A Digital Anthropological Examination of the Behaviour of Sri Lankan Buddhism in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Abstract

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is a way of depicting the obscurity of boundaries between the physical, digital, and natural worlds. Among various divisions of 4IR, the concept of ‘digital’ plays one of the prominent roles as it tends to affect various areas in the modern world. Digital anthropology examines the impact and the relationship between digitalization and human cultural aspects. Religion is a key factor of culture that emphasizes the unique characteristics of human social behaviour. Modern-day Buddhism in Sri Lanka is known as “Popular Buddhism” as it is reshaped with contemporary social and cultural practices and influence. “Dialectic nature of digital culture” is a key principle in digital anthropology which explains the aspects of digitalization and culture. As a theoretical analysis, based on existing literature this paper attempts to describe the validity of applying this principle to the modern popular Buddhism in Sri Lanka to understand the behaviour and the appearance of itself in digital space. Dialectic is one of the key concepts established by Fredrich Hegel during the 19^th century. There are three contradictions in dialectic as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. A thesis gives growth to its reaction; an antithesis negates the thesis; and the conflict between the two is determined through a synthesis. When considering Facebook and YouTube posts based on modern popular Buddhism and their comments, a particular dialectic nature can be identified very clearly, as the relevant audience engaged with under thesis, antithesis, and synthesis comments. We suggest analyzing the comments of the relevant posts on social media under the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis categories to emphasize the changes of the modern popular Buddhism. We also propose to extend the studies based on Buddhism in the digital world through the novel digital anthropological perspective as it directly underlines the relationship between the human and digital world.

KEYWORDS: Digital Buddhism, Culture, Popular Buddhism, Dialectic, Anthropology