The Dharma of Second Life
by Al
In the last week, I have spent a bit of time in Second Life. For those who have been blissfully unaware, Second Life is a virtual world simulator. Think World of Warcraft but not as shiny and polished and, for the most part, not based around the idea of a game. People do have game areas in it but it is largely a creative chat medium.
I looked around Second Life a few years ago, found the software to be a bit buggy and the servers to be unreliable, and quit bothering. It seemed like a big time sink (and it still can be) without a lot of “there” there to bring me back. Just recently, that has changed a bit. I’ve heard during the last few months of a few Buddhist teachers running meetings in second life, doing instruction, and generally talking to people there about the Dharma.
Earlier this week, I heard about Kannonji, a virtual temple there. They have a blog up and run meetings and meditation sessions at their temple in second life every day. A day or so later, I found out that my own teacher, Jiun Foster, was going to conduct a teaching there this Saturday. In the course of setting that up and meeting Rev. Jiun, the kind folks at Kannonji donated space on their virtual land (which only exists because someone is paying a monthly rent to keep it around) to the Five Mountain Order, our Zen organization. This allows us to have a virtual zendo there for group meetings and teachings as well as interviews with teachers. As a result, I made a new SL account and have spent a bit of time meeting the folks there.
I’m actually quite hopeful for it as tool for spreading the Dharma, especially amongst folks who aren’t near practitioners or are, perhaps, too shy to just show up to a Dharma center and ask questions. If tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people can play things like World of Warcraft, these same people have computers beefy enough to log into Second Life. I’ve heard at least one person ask me about the utility of Second Life when compared to a flesh and blood sangha but, in many ways, that’s apples and oranges. A flesh and blood meeting with people, embodied in the world, is not going to be the same as virtual meeting. That said, quite a few groups of people are meeting over group voice chat, skype, and other tools, in order to support each other in the Dharma. Second Life is an additional tool in that sort of direction.
One nice thing about SL is that it supports voice, gestures, and a certain level of embodiment. I’m doing koan work with two members of our organization now and we’ve been experimenting with ways to work on koans when two of us (a student and teacher) are not local to each other, which is the case for most people in our order. The phone works fairly well. Skype with video, I am told, also works quite well. Email can work though it isn’t as spontaneous. Rev. Jiun and I tried some koan work yesterday and found that SL worked reasonbly well, though I expect video might nudge it out. Since you can have private voice conversations in SL, gesture, and also type text, it feels very practical. Does it replace meeting in person? No, that is the gold standard, in a way, but we also live in an era of a very distributed Dharma and the Five Mountain Order supports this with our embrace of working with members who may not have a local sangha. The Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary, as a distance-based Mahayana seminary, is another attempt at this.
It will be interesting to see where this all goes. The dork factor is a bit high at times (and I did buy a flaming demon avatar shape and a lightsaber to go along with my official "looks vaguely like me" Zen priest avatar and clothes) but it is an interesting environment.
I encourage people to come visit Kannonji if they can install a Second Life player. (You can find the official one here and, Emerald, the one I use, here.)
I also encourage people to come to Kannonji at 4:00 PM PDT on October 17 (tomorrow) to listen to Rev. Jiun’s talk. I plan to attend and it ought to be interesting. He will be conducting interviews and talking to people afterwards as well.
Comments
Pretty doubtful about the possibilities of virtual community myself – it is only virtual in the computer simulation sense, not in any of the other dictionary senses (esp. it is not even close to seeming real) and because of the artificiality and narrowness of bandwidth (compared to face to face) it doesn’t really foster community – it’s like synthetic food that fills, but does not nourish. One conversation with a real person is worth 1000 online interactions. 10,000 maybe. I fear that taking second life seriously means falling for a simulacrum of the simulacrum that we call reality. Second Life must mean in this case second rate life, second hand life, at two removes from life, second order derivative of life, secondary to life: because it cannot mean “another life”.
That said my friend Bodhipaksa has been successfully teaching meditation online for a few years now (wildmind.org), so why not?
Good avatar too btw – must have taken some time to get that up.
Regards
Jayarava
But you say this as someone who lives, as I recall, in a intentional community composed of people from your sangha.
One of the Kannonji organizers is in the middle of Ohio with no Dharma centers nearby and on his own, as far as I know. What is your solution for those people to connect with others concerning the Dharma and to receive support in their studies?
Heck, how do you suggest I do koan work with my teacher except using various distance tools (phone, skype audio or video, e-mail, etc) since he is across a continent from me?
Basically, it is group text and/or voice chat with nice niceties, such as virtual avatars added. You’d probably get the same effect from a group conference call or group video conference except most people (including me) don’t have the tools and bandwidth to do such things. It acts as a platform for them.
I don’t think it replaces embodied sanghas of people but it adds an option for people who are otherwise disconnected or cannot avail themselves to a sangha or who want to interact with a particular teacher on some level.
While limited, it serves a purpose. I do always ask naysayers of such things if they have tried them to get an impression of what they are like before entirely dismissing them.
I think this is a great find. I don’t know much (yet) about Buddhist philosophy, but it seems there would be room in its ideals for supportive groups that spread its thinking, as opposed to propagating a place for people to falsely escape reality. In a sense, this online “temple” might even provide a sense of grounding in the metaverse, a place that suffers from many of the same issues as the real world.
Neat find :)
Hey Al,
Is the interaction with audio or a keyboard. Also, if we really did want to show up today, how much installation and other overhead would there be?
It can be both or either. Jiun will be speaking audio and I believe others can use audio to ask questions or they can use text. I think the environment will be largely neophytes but I’m not really sure.
For a viewer, I’d recommend either Snowglobe or Emerald. If you download the latter, you also need to download the “voice patch” to have audio capabilities.
Second Life makes an official viewer available on secondlife.com but, by all accounts, it isn’t as fast or as feature rich as the third party viewers.
If it is your first time in Second Life, it will put you into a tutorial area before letting you go anywhere. Once you exit the tutorial area, you are free to teleport places in the world. At that point, if you click on this link in your web browser and have it open up your SL life viewer when prompted, it will auto-navigate you to the Kannonji site.
This is one of the most phenomenal tools for practicing the paramita of patience that has ever been generated. Fortunately I figured the time wrong and started looking for the place two hours early. I am now sitting on a zafu in some kind of helment with a microphone, black or no clothes, and for some reason I can’t begin to imagine, a transparent neck. And possibly a military web belt of some kind. This, Al, had better be worth it. See you in an hour.
How cool. I support anything that helps people practice the Dharma. Especially as you said for those with disabilities or other problems preventing them from attending a traditional, physical sangha.
Well, it was a pretty short talk followed by interviews. You’re a pretty experienced practitioner, Bill, so I’m not sure if you were the target audience. At least you’re set up for SL now. :-)
Anyone looking for me can find me as “Jigen Darkmatter” (I found the last name jokingly appropriate for Zen).
I had you pegged, anyway. “Set up” is not what I’d call myself. I ended up sitting in the wrong direction and feeling extremely odd. I left after the talk, not out of any disrespect but because I wouldn’t want to start any interviews by bumping into the walls and asking how to sit down. There does seem to be a lot of Buddhism, although someplace called Milarepa seems mainly occupied by stylized sex shops of some sort. People apparently blog about becoming whores in Second Life. What does that actually entail? Jiun made a good case for it being as “real” as anything else, though, and certainly a phenomenal amount of work has gone into the place. Not quite Snow Crash, but well on the way.
Anyway, you’re right, there’s a lot of interest in Dharma there and it’s good to have people who know what they’re doing. But without a map, a schedule, and something very specific to do there, it could be a horrible waste of time, too. How do people construct those avatars? Is there some kind of SDK for that sort of thing?
Just went to tonight’s session and it was great. I live an area without any Buddhist groups in for at least a hundred or so miles. This is a great find for me, and I thank you for sharing the information.
Namaste.
Rilo, I’m glad that you enjoyed the session and found it useful.
Bill, I assume that there is an SDK though I think most people work on stuff, other than textures, in game. There is a way of creating and editing objects, though I don’t know all the details. Thinks like sitting are handled through right click on objects and choosing things from a “pie” menu that appears. Some of that depends on your client.
I don’t know a lot about SL culture though I know people do role-play of a variety of sorts, including sexual, in some spaces. I believe one has to explicitly consent to enter an area where “adult” content occurs. It isn’t my bag so I don’t really know.
My main avatar is clothed in free (or near free) clothes that Caspian, one of the main Kannonji people, helped me find. He also tweaked my body, found a skin for me (which I bought for something like $1) close to my skin tone, and the glasses. He probably spent an hour and a half helping me get set up with that so I could look like a proper Zen priest.
The Djinn avatar that I have, which you may have seen (or at least can see on Flickr), I paid for. You can convert dollars to Lindens (the local currency) and there is quite a secondary market in people manufacturing goods. The Five Mountain Zen, which is on top of a nearby peak, was created by someone who markets buildings and Rev. Jiun bought it when Kannonji gave us space to use. Caspian tweaked the roof and added a few items to our temple. The same goes for the Buddhist altars. There is a whole virtual economy.
You could actually have interviewed easily because you don’t actually need to walk to most places. You can teleport to where people that you know are or they can contact you and ask you to teleport to them (which will happen automatically if you agree). Jiun was teleporting people up to our zendo for the interviewing so it could be done in private. If you have a voice module in your client, you can even do private voice to voice chat so no typing is required, which is convenient.
Oh, one pointer is that if you hold down the alt key on the keyboard and use the arrow keys and page up or page down, you can move your point of view around without moving your avatar. That makes it convenient, if you are facing the wrong way, to turn your viewpoint around even if you aren’t really pointed in that direction. It also means that you can pull your POV back to observe groups as well.
Thank you, Second Life and Virtual worlds can really benefit living beings if we work hard at it.
Thanks! It makes sense that the stuff would mostly be programmed by game hackers, rather than people like me who code database web in order to get payments from credit cards. Although it does look like the porn web community is well represented. There should be a non-sectarian directory of Buddhist locations. Besides Kannonji, I found a couple others in a very short time.
There are a number of Buddhist places. You can do a search in your client on words that occur in places (their names or other markers, I believe). Unfortunately, not everyone hanging out in Second Life who says that they are a Buddhist teacher is one. I know that some people presenting themselves as Tibetan teachers have been unveiled as frauds.
Yeah, well. It’s not like I’m looking for a teacher there. It would be nice if there were a Tibetan scene as active as Kannonji, though. Is that Bodhi island defunct?
Hi. I have explored dharma in Second Life over the last year. As a long time Vajrayana practitioner, I must say that when being greeted by a pleasant “Namaste” in a Buddhist setting, I realize that these are -not- buddhist teachers, but probably real life yoga dabblers or new agers who -think- they are practicing buddhism. Nice folks; well meaning and utterly uneducated in the dharma. Great! Everyone starts somewhere. But are they dharma teachers or even practice instructors? Hmmm, methinks no.
There are no refuge prayers, no supplications, and when I posted an English translation of the Heart Sutra, (after the 4 Dharmas of Gampopa and a lineage prayer), just before “practice” began with the bell, I was asked by the Umsei what it was and could she have a copy. I complied.
Really, from my inquiries, most people use practice sessions on SL to park their “Avatars” and piddle doing something else. Truth be told second life can be more of a distraction/hindrance to practice, as it creates just one more layer of “co-interdependent origination” and confusion. Best to put the ‘puter on standby and go to the shrine and practice. At least, this is what I do….when not messing around in SL!
Philip aka “Prosemo Nirvana”
Philip, I don’t disagree with *some* of what you are saying and seeing. I don’t think Dharma practice in Second Life replaces Dharma practice in real life. If I want to meditate, I’ll go sit and stare at the floor, for instance.
Now, that said, there are people that do group chanting, for example, using voice chat with avatars in Second Life. I think part of the issue that you ran into is there are a lot more pretend Buddhist teachers than actual ones running around there. Being a not necessarily tech savvy group, many Buddhist teachers probably don’t even consider Second Life an option for anything.
I think Second Life is an excellent place to give Dharma talks. I think that that kind of teaching, where a teacher is speaking to a group on a topic and then, maybe, doing a question and answer period after, translates perfectly well. That is what Kannonji is organizing a lot of within SL. They are tracking down Zen teachers from various lineages, convincing them to come into SL, making custom avatars for them (that look like the teachers) since the teachers don’t have these skills, and helping them get oriented. This makes the learning curve for the teachers a lot less steep and brings more actual teachers into SL.
I’ve also found it quite useful for interacting with the teachers in my own lineage. Both of them are tech savvy (one is a web designer, the other runs a tech company) and we can do individual and group voice chat in SL more easily, in many ways, than we can with Skype or similar tools. I’ve also used it for koan work since neither my teacher or the Zen master that I do koan work with are local to me so we have to find creative ways to work on koans during the portion of it that involves the testing of answers, etc. SL allows us to use voice, some gestures, and generally interact in real time, which is useful in a distributed world.
I would expect that the Tibetan Vajrayana schools might have less luck with it, being more conservative and being unable to give wangs and such outside of an in-person medium.
I agree with you about this. It was to the practice situation to which I was referring. I have not had luck with finding legitimate dharma discussion there. In “Buddha Center” most of the talks given are by Sogyal Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama and Echahart Tolle. Not lightweights by any means, but are also, unfortunately, the stuff of dharma populism. And, thus, these and such teachers become misinterpreted according to the legions of spiritual materialists out there.
I think maybe the way to go is for RL existent Sanghas to use it for both open public teachings and closed sangha-only teachings. For example, my current teacher Ponlop rinpoche just gave a talk while visiting our Austin TX sangha. It was available in streaming video in real time There were around 80 at-large sangha members attending this talk (on Mahamudra Path and fruition – definitely -not- the stuff of a public talk).
I think another way of doing this is to streaming the audio in an SL dharma auditorium, and attendees watch from there, and interact in breaks. the obvious problem with this is that many…probably -most- people do not relate to SL. Half of our sangha are above the age of 50 (like myself). But, our Gen X to gen Millenials wouldn’t think twice about using it.
I can hear them now, “Sh*t man, why would I want to add yet another layer to Samsara/relative world, when I’m practicing to realize that it is inherently empty?” But, as Vajrayanists, I think the response is obvious. “Because, Second Life is the Creation and Completion stages of practice realized right on your computer. The danger of SL is the same as the idea of Vajra Hell: the viewer begins to believe its reality after the completion stage (after they shut SL down.)
I can go to sites where expending one’s kleshas into what would be extreme injury to others in RL seems indifferent on SL because, “after all, SL isn’t reality, right?” WRONG! I think it should be viewed as a simulation that trains use reality properly…or improperly.
So, I think you’re spot-on with SL. SL itself can be a practice…or at least a SIM of how to put “practice” “dharma in action”.