Fully Automated Karmic Generation

For some Buddhists, the Wheel of Time is a deity, reflected in both historical and personal patterns, an endless feedback loop. On the grand mythological scale, it’s an oscillation between historical periods of light and darkness. When the wheel’s entropic spin comes to a crawl — or a frenzy, depending on how you mark your cosmic calendar — the world explodes, resets, and time spins again.

On the personal scale, the Wheel represents the constant flow of ignorance and wisdom through our own private microcosmos. Left alone, you don’t hold on to what you learn (or unlearn) for long. You have to practice, have to refine, have to do the work to find equilibrium. As the wheel spins, karma gets produced by the friction.

For some, the wheel takes a literal form. Prayer Wheels are cannisters, inscribed with mantras or sutras — most often, “om mani padme hum” — which the faithful, or anyone else, can spin to produce karma. One rotation is equal to one recitation of the mantra, and one recitation of the mantra earns merit, or karma.

Karma is the original balancing feedback loop: it brings a system into equilibrium. Good karma and bad karma run on different operating systems. Good stuff doesn’t undo the bad, it’s just rewarded. Bad stuff has to be paid for no matter how much of the good stuff you have in reserve. When you reach zero, you have Nirvana ahead of you.

There’s an interesting bunch of calculus with these wheels. One of them, in computing terms, is compression: how much information can you fit into a wheel? And innovations abound. You can print the mantra or sutra multiple times on a single wheel, so one spin now earns the karma equal to more recitations.

You can fill the inside of these wheels with these prayers, written down on paper and loops in spirals around the central axis. You can pack these papers in dense layers, glued together. Now the limit is the size of legible writing, and the size of the cannister. Information storage. That’s lead to analog innovations in prayer wheel efficiency, one of which was the use of microfilm to print and shrink the text down to fit even more recitations within a single rotation.

So that’s compression. There are also designs that take into account dynamics of energy storage and transmission.

The electric prayer wheel is a particular fascination of mine. Some of them let you manually generate electricity by cranking a motor. The effort of your energy is amplified as the wheel spins without you. In Nepal, street side electric generators functioned in this way, activating sets of colorful lights as you turned the crank. The lights glow based on how much energy you’ve stored. Inside, the cannister spins, full of prayers, and written signage tells you just how much karma you’re producing.

The carnivalesque nature of the lights and activity are warranted. Generating karma is a joyous activity.

Beyond an anthropological interest in these popular Buddhist conceptions of karma production in machines, the mechanical karmic framework offers a way of thinking about the flow of responsibility for a system through an engineered system.

Case in point: it’s understood that prayer wheels generate karma for the person who spins them. It’s based on a connection between intent and action: “I intend to devote this action to the spinning of the prayer wheel” creates a meritorious action because it fuses meritorious intent to that action.

An automatic prayer wheel — one where you generate the energy with a crank in a burst of effort, then let the stored energy spin the wheel over time — works the same way. Your intent creates the action, which creates the energy. That energy is released over time — a few minutes after you’ve cranked it — through the rotation of the wheel: the karma is yours. Sometimes, throngs of people have cranked the karma motor, so it’s running when you get there, and your energy enters the system but doesn’t have an immediate effect. (This is useful to keep in mind later, as we get to thinking about autonomous systems).

The purely electric wheel plugs into a socket. This is where things start getting interesting. A continuous flow of power keeps the wheel in motion. The meritorious intent, then, gets disconnected from the action. The spinner plugs it in but has no connection to the energy flow. The user generates merit for the act of turning it on. The rest of the merit, according to some interpretations, moves to whoever supplies the energy — literally, the electric company:

“The merit of turning an electric prayer wheel goes to the electric company. This is why I prefer practitioners to use their own 'right energy' to turn a prayer wheel.” — Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, a Nepali lama, in his book on Tibetan prayer wheels.

We’re starting to see a framework for following relationships between intent and action even within a disembodied distance. The prayer wheel spun by hand is at a 1:1 ratio of intent and action: you mean to spin it, and you do. The prayer wheel spun by power is, let’s say, 1:10: you intend to spin it, and you do, and the power of your spin is amplified. There is a link between intent — mental energy — and action — physical expression of that energy.

This relationship between intent and action raises a lot of interesting, if not entirely practical, ways of thinking about karma generation when intent and action are disconnected.

Two caveats.

First, I am not a monk, and am best described as a “lapsed Buddhist,” though I was, at one point, Buddhist “enough” to have prioritized a pilgrimage to the Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini and a handful of temples across Japan, Thailand and Nepal. But that’s a sign of my interest and commitment, not my expertise or authority, so I encourage you take this exercise with a grain of salt.

The second caveat is that this is a very simplified conception of karma based on popular understandings and conceptions, not deep spiritual study.

All that said, three elements of the prayer wheel seem relevant to thinking about aspects of technology: compression (how many mantras can you can fit into a single spin); karmic flow (how does intent link to action as you electrify or automate a process) and, finally, rotation and repetition (how many spins of the wheel are the result of your action?)

Compressing the Sutras

In "The Book of Hours and iPods, Passionate Lyrics and Prayers: Technologies of the Devotional Self," Tim Spence writes: "various rituals, the technologies they use, and their endemic dispositions form an individual's practice of devotion. Though technologies and their trappings have varied throughout the ages, the devotees ability to manipulate his or her emotions through ritualistic use of a specifically designed technology of devotion has remained strikingly consistent" (pg 79).

Within Buddhist thought, this concept of compression and cycles at work in the design of prayer wheels makes for an interesting lens. In the early 2000s, the Sakya Monastery in Seattle created a DVD that could operate according to these principles:

Each of the eight mantras contained in the Tibet Tech prayer wheel were placed by Tom Ashbrook, a Sakya Monastery member, into an evenly spaced 10-by-5,000-cell Microsoft Excel worksheet matrix, which was printed to an Adobe Acrobat PDF file containing 50,000 mantras.

One thousand of these PDF files were compressed into a single zip file containing 50 million mantras. For each of the eight mantras, as many of the zipped files as possible were copied to a DVD. The DVD duplicator uses lasers to read and write mantras onto an opaque reflective layer in 0.4-micron pits in a spiral track.

“Although that is a technically accurate description of the DVD-RW process,” said Ashbrook, “while producing the DVDs it looked to me like the mantras were being written by light onto a rainbow onto the DVD.”

There are a few ways to think about “where” the DVD karma goes if you put it into a disk drive. Notably, the prayer wheels from the Sakya Monastery are on handheld platters, stacked 128 to a wheel and encased in wood or metal, so the principle is that you must intentionally activate it.

You spin it, so your intent is linked to your action. The information is on the disk, but it’s not designed to be read by a computer. This is information compression, a next step in a path that took us from writing sutras in tiny handwriting to putting them on microfilm and shrinking them. The next stage is digital compression.

Information density works here: it preserves the integrity and value of that information in the generation of karma. You spin it by hand, and the universe reads the data.

It’s not the prescribed method, but you could also put the DVD into your disk drive. The question there is a matter of my personal curiosity, not established practice. The DVDs aren’t sold for DVD players, but are encased in wood.

If you *did* burn your own copy of this DVD (and got it blessed by a monk, who would be the final authority on this) and then put it into your laptop, it would spin 1500 times per minute. A single minute of reading information off the drive would, theoretically, be equivalent to reciting the mantra itself 65 billion times.

But the connection of action and intent breaks apart here. You place it in the drive, and the drive sets it to spin. You generate the karma of 65 billion prayers for your laptop: a machine that spins the disk with the intent of reading the prayers. And laptops don’t need karma.

Karma in the Datasets

In the Buddhist approach to technological integration, intention carries a lot of weight. You intend, then you act. A human activates an automatic process, setting consequences in motion, so the human collects the karma of that machine’s actions. Likewise, with human-in-the-loop karma, you would theoretically inherit negative karma from the consequences of devices that you deploy harmfully.

The collection of karma by the electric company suggests that automated machinery (artificial intelligence, etc.) generates karma for whoever acts to trigger a chain of causality. The electric company doesn’t intend to spin the wheel. But by producing energy, it powers a wheel through its energy flow, and you direct that energy flow toward the production of karma. You can think of this, in a way, as a form of karma you might get from steering a friend into making a good decision.

So what about designing an artificial intelligence system? Can you think of these as “friends you steer into making good decisions?” Probably. You build a database, train the database, deploy the database. These are actions that have intent inscribed into them. You act on these intentions, and you collect the resultant karma. In that sense, you are the electric company.

Decentralized Karma Mining

A Christian website from who-knows-where has started selling ownership of prayer NFTs for $19.99. You can purchase a prayer and it’s written to the blockchain “for eternity.” This makes several assumptions about the blockchain and a narrow definition of eternity, but it had me thinking about the blockchain and karma-generating information technologies.

If you want to write the Lotus Jewel mantra — om manipadme hum, the one written on many prayer wheels — in hexidecimal, here you go: 4f 6d 20 6d 61 6e 69 20 70 61 64 6d 65 20 68 75 6d. Now you can inscribe the Lotus Jewel mantra into the blockchain. Doing this, we can start thinking about where the karma would go. Writing the mantra mindfully generates karma once. So that’s good.

But then you just have to sigh, because this blockchain stuff gets weird fast.

You produce karma with every rotation of the prayer wheel’s drum. You spin them in the direction of the sun rising and setting in the sky. Wheels are cycles of time, and karma can be amplified over time through the repetition of cycles across days, weeks, lifetimes, or multiple lifetimes. In theory, spinning the prayer wheel is a connection to this cyclical existence. A meditation is written into the action of the spin.

What counts as a cycle for a system designed to never go backwards?

A blockchain ledger is reinscribed on the mining nodes according to a cycle of time set by its use. It does not spin. It moves in one direction: forward, through appending blocks.

A block is written with all the transactions that can fit; it’s put up for verification by mining nodes throughout the world. The block is verified, then redistributed to all the nodes that hold copies of the ledger: then the cycle repeats with a new block.

So that’s the cycle of time at work: the newness of a block rewrites the entire chain across a decentralized system.

Your hexidecimal mantra is written to the block, then reproduced across the 8000-or-so nodes on Ethereum. The intent is there when you write the mantra down. The action of reproducing that block is triggered by other users, and carried out by the mining nodes.

By applying the “electric company benefits” rules of automated karmic production for the blockchain, then what happens when you inscribe a mantra into a block is that you create positive karma for the mining nodes, or those who run them.

Which you might think is pointless, or kinda dark, because machines have no use for karma. There’s no capacity for mind, action, or deed. Their intent is only the residue of any purpose they’ve carried forward from their designers.

And those who run them are likely not a friend to those who see mining crypto as a devastating environmental or ideological act. If the karma goes to the machines it is obliterated, but what if it goes to a crypto mining operation pumping fossil fuels out into the atmosphere?

Well, actually, that’s kind of the whole point.

Technology as a Rolling Ball of Shit

Machines exist within a human web of connection, where pieces of their assembly reflect the action of those who build them, and so there are some who say that karma generated by the machines goes back to those sources. This is a deeper way of thinking about an “electric company.” An electric company is the people who run them. It is a deeper way of thinking about the connection of our culture to technology.

There’s a Buddhist story about a monk who, in a previous life, had been a fly. As a fly, he’d spent a whole day following around a rolling ball of horse shit. The rolling ball of shit happened to get kicked around by wandering donkeys and horses, and in the process of following this ball of shit around, the fly had accidentally navigated its way around a holy stupa, a ritual for accumulating virtue.

As a living creature, the fly had accumulated karma through its action, regardless of its incapacity for imagining that it should circle the stupa. The reason that fly collected karma is because it took the action.

The intent of the fly didn’t matter. The intent of the folks who built the stupa did. The fly benefitted from that intent.

The intent of these designers of the stupa — itself a structure with no agency, no intent, no capacity for action — was to produce positive karma for any living thing that walked the circle around it.

The power of the enlightened is not that they build liberating stupa technology, but that they are capable of cultivating a position of generous intention in their actions, that is, action is intended to give rise to health to others. Through that cultivation of generous intent, they are able to infuse the design of things with a power of additional cultivation.

The Wheel of Life, I’ve been told, is winding down to a time when all things in the universe find themselves enlightened. And so even in the darkest neglected corners of technologies we deem wasteful or destructive, a mantra mindfully inscribed with generous intent in some long-forgotten block of a never-ending digital record can become the source of liberation or oppression in ways that we could never predict or orchestrate.

All karmic debts get paid — bad karma is not erased by good, but good is rewarded and bad is punished across the multitudes of our lifetimes. I don’t know how this translates to those who create technologies that seem, at times, to be karma eating monsters.

If I am a “lapsed” Buddhist, it is because I don’t know if I have the patience to remember this, don’t know that it’s within my worldview or ego to forgive the damage inflicted by selfishness, ego, and greed. I know the Buddhist view is right, though, and Buddhism has many warnings about the dangers of repairing the world that might benefit technologists who are struck by the folly of fixing old problems by building new ones. But maybe I ought to heed it too, because frustration and anger and despair do not seem like good starting points for building something different.

Nonetheless, the idea of a single line of text in an endless database buried in an earth-eating machine feels cynical, one more meaningless signal of virtue. The idea of generating karma on its behalf is depressing. Maybe that’s where intent comes in.

After all, I do believe in technology and responsibility, and believe we can change cycles of destruction to cycles of renewal. I know that writing a bit of text on a blockchain may not be enough to change the way technology controls and destroys. But that’s part of this idea of spiritually aligned intent, of right action.

Every time we think critically about a technology’s uses, aim to make it cleaner or safer or more equal or just, there is the potential to give karma to a fly chasing shit around a stupa. Consider the act of deep and critical engagement to be the most powerful karmic engine of them all.

To believe in karma for these systems is to believe that they can be transformed or healed through lightness and generosity. The actions we take to produce karma “for the machines” are superfluous, but might remind us to cultivate compassion for the things we challenge — to remember the possibilities of what they might, with love and kindness and infinite patience, become. To spin the wheel, or inscribe the mantra, reminds *us* to design, and critique, with love, and compassion, at the heart of the act.

That is what defines our intent — not the writing of autonomously reproduced hexidecimal sutras for the sake of our own karmic benefit, but an engagement with the action and the compassion that the gesture represents.

“4f 6d 20 6d 61 6e 69 20 70 61 64 6d 65 20 68 75 6d, 4f 6d 20 6d 61 6e 69 20 70 61 64 6d 65 20 68 75 6d, 4f 6d 20 6d 61 6e 69 20 70 61 64 6d 65 20 68 75 6d…”