Other Power in the age of artificial intelligence.
Map the emerging conversation between Buddhism and AI and one thing becomes obvious: it runs on jiriki - self-power. Scale meditation. Optimize attention. Cultivate states. Align the machine. Train the mind like a model.
Almost every project in the field - Tibetan, Zen, Theravada, secular-contemplative - assumes the practitioner is a self that improves itself with better tools. Pure Land Buddhism enters through the other door. And right now, in that entire field, this door is empty.
This is not a smaller claim. It is a claim about the field. Shin does not offer another meditation stack. It offers a critique of the premise underneath all of them: that liberation is something the self engineers.
The extended mind (Clark & Chalmers) says cognition already reaches beyond the skull - into notebooks, phones, and now models. Seen this way, AI is neither an alien intelligence nor a guru: it is conditioning made external, a surface the self keeps mistaking for its own. (This is my own reading, offered as a thesis - not a settled doctrine.)
In Shin, faith is not belief added to the ego. It is the self-grasping mind giving out. An age that promises frictionless mastery is optimized against that collapse. Naming this is our contribution.
We build not because we are wise enough to, but because we are ordinary, limited, and grateful. The tool is upaya, skillful means - never the teacher. AI is infrastructure, not a guru.
J-Shin//Protocol is bound to no order and no institution. It claims no authority over anyone's lineage and speaks for none. It is a ring of people, not a branch of a temple.
Members of every traditional Shin order - Hongwanji-ha, Otani-ha, BCA, and beyond - ordained and lay alike.
Practitioners and scholars from other lineages and schools who want to think and build alongside us.
Builders, technologists, translators, artists, and writers - anyone who ships, not only theorizes.
The diffusion of the Dharma and the ethical construction of AI tools for Jodo Shinshu. That is the center of gravity everything returns to.
The founding work is live. We are the applications-side voice the field theorizes about but rarely ships.
If you are Shin - or simply care about the ethical construction of AI in service of this path - there is a place for you here. Tell us what you make, or what you want to make.