"Walk down the tiny, colorful streets of . . . Upper Dharamsala . . . and one glimpse reveals what 21st-century Buddhism is all about. Internet cafes sprinkled around the Indian Himalayan town are filled with new Web users sitting hours every day trolling Facebook and other social networks while dressed in red robes. With Buddhism’s embrace of the Internet, lamas and monks are increasingly “adding” friends and family to their Facebook account, posting images, sharing videos, and “liking” Web pages." *When I saw this recent Christian Science Monitor story about the popularity of social networking services among Tibetan Buddhist monks, it reminded me of a Vision of the Future I had back in the days of the Mosaic browser, which I eventually expressed to the administrator of a well-implemented website addressing the English-speaking Sangha, when I finally found such a site, in a not-so-well-implemented series of haiku:
hello editor:
i had a vision
years ago on the cusp of
the internet age
all the world's bhikkus
monks, aspirants and sages
sitting, practicing
cultivating each
in her own place, communing
interconnected,
in sacred group art
of chat-room haiku writing:
digerati tao
and here you are. (bad
haikus, sorry). rather, here
one of you is, now.
let's get a chat room
going, to share our pearls of
koanic wisdom.
Naturally, members of the global Sangha were not envisioned as customers of internet cafes, out in the commercial world, but as equipped -- right there on their zafus, wherever in the world they perform the sitting practice -- with devices sufficiently networked to permit real-time text communication. I further imagined that very little traffic would be produced, but that, when text was transmitted, it'd be in the most pithy and sublime verse.
* [Struggling here not to take issue with the piece and its unfortunate diction, but, in all fairness, I suppose I also erred, invoking the Tao in something ostensibly treating of Buddhism. I'll admit, so long as they are participating at all, I kind of like the idea of all these monks actually trolling social networking sites ('though that's not what Saransh Sehgal meant by it). Also I cannot help but strongly object to the assertion that the reported behavior "reveals what 21st-century Buddhism is all about," because I already have a pretty good idea "what it's about."]