Nichibunken Evening Seminar

What role does the adaptation of technology play in the way temple Buddhism imagines the future of religion? How do technological and aesthetic forms work together to make Buddhist cosmologies perceptible, affective, and compelling?

This talk explores these questions through two examples from ongoing fieldwork in Kyoto: Gōunji, the “space temple” that Daigoji planned to launch into orbit, and a contemporary enactment of the descent of Amida and the Twenty-Five Bodhisattvas from the Western Pure Land, performed at Ryūganji temple in June 2026. The first mobilises aerospace technology to extend Buddhist presence beyond the Earth; the second uses drones to render a Buddhist paradise temporarily present in this world.

I bring these apparently disparate practices together to explore how technologies—both new and old—function as “technologies of enchantment,” using aesthetic forms to make invisible or distant Buddhist worlds materially and experientially present. In doing so, they also make particular futures of religion imaginable, offering ways of envisioning how Buddhist institutions and practices might inhabit a technologically transformed world.