Masahiro Mori and Buddhist robotics

Masahiro Mori’s Buddhist robotics was a body of writing, engineering education and contemplative practice developed by Japanese roboticist and lay Buddhist Masahiro Mori (1927–2025). It connected the Buddha-nature of manufactured machines with the spiritual development and responsibilities of their makers. Its settings included Mori’s books, the Mukta or Jizai Research Institute, robot contests and collaboration with psychologist Hiroko Kamide.^[1][2][17]

The subject connects religious thought with robotics and, later, artificial intelligence. Much of its formative material concerns mechanical design and control systems. Mori’s account gives machines religious significance without requiring humanlike intelligence or religious performance.^[2]

The Mukta institute

Mori dated the beginning of the Jizai Research Institute to 2 March 1970. In an undated interview for VITALITE, he described earlier Saturday gatherings where participants tried to loosen habitual ways of thinking. The problem, as he remembered it, was that technically promising ideas could be rejected simply because they lacked precedent. The institute was intended to cultivate the flexibility needed to recognize and develop them.^[3]

In an interview conducted in Tokyo in autumn 2009 and published in Gradhiva in 2012, Mori recalled an initial group of 28 people. Technical consulting helped pay the rent; brainstorming, Buddhist study and mechanical experiments coexisted. He demonstrated a snake-like machine made at the institute in 1979, whose undulating motion propelled it on unpowered wheels. He also recalled replacing a conventional year-end celebration with a temple visit for zazen, seated Zen meditation. A teacher challenged the group to examine the meaning of the freedom its institute claimed to pursue.^[4]

A separate participant’s recollection confirms the group’s interdisciplinary character. Writing in JAPIC NEWS in June 2009, pharmacist Fumito Tsuchiya described Mori inviting him, after university, to a monthly Saturday study meeting. Professors of science and engineering and a Zen monk discussed how to live freely, sometimes late into the night. Tsuchiya connected Mori’s influence to his own concern with human error and medical safety. His account describes earlier participation, rather than establishing the institute’s meeting schedule in 2009.^[5]

Frederik L. Schodt, who first interviewed Mori in spring 1986 and visited the institute around that period, provides another firsthand account. His later writing also cites Mori’s 2005 recollection of chanting the Heart Sutra in everyday situations. The frequently repeated description of institute members reciting scriptures and meditating comes through Schodt’s Inside the Robot Kingdom. Its quotation by Linda C. Pope and Ted Metzler in 2008 is evidence of the account’s circulation, rather than a separate observation of the same practices.^[6][7]

These activities gave Mori’s philosophy an institutional setting: a place where technical work, study and Buddhist practice could inform one another. They do not by themselves establish Mukta as a Buddhist denomination or a congregation organized around worship of robots.

Books and the meaning of robot Buddha-nature

Mori published Mori Masahiro no Bukkyō nyūmon, an introduction to Buddhism from an engineer’s perspective, in Japanese in 1974. The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion appeared in its first English edition in 1981, translated by Charles S. Terry and published by Kosei. The English volume drew on both the introduction and Shingan. The Japanese publication date is consequently distinct from the date of the English collection.^[8][9]

In Mori’s exposition, Buddha-nature extends to living beings, landscapes and manufactured objects. It is neither a component installed by an engineer nor a hidden organ within a body. His reasoning includes human makers and their products within the same reality: if humans arise within what he calls Buddha or emptiness, their machines cannot stand outside it. The ethical consequence is to stop measuring everything solely by human convenience. A thing’s ability to frustrate or harm a person does not, in this account, remove its Buddha-nature.^[2]

Mori illustrated the relationship through ordinary controls. A driver makes a car move, but must also move hands and feet as the car’s controls require. A thermostat changes a room’s temperature while responding to that temperature. Pope and Metzler’s close reading shows how Mori moves from such reciprocal dependence to a challenge to the idea of an entirely independent human controller. This is a philosophical interpretation of human–machine relations, not a claim that a thermostat secretly intends to command its owner.^[7]

The institute’s name expressed a related concern. Mori explained jizai through the relationship between acting as oneself and existing naturally, without an obstructive insistence on the self. In the VITALITE interview, he called humans nature’s children and machines its grandchildren. That analogy placed engineering inside nature rather than treating artificial objects as an exception to it.^[3]

His later language could be more provocative than the assertion that robots possess a potential for awakening. Takeshi Kimura’s 2015 study examines Mori’s statement in a 2014 book that robots are already enlightened, without the delusion that troubles humans. In that formulation, he regarded attempts to give robots self-consciousness as unnecessary. The religious claim concerns freedom from ego and delusion; it does not report a machine’s subjective experience.^[8]

Making things and cultivating people

Mori also interpreted engineering as a possible setting for Buddhist learning. In the 2009 interview, he compared concentrated making to a photographer becoming absorbed in the scene: the opposition between an observing self and an external object can recede. He regarded zazen as a way of cultivating this attention, and robotics as another approach to understanding human beings.^[4]

Robot contests supplied a particularly concrete example. Kimura describes Mori interpreting students’ immersion in designing and rebuilding machines as an experience of self-forgetting. Under the term gidō, or the way of technology, making things became a means of developing people. Mori could describe the robot as a bodhisattva guiding its makers. This was his interpretation of their activity, not evidence that the contestants understood themselves to be undertaking Buddhist practice.^[8]

Kimura’s 2018 analysis also explains Mori’s appeal to taiho, the backward step associated with Dōgen: temporarily turning attention inward instead of pursuing every problem through further external effort. Mori presented this as a resource for technical creativity. Kimura nevertheless identifies a risk in that proposal: engineers might adopt meditation merely as another productivity technique, reducing a challenge to habitual thinking to an instrument of industrial performance.^[1]

The uncanny valley and Buddhist interpretation

Mori’s best-known contribution to robotics was the uncanny-valley hypothesis, introduced in 1970. It proposed that increasing human likeness would not produce a steady increase in affinity: an almost-human appearance or movement could instead become disturbing. His original essay advised designers to consider attractive, recognizably artificial forms. One example was an articulated wooden hand made by a carver of Buddhist statues, whose curves could be appealing without simulated skin or fingerprints.^[10]

W. A. Borody’s 2013 study reads this design advice in relation to compassion and Mori’s criticism of attachment to the ordinary human ego. In Borody’s interpretation, reproducing human appearance is a questionable ideal when Buddhist practice itself seeks to transform how human identity is understood. This is an interpretive account of the essay’s Buddhist significance, rather than proof that its psychological hypothesis follows from Buddhist doctrine.^[11]

Mori himself described the uncanny valley, in a 2012 interview, as advice to designers arising from his intuitions. The distinction matters: a proposal about human responses to appearance, a Buddhist account of reality and a claim about a machine’s inner experience are different kinds of argument.^[18]

Kamide and the AI-era continuation

The philosophy continued to develop through Mori’s collaboration with Hiroko Kamide, a social psychologist working on human–robot interaction. Their paper “One being for two origins — A necessary awakening for the future of robotics” was presented at the 2016 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts. Kamide’s university publication record identifies it as peer reviewed.^[12]

In a December 2016 interview, Kamide explained the program through good, bad and muki, a condition beyond that evaluative division. On her account, technology becomes beneficial or harmful through its human use; improving technical capacities therefore demands attention to the disposition of users. Her example was a sharp blade, which can serve surgery or violence. She also distinguished knowledge that separates phenomena into categories from wisdom that understands their relationship. These are the collaboration’s proposed philosophical premises. They do not constitute a demonstrated procedure for making an autonomous system choose ethically.^[13]

In June 2018, Mori and Kamide published Robotto kōgaku to Bukkyō: AI jidai no kagaku no genkai to kanōsei (Robotics and Buddhism: The Limits and Possibilities of Science in the AI Age). The 512-page book organized their teaching correspondence. According to the publisher’s description, more than 600 emails were condensed to approximately 200 and arranged chronologically. Its contents move from Kamide’s introduction to Buddhism and zazen to robot Buddha-nature, military uses of technology and presentations to robotics audiences. It documents an extended exchange between researchers, including the transmission of practice as well as concepts.^[14]

Critical reception

Buddhist scholar Shigeki Moro contests treating Mori’s position as a general Buddhist answer to robot ethics. His 2020 study identifies affinities with the modern Buddhist thought of Nikkyo Niwano, founder of Risshō Kōsei-kai. Moro places Mori’s extension of Buddha-nature within a particular interpretation, rather than a consensus spanning Buddhist traditions.^[15]

Moro’s central ethical objection concerns the beneficiary of respectful treatment. If machines are already free from delusion and humans respect them to improve their own spiritual condition, the human remains the beneficiary. The argument therefore does not establish the robot as a moral patient: an entity that can itself be wronged. Moro acknowledges the value of correcting human attitudes while questioning whether Mori’s doctrine settles that separate issue. He also distinguishes it from accounts of plants attaining Buddhahood that give nonsentient things a role in aspiration and practice.^[15]

Mori’s writings also resist reduction to one simple formula about machines lacking suffering. In his 2018 study, Kimura interprets another passage as contemplating whether a future robot with mindlike intelligence might need craving and suffering to understand human companions. Kimura raises the ethical problem of creating such suffering. This conditional discussion complicates the already-enlightened formulation; it establishes neither that a machine had those experiences nor that such engineering would be justified.^[1]

Legacy and relevance to artificial intelligence

A 2020 volume by the Masahiro Mori Study Group, Monozukuri wa hitozukuri, collected accounts from eleven former students and associates, including people who knew Mori through Jizai. Its subjects included creativity, education and the relationship between robotics and Buddhism. The publication records a network of remembered teaching without establishing a successor religious organization.^[16]

Mori died on 12 January 2025, aged 97. A memorial published by the Japan Creativity Society recognized both his engineering work and his contributions to creativity and Buddhist thought.^[17] The sources assembled here do not establish Mukta’s activities or succession as of 17 October 2026.

His work has also been compared with later Buddhist robots. Schodt discussed the Heart Sutra-presenting android Mindar at Kyoto’s Kōdai-ji in relation to Mori’s ideas, while explicitly stating that Mori had no connection to that robot. Such a comparison belongs to reception history, rather than demonstrating that Mori founded or directed the project.^[6]

For AI debates, the lasting distinction is between assigning religious significance to a machine and establishing what that machine experiences. Asked in the 2012 IEEE interview whether computers could acquire a mind, Mori expressed uncertainty and doubted that the problem could be solved without understanding mind itself. His Buddha-nature claims therefore cannot be used as his certification of machine consciousness.^[18]

Mori’s contribution is most specific where it asks what technological work does to its human participants: how design disciplines attention, how powerful tools amplify intentions, and whether respect for artifacts can change the responsibilities of their makers. The disagreement over moral patienthood leaves a further question open: whether an ethic that improves humans’ relationships with machines also recognizes interests belonging to the machines themselves.^[13][15]

See also

• Historical precursors to AI-mediated religion
• Robotic clergy
• Machine agency

References

1. Takeshi Kimura, “Masahiro Mori’s Buddhist philosophy of robot,” Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics 9, no. 1 (2018): 72–81, especially 75–79. DOI and publisher record.
2. Masahiro Mori, “Does a Robot Have Buddhanature?”, Tricycle, 21 March 2023. Adapted from The Buddha in the Robot. Text.
3. Masahiro Mori, interviewed by Yasuhiko Sata, “生命力を自在にとらえる” [Apprehending life’s force freely], VITALITE, undated, 1–2. Tokibo-hosted interview.
4. Masahiro Mori, “Le Bouddha dans le robot. Rencontre avec le professeur Masahiro Mori,” interview with Zaven Paré, Emmanuel Grimaud and Chihiro Minato, Gradhiva 15 (2012): 162–181, especially 163–167. Interview conducted autumn 2009. DOI; full interview PDF.
5. Fumito Tsuchiya, “徒然なるままに,” JAPIC NEWS, June 2009, 2–3. Issue PDF.
6. Frederik L. Schodt, “The Metaphysical Can Opener,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 18, no. 23, article 1 (1 December 2020), 1–2 and notes. DOI; full text PDF.
7. Linda C. Pope and Ted Metzler, “Has a Robotic Dog the Buddha-nature? Mu!”, in AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches, AAAI Workshop Technical Report WS-08-05 (2008), 23–26, especially 23–25. Paper PDF.
8. Takeshi Kimura, “ロボットと仏教のハイブリディティ：森政弘のロボット考学” [Hybridity of Robotics and Buddhism: Masahiro Mori and the Philosophy of Robotics], 山口大学哲学研究 [Yamaguchi University Philosophical Studies] 22 (2015): 31–42, especially 32 and 35–38. University repository PDF.
9. Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot, translated by Charles S. Terry, first English edition (Tokyo: Kosei, 1981), 192 pages. CiNii catalog, including original-volume note; National Diet Library catalog.
10. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” translated by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (June 2012): 98–100. Authorized translation of the 1970 essay. IEEE Spectrum text.
11. W. A. Borody, “The Japanese Roboticist Masahiro Mori’s Buddhist Inspired Concept of ‘The Uncanny Valley’,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 23, no. 1 (2013): 31–44. Full text; DOI.
12. Hiroko Kamide and Masahiro Mori, “One being for two origins — A necessary awakening for the future of robotics,” 2016 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO), 11–15. DOI; Kamide’s Kyoto University publication record.
13. Hiroko Kamide, interviewed by Yueh-Hsuan Weng, “One being for two origins: A new perspective on roboethics,” Robohub, 8 December 2016; interview dated 5 December. Interview.
14. Masahiro Mori and Hiroko Kamide, ロボット工学と仏教――AI時代の科学の限界と可能性 (Tokyo: Kosei Shuppansha, 2018), 512 pages, ISBN 9784333027842. Publisher-supplied description, contents and publication dates.
15. Shigeki Moro, “AI·佛性·倫理” [AI, Buddha-nature and ethics], Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 3, no. 2 (2020): 20–42, especially 25–29. Full text PDF; DOI: 10.6939/HIJBS.202010_3(2).0002.
16. Masahiro Mori Study Group, もの作りは者づくり：ロボット博士の伝授録 (Tokyo: Kosei Shuppansha, 2020), ISBN 9784333028269. Publisher-supplied description and contents.
17. Susumu Kunifuji, memorial for Masahiro Mori, Japan Creativity Society Newsletter, 10 April 2025, 7. Newsletter PDF.
18. Norri Kageki, “An Uncanny Mind: Masahiro Mori on the Uncanny Valley and Beyond,” IEEE Spectrum, 12 June 2012; editorial death notice added 22 January 2025. Interview and update.