term) and in so
doing using new electronic vectors posit a challenge to normative or
orthodox Buddhism. Adam Possamai influenced by Baudrillard's thinking
termed "hyper-real religions" to those religions "created out of
popular culture which provides inspiration for believers/consumers at
a metaphorical level."[6] These are cases where religions and popular
culture are so intermingled that it becomes hard to find a sense of
the actuality or "real" of religions and religiosity behind them.
Possamai in fact identified the internet as a key factor in the
transformation and growth of these hyper-religions. In other words
(if I may be permitted to finish with Baudrillard), in this creation
of a new heterotopic space of simulated digital religion, is this so
extenuated from its original source of (communicated) meaning that we
end in a more-real-than-real (hyper-real) simulacrum of Buddhism? 

Notes 

[1]. James Taylor, "Cyber-Buddhism and Changing Urban Space in
Thailand," _Space and Culture_ 6, no. 3 (August 2003): 292-308.

[2]. Rob Shields, ed., _Cultures of the Internet, Virtual Spaces,
Real Histories, Living Bodies_ (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications,
1996); Mark Poster, "Postmodern Virtualities," in
_Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological
Embodiment_, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (Thousand Oaks,
CA: SAGE Publications, 1995): 79-95; Kevin Robbins, "Cyberspace and
the World We Live In," in Featherstone and Burrows,
_Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk_, 135-55; Mark Nunes, "Jean
Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity,"
_Style_ 29, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 314-27; and Mark Nunes, _Cyberspaces
of Everyday Life_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

[3]. Thomas Kirsch, "Complexity in the Thai Religious System: An
Interpretation," _The Journal of Asian Studies_ 36, no. 2 (February
1977): 241-66.

[4]. Paul Virilio, _The Aesthetics of Disappearance_ (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1991); Paul Virilio, _Speed and Politics: An Essay on
Dromology_ (1977; repr., New York: Semiotext(e), 1986); and Thomas
Sutherland, "Liquid Networks and the Metaphysics of Flux: Ontologies
of Flow in an Age of Speed and Mobility," _Theory Culture &
Society_ 30, no. 5 (2013): 3-23.

[5]. Taylor, "Cyber-Buddhism," 294.

[6]. Adam Possamai, _Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real
Testament_ (Brussels: P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Éditions Scientifiques
Internationales, 2007), 79.

Citation: James Taylor. Review of Veidlinger, Daniel, _From Indra's
Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of
Buddhist Ideas_. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55472

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.