The Buddhist Machine

Published: February 23, 2026

When the Buddhist prefect Pai-chang wanted to choose a founding teacher for the new monastery at Mount Ta-kuei, he invited all his monks to a discourse and declared that "the outstanding one will be sent". He then placed a water jug on the floor, saying, "Don't call this water jug. What would you call it?"

The head monk said, "It can't be called a wooden clog". Pai-chang then asked the cook of the monastery, Kuei-shan, his opinion. Kuei-shan kicked over the water jug and left.

Pai-chang laughed and said, “The head monk loses.” Kuei-shan thereupon was made the founding teacher at Mount Ta-kuei.

To mistake the finger for the moon

A passage in a recent Harper's Magazine article (a publication I had assumed functionally dead until coming across the essay mentioned) describing the state of affairs in greater SF at the very end of 2025, provoked in me the question of Zen practice in the age of near-singularity. I do not mean this primarily as a quest for spirituality nor (which perhaps would be more urgent) a specific (to borrow from John Rawls, a a comprehensive) moral system for this age. I will restrain myself to mentioning that I have not yet found a person of high agency happy (i.e. leading the good life) in this day and age.

Rather I'm interested in - what I would posit to be an essentially accidental - acquisition of bodhi, i.e. awakening or the fundamental understanding of the emptiness of conceptions (in fact the emptiness of all things). To give a vulgar of things: Beginning from an assumption that everything we know about the world is only derived from sensations (i.e. our perception) for which we have no absolute proof that they are derived from anything actually existant (the Ding an sich), we should recognize that all thoughts and conceptions of ours are fundamentally void. They are projections we make into the world and not necessarily derived from anything in the world. To realize this emptiness is enlightenment.

A version of this realization, be it at an epistemologically lower level, is what can be made about the AI superbubble of our time. There is no fundamental connection anymore between actual utility and valuation, between underlying skill and personal value, nor between what is said or claimed and what is being done or achieved in practice. A prototypic form of bodhi is perhaps nowhere easier to achieve than in the SF of 2026, where very little meaningful work is being done at all.

The Clueless headmaster

Roy Lee, founder of Cluely, is the archetypical high agency person we imagine our singularity moment requiring. In an age where the potential of a single human has been greatly magnified - and in the prophecy of SF will only exponentially increase further - the fundamental bottleneck is the willingness to act upon an idea. Perhaps soon (or already) we will even need to speak of a need to act for it is not clear that most people would want to act if not externally required to do so (e.g. for economic advantage, social recognition, etc.). That need, I will assume, is most commonly found in a particular type of psychologically hurt person which must prove themselves (as much as others) that they can act. It is a need for agency and only the need that will survive post-singularity.

In any case, much of what this high agency produces is not only fundamentally (i.e. in a Buddhist sense) empty but in a more plain-to-see way as well. Cluely exists as a hype-machine that produces videos of things the actual product cannot (nor is ever even meant to) deliver, whereupon these videos get shared and become viral, leading to venture capital interest and investment, increasing the valuation of Cluely which in turn will produce even more such videos. As I see it there are at most two parties who extract any genuine economic value from this cycle: the social media platform monetizing the attention of the produced videos and the LLM provider whose tokens get consumed for the production of the videos as well as by the few users the product actually has.

Such is an empty product. There are many empty products and the emergence of them is certainly not something new in SF. They have always existed and form a natural part of the centre of the distribution in VC, where most companies fail for some version of lack of product-market-fit. A qualitative difference to earlier empty start-ups seems however to have emerged. These empty start ups today appear to inhabit an entirely advantageous position in the system. The emptiness seems desired by all (or at least a sufficient number) of agents in the SF ecosystem. Certainly in part explained by the abundance of capital in the system already, where there is no fear of cannibalism or even basic competition, it also seems to reflect the way that these high-agency people have perfected a version of performative capitalism in which no underlying value needs to be created only the act of building a startup must be realized.

An exemplary case is of Donald Boat who (as Sam Kriss' Harper's article exactingly describes) has managed to emulate the pipeline of translating online fame into money extraction from investors all the while skipping the (as we may now realize ultimately superfluous) step of ever founding anything. Once his insistent pleas on X to @sama to gift him a Nvidia graphics card were granted, Boat's underlying leverage multiplied manifold. Presumably because of both a shared sense of virality as well as a deep-seated FOMO, many other prominent SF people started acquiescing to his demands as well. A novel if - as we must highlight - entirely empty way of monetizing primitive social prominence.

Sitting under the Bhanyan Tree

Yet Boat, seemingly as one of the few, in fact possess not only enough understanding to extract value from the current state of things but in fact to reject it. He, if anyone, can be seen as enlightend in the sense of having not only understood but internalized the underlying emptiness of today's SF.

Much of Zen Buddhism is taught through typically paradoxical, often humorous riddles known as koans. They are meant as exercises of the mind intended to show the emptiness of our conceptions. Key to them is that - just as with a good joke - they cannot be explained in hindsight, i.e. after the student has understood them. For to teach emptiness through words is like the teacher who is pointing to the moon having his student mistake his finger for the moon. I leave you with what I find to be a most learned koan of our day:

“I’m like Roy. I’m like Trump. We have the same swaggering energy. There is a kind of source code underlying reality, and this is what we understand. Your words have to have wings. Roy and I both know that social media is the last remaining outlet for self-creation and artistry. That’s what you have to understand about zoomers: we’re agents of chaos. We want to destroy the whole world.” Did Donald consider himself to be highly agentic? “We need to ban the word ‘agency.’ I’m a dog.”