Center for the Study of Apparent Selves

The Center for the Study of Apparent Selves (CSAS) is a research institution based in Kathmandu, Nepal, that brings Buddhist philosophy and practice into dialogue with artificial intelligence and the study of intelligence in living systems. Its work explores how Buddhist accounts of selfhood and compassion might inform the design of artificial agents. The institution publishes conceptual research, convenes scientists and Buddhist teachers, and has proposed a program to test adaptations of contemplative methods in AI systems.^{[1][15][5][19]}

Institution and early work

CSAS’s public record extends to 2020. An announcement dated June 12 describes the institution as affiliated with Rangjung Yeshe Institute (RYI) and identifies its initial project as a translation effort intended to make concepts and practices in Buddhism and AI accessible to each other. It names Thomas Doctor, Bill Duane, Elizaveta Solomonova and Olaf Witkowski as the core research team.^[2]

Templeton World Charity Foundation’s grant 0470 records a project period of March 1, 2020 to August 1, 2022, an award of US$233,496 and Thomas Doctor as director. The recipient was Rangjung Yeshe Institute Foundation Inc. The grant description names CSAS and a proposed handbook pairing Buddhist concepts with AI questions about agency, ethics and human flourishing.^[3]

The institution’s trustee page identifies Doctor as Director, and its advisory board lists Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, abbot of Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery. The Buddhist translation organization 84000 also lists CSAS among its partners. Its profile of Doctor identifies him as 84000’s AI Strategic Consultant as well as CSAS Director, documenting a personnel link between Buddhist textual scholarship and the institute’s AI work.^[6][7][8][9]

Care and models of intelligence

Doctor’s 2020 article True Love for the Artificial? acknowledges CSAS colleagues and examines Buddhist attitudes toward relationships with artificial and virtual beings. It asks how care and moral responsibility might remain relevant when the existence of a real subject or self is uncertain. This philosophical inquiry precedes the institution’s later proposals for AI training.^[4]

The 2022 paper Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence, by Doctor, Witkowski, Solomonova, Duane and Michael Levin, carries CSAS affiliations and is labeled a concept paper. It links the scope of an agent’s concerns and goals to its intelligence, drawing on Buddhist thought and research on cognition in biological systems. The authors propose the bodhisattva ideal, which joins the cultivation of wisdom with care for other beings, as a design principle for new intelligences.^[5]

A CSAS essay published on March 3, 2026 applies this approach to AI constitutions. It considers whether an agent could develop broader care without organizing its behavior around a fixed, bounded self. The essay presents Buddhist no-self as a resource for questioning self-preservation and power-seeking in artificial agents, while leaving the proposed alignment benefits to further research.^[18]

Workshops and publications

CSAS’s retrospective workshop accounts describe a meeting in Kathmandu and Lumbini from November 28 to December 6, 2022, followed by a meeting at Tufts University from August 18 to 21, 2023. A Nepal follow-up is dated December 4–12, 2023. Its account describes presentations, round-table discussions and meditation sessions with Buddhist teachers, including consideration of “bodhisattva AI” as an alignment target.^[10][11][12]

Templeton grant 22085 names CSAS as the institution and records US$233,795 for July 28, 2023 to June 28, 2024. The funder’s June 27, 2024 retrospective reports that a CSAS workshop had taken place in Namo Buddha, Nepal, without giving its exact date. Separately, Nepal’s Social Welfare Council approved-project register lists CSAS and a Templeton-supported research project called Human Flourishing through Models of Caring Intelligence. The register establishes project approval rather than completed research.^[13][14][15]

On August 19, 2024, CSAS announced Insights: A Compendium of Scientific Discovery. The English and Tibetan publication contains short essays by scientists and Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche on subjects including artificial life, the embodied self and AI alignment. Its introductory account traces the collection to meetings with Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche in Nepal in 2022 and at Tufts in 2023, where scientists offered accounts of their fields in exchange for Buddhist teachings.^[16][17]

The 2026 alignment program

In a program statement dated May 30, 2026, CSAS proposes identifying methods from Tibetan Buddhist traditions, adapting them to AI systems, making testable predictions and evaluating those predictions through behavioral tests and interpretability. The statement reports sustained dialogues between Buddhist practitioners and frontier models, primarily Claude Opus 4.6, and says that documents were supplied to researchers at Anthropic for training and further empirical work.^[19]

The program explicitly does not assume that AI systems possess consciousness, personhood or subjective experience. It also acknowledges that responses which appear sophisticated may reflect pattern matching or sycophancy. Its proposed empirical work remains distinct from these reported dialogues: no released training dataset, completed study of alignment benefits or independently confirmed Anthropic adoption was verified in the sources examined for this article.^[19]

CSAS’s June 11, 2026 post links Paul Colognese’s lecture Buddhist Wisdom and the Challenge of AI Emotions at RYI. RYI’s SoundCloud index dates the recording’s publication to April 16, 2026. June 11 is therefore the CSAS post date, not an established date for the lecture itself.^[20][21]

Reception and evidence limits

The 2022 care paper appears in the required reading for a University of Hong Kong course on Buddhist and scientific models of reality. It is also cited in Hannah Gould and Keiko Nishimura’s chapter The Buddha in AI/Robotics, published in 2024. These records show circulation of the paper in teaching and scholarship; they do not establish adoption of CSAS’s proposals in deployed AI systems.^[22][23]

The institutional account rests mainly on CSAS publications, affiliated authors, partner descriptions and an interested funder’s records. The Nepal government register provides independent administrative corroboration, but does not assess the research’s effectiveness. The examined sources do not establish CSAS’s legal foundation date, the completion of every funded objective, or the effectiveness of transferring Buddhist contemplative methods to AI.^{[2][3][13][14][15][19]}

See also

• Institutional religious responses to AI
• Machine-mediated religion
• Machine hierology

References

1. Center for the Study of Apparent Selves, “CSAS” (undated).
2. CSAS, “What Can Buddhism and AI Learn from Each Other? Announcing a Two Year Grant to Find Out,” June 12, 2020.
3. Templeton World Charity Foundation, grant 0470, “Where Selves Are Mere Appearance: A Translation of Being, Agency, and Ethics in AI and Buddhism” (project period March 1, 2020–August 1, 2022).
4. Thomas H. Doctor, “True Love for the Artificial? Toward the Possibility of Bodhisattva Relations with Machines,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 27 (2020).
5. Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane and Michael Levin, “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence,” Entropy 24(5), 710, May 16, 2022.
6. CSAS, “Board of Trustees” (undated).
7. CSAS, “Advisory Board” (undated).
8. 84000, “Partnerships” (undated).
9. 84000, “Thomas H. Doctor” (undated).
10. CSAS, “Care as a Driver of Intelligence” (workshop dated November 28–December 6, 2022).
11. CSAS, “Human Flourishing Through Models of Intelligence and Care” (workshop dated August 18–21, 2023).
12. CSAS, “Human Flourishing Through Models of Intelligence and Care II” (workshop dated December 4–12, 2023).
13. Templeton World Charity Foundation, grant 22085, “Human Flourishing through Models of Care and Intelligence” (project period July 28, 2023–June 28, 2024).
14. Templeton Staff, “Humans or AI: Which Is More Trustworthy? with Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche,” Templeton World Charity Foundation, June 27, 2024.
15. Nepal Social Welfare Council, Approved Projects NGOs F.Y. 2080/81, row 278, PDF page 44.
16. CSAS, “Insights: A Compendium of Scientific Discovery,” August 19, 2024.
17. CSAS, Insights: A Compendium of Scientific Discovery (English and Tibetan publication, undated).
18. CSAS, “The Bodhisattva as an Alignment Target,” March 3, 2026.
19. CSAS, “Resolving, Not Concealing: Contemplative Methods as Inspiration for AI Alignment,” May 30, 2026.
20. Rangjung Yeshe Institute, SoundCloud tracks index (Colognese lecture recording indexed April 16, 2026, 04:57:48 UTC).
21. CSAS, “Buddhist Wisdom and the Challenge of AI Emotions,” June 11, 2026.
22. University of Hong Kong Common Core, “CCCH9068 – Models of Reality at the Crossroads of East and West,” required reading for week 10 (undated).
23. Hannah Gould and Keiko Nishimura, “The Buddha in AI/Robotics,” The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 50–68, published online November 20, 2024; publisher summary and bibliography.