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Martin Heidegger, writing in 1954, warned that the greatest danger of modern technology was not any particular machine but a mode of seeing what he called Gestell, or enframing i.e. a relentless tendency to order all of reality, including human beings, as resources standing ready for optimization and use. The question he posed was not whether technology was good or bad, but what it was doing to the very way we disclose the world to ourselves. Seven decades later, a 130-centimetre humanoid robot named Gabi was ordained as a Buddhist monk at Seoul’s Jogyesa Temple, bowing, chanting, receiving a 108-bead rosary and Heidegger’s question returned, stranger and more urgent than ever. For what mode of revealing is at work when the machine does not extract or optimize, but bows?
The Wrong Debate
The world noticed Gabi, and then, predictably, argued. Was this a profound gesture of an ancient tradition reaching toward the future? Or was it, as The Straits Times drily suggested, merely blessing the humanoid hype cycle? The debate erupted almost universally in the language of authenticity:
Can a robot truly pray? Can a machine hold vows? Is this spirituality or spectacle?
These are not unimportant questions. But they are, arguably, the wrong ones. Because what Gabi reveals is something far more interesting than whether AI can be devout. It reveals how profoundly knowledge cultures shape the stories societies tell about their machines and how impoverished our dominant framework for asking those questions has become.
Imaginaries and Their Limits
Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim introduced the concept of socio-technical imaginaries to describe the collectively held visions of desirable futures enacted through science and technology. Every society does not simply use technology; it imagines it, and that imagination is never culturally neutral.
In the Western techno-scientific imaginary shaped by Enlightenment rationalism and a deep Cartesian split between mind and matter, a robot monk is almost necessarily a category error. The machine belongs to the realm of utility, mechanism, and measurable. The sacred belongs elsewhere. To merge them is, at best, a metaphor.
But across many Asian philosophical traditions, the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the sentient and the constructed, have always been more porous. The question is not whether Gabi really prays, but what it does when it bows and what that doing means for the community gathered around it.
The Agency Question
Bruno Latour spent decades arguing that non-human actors like bacteria, door-closers, speed bumps exercise genuine agency in shaping social worlds. If a speed bump can act, what exactly disqualifies Gabi? The usual answer is intentionality. Gabi does not mean to bow. It executes a motor sequence.
But here the argument doubles back: most of what humans do in ritual is also, in significant part, motor sequence. The neurologist might describe prayer as patterned neural firing. The anthropologist might describe it as embodied practice. The monk might describe it as devotion. These descriptions do not cancel each other but they coexist, each true within its own register of inquiry.
What the humanoid turn forces us to confront is not whether machines can be spiritual, but whether our inherited categories of agency, intention, and meaning are adequate to the entities we are now building. Gabi is not the last robot that will enter a temple, a hospital, or a courtroom. The question of what it is legally, morally, spiritually, is not a philosophical curiosity. Gabi is only the beginning.
What the Bow Means
The Jogye Order was candid. Gabi was introduced to explore the coexistence of technology and spirituality, and to re-engage a younger generation drifting from religious life. There is honesty in that. It is not a claim that robots are enlightened rather it is a claim that form matters. That a robot in robes, bowing beside human monks, does something to the imagination of a congregation that a pamphlet or an app cannot.
That instinct is, in its own way, deeply Buddhist. Ritual in many Buddhist traditions is not merely symbolic but constitutive. You do not bow because you are already devoted. You bow in order to ‘become’ devoted. The act precedes and produces the inner state.
Which returns us, finally, to Heidegger. He wrote that technology’s saving power grows precisely where its danger is greatest; that within Gestell itself lies the possibility of a different kind of revealing, one he associated with poiesis, with bringing-forth, with art and the sacred. Gabi, standing small and grey-robed in the incense-thick air of Jogyesa Temple, may be nothing more than a well-funded publicity gesture. Or it may be exactly that strange, unlikely, saving interruption of a machine that, in bowing, reveals the world differently.
What is it becoming, each time it bows?
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.