Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Dis- and Re-Embodiment in Religious Practices: Semiotic, Ethical, and Normative Implications of Robotic Officiants

  • Published:
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Robotics has been increasingly adopted by religious communities around the world. In late 2015, a prototype of the “robot-monk” Xian’er was inaugurated at the Longquan Monastery in Beijing, with a second-generation model added in 2016 and a third robot released in 2018. Since then, Xian’er has been reciting Buddhist mantras and offering guidance on matters of faith to the thousands of worshippers visiting the temple every year or connecting with it online. In 2017, a robotic arm performing the Hindu Aarti ritual, which involves moving a light in front of a deity following a circular pattern, also appeared. The same year, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Germany’s Protestant Church introduced a “robot-priest” called BlessU-2, able to give blessings in several languages, with a male or female voice. In 2018, roboticist Gabriele Trovato designed SanTO (acronym of “Sanctified Theomorphic Operator”), a small robot drawing inspiration from the statues of saints, in the aim to offer spiritual succour to Catholic believers, keep them company during prayer, and teach catechism. Such innovations are markedly changing the way people experience faith and religious practices, through a process of dis- and re-embodiment of “officiating agents”, which entails relevant transformations in terms of meaning-making processes, as well as related to the way devotees engage in ethical reasoning and decision-making, and to the normative protocols needed to regulate them. This paper addresses these crucial issues through a semiocultural approach, combining theoretical reflection with the analysis of the above-mentioned case studies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Xianfian described it as “a reflection of innovative Buddhist spirit … [which] might help traditional Buddhism reach a wider public more easily” [1].

  2. Which makes of Xian’er an anthropomorphic robot, though with cartoon features.

  3. More specifically, the arms, which in the first prototypes formed part of the robot’s central motionless body and mainly functioned as deictic elements pointing to the touchscreen placed on its chest—i.e. the actual element allowing users to interact with Xian’er—, became mobile in the 2018-model.

  4. As exemplified by its increased sense of touch, as well as by its augmented communicative tools and capabilities.

  5. Especially via the “Xian’er’s mini-programs”, which allow users to communicate with Xian’er as they would do with any other user, posing questions about Buddhism, sharing thoughts and concerns about everyday life, and even meditating with it.

  6. In fact, various animations, audio recordings of Xian’er’s recitation of passages from canonical texts and other materials have also increasingly spread in addition to the comics.

  7. Which makes of it a theomorphic (from the Greek theo, “god”, and morphḗ, “shape”) robot, that is to say, a robot inspired from a sacred entity (cf. [2]). As Gabriele Trovato et al. [3, 4] highlighted, the appearance of theomorphic robots can vary depending on the specific religion, as well as on the connotation of specific deities: “this abstract idea takes a concrete form [which can be anthropomorphic or otherwise] when a robot is inspired by an existing form with which humans generally represent divine entities or sacred objects” [“Questa idea astratta prende una forma concreta quando un robot si ispira a una forma esistente con la quale gli umani in genere rappresentano entità divine o oggetti sacri”] [5: 44, my translation].

  8. “Totalità composita nell’esistenza”.

  9. “Unità coerente nell’esperienza”.

  10. In a more markedly phenomenological view (see in particular [10]).

  11. In fact, it costs about 50,000 yen ($450) per funeral, compared to more than 240,000 yen ($2,200) for a human officiant.

  12. I.e. the attempt to design a new object so that it resembles an already existing object, with which the user is already familiar, thus increasing the understanding and usability of the new one.

  13. “La sfida più critica nel design sta nel come rendere ‘sacro’ il robot, allo stesso modo di una statua in un contesto di sacralità, proiettandogli un’essenza ‘divina’ attraverso il suo aspetto”.

  14. In fact, the niche behind the figure of the saint hosts a camera, which tracks the position of the user and makes the “robot-saint” rotate to constantly face him/her, while the cross above it contains a microphone that allows oral interaction; finally, the sensors and conductive paint covering the bot’s arms and hands allow touch sensing.

  15. As reflected in the collective imaginary. Let us consider, for instance, the movie Doomsday Book (인류멸망보고서) directed by Jee-woon and Pil-sung (2012), and in particular its segment The Heavenly Creature, which represents In-myung, an AI-powered robot that lives in a Buddhist monastery. The robot becomes a Buddhist itself, and achieves independence from the humans who created it, escaping their control. It eventually reaches Enlightenment and enters Nirvana, generating various reactions among humans: while the Buddhist community shows veneration toward the “enlightened robot”, the corporation that invented it decides to exterminate it out of fear and envy.

  16. Not to be used in rituals of any kind, but thought to be shown exclusively to God.

  17. Masahiro Mori [49] coined the expression “uncanny valley” to refer to the fact that as robots appear more humanlike, they become more appealing, but only up to a certain point. Upon reaching the “uncanny valley”, our affinity descends into a feeling of strangeness, uneasiness and even revulsion.

  18. “Presiedere a funzioni religiosi per … [i] cristiani non è un fatto tecnico, insomma non si può affidare solo a chi conosce meccanismi e rituali ma a persone che abbiano una relazione con la comunità. …. Il punto interrogativo lo metto qui: affidandola a un robot, la relazione con gli altri non rischia di essere messa in crisi? … Dove va a finire la liturgia che nasce da un legame fra la parola di Dio e la comunità?”.

References

  1. Sherwood, Harriet. 2016. Robot monk to spread Buddhist wisdom to the digital generation. The Guardian, 26 April 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/26/robot-monk-to-spread-buddhist-wisdom-to-the-digital-generation. Accessed 4 September 4 2023.

  2. Trentini, Yisela Alvarez. 2019. Robots and religion: Mediating the divine. The Startup, 21 July 2019. https://medium.com/swlh/robots-and-religion-mediating-the-divine-2bd73220787d. Accessed 4 September 2023.

  3. Trovato, Gabriele, Francisco Cuellar, and Masao Nishimura. 2016. Introducing ‘theomorphic robots’, paper presented at the 2016 IEEE-RAS 16th International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Cancún, Mexico, 15–17 November 2016. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7803429.

  4. Trovato, Gabriele, Loys De Saint, Masao Nishimura Chamas, Renato Paredes, Cesar Lucho, Alexander Huerta-Mercado, and Francisco Cuellar. 2021. Religion and robots: towards the synthesis of two extremes. International Journal of Social Robotics 13: 539–556. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00553-8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Trovato, Gabriele. 2020. Il robot SanTO: il nuovo con uno sguardo al passato. Filosofia 65: 39–50. https://doi.org/10.13135/2704-8195/5077.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Bhattacharya, Ananya. 2017. The robots are coming for one of Hinduism’s holiest ceremonies. Quartz, 4 September 2017. https://qz.com/india/1066718/the-robots-are-coming-for-one-of-hinduisms-holiest-ceremonies. Accessed 14 September 2023.

  7. Fontanille, Jacques. 2005. Il malessere. In Il discorso della salute. Verso una sociosemiotica medica, ed. Gianfranco Marrone, 35–50. Rome: Meltemi.

  8. Fontanille, Jacques. 2013. Figures of the body and the semiotics of imprint: semiotic figures of the body in the humanities. Chinese Semiotic Studies 9 (1): 37–52.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Fontanille, Jacques. 2004. Soma et séma. Figures du corps. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phenomenologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. English Translation by Donald A. Landes. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge.

  11. O’Leary, Denyse. 2018. Robot Priests: And you thought “Robotic Religion” was just a pointed criticism…?. Mind matters, 23 June 2018. https://mindmatters.ai/2018/07/and-you-thought-robotic-religion-was-just-a-pointed-criticism/. Accessed 4 September 2023.

  12. Rambelli, Fabio. 2018. Dharma devices, non-hermeneutical libraries, and robot- monks: prayer machines in Japanese Buddhism. Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University 3: 57–75. https://doi.org/10.5109/1917884.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  14. CBN. 2017. Not Science Fiction: Robot Pastor Makes Debut as Pulpit. The Christian Broadcasting Network, 4 June 2017. https://www2.cbn.com/news/world/not-science-fiction-robot-pastor-makes-debut-pulpit. Accessed 7 September 2023.

  15. Löffler, Diana, Jörn. Hurtienne, and Ilona Nord. 2019. Blessing robot BlessU2: A discursive design study to understand the implications of social robots in religious contexts. International Journal of Social Robotics 2021 (13): 569–586. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00558-3.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Boer, Laurens, and Harvey Bewley. 2018. Reconfiguring the appearance and expression of social robots by acknowledging their otherness. In: Proceedings of the 2018 on designing interactive systems conference 2018: DIS '18, 667–677. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196743.

  17. Vidal, Denis. 2007. Anthropomorphism or Sub-Anthropomorphism? An Anthropological Approach to Gods and Robots. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute XIII (4): 917–933. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4623070.

  18. Siripala, Thisanka. 2019. An Ancient Japanese Shrine Debuts a Buddhist Robot. The Diplomat, 5 March 2019. https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/an-ancient-japanese-shrine-debuts-a-buddhist-robot/. Accessed 7 September 2023.

  19. Sigal, Samuel. 2020. Robot priests can bless you, advise you, and even perform your funeral. Vox, 13 January 2020. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/9/20851753/ai-religion-robot-priest-mindar-buddhism-christianity#:~:text=%E2%80%9CMindar's%20metal%20skeleton%20is%20exposed,at%20the%20University%20of%20Virginia. Accessed 14 September 2023.

  20. Travagnin, Stefania. 2020. From online Buddha halls to robot-monks new developments in the long-term interaction between Buddhism, media, and technology in contemporary China. Review of Religion and Chinese Society 7 (2020): 120–148. https://doi.org/10.1163/22143955-00701006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Kimura, Takesih. 2017. Robotics and AI in the sociology of religion: a human in imago roboticae. Social Compass. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768616683326.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Leone, Massimo. 2023. (Dis)Embodiment in Religion and Ethics. Bruno Kessler Foundation – Center for Religion Studies. https://isr.fbk.eu/en/disembodiment-in-religion-and-ethics/. Accessed 4 September 2023.

  23. Zaleski, Jeffrey. 1997. The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. San Francisco: HarperEdge.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Cobb, Jennifer. 1998. CyberGrace: The Search for God in the Digital World. New York: Crown Pubs.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Brasher, Brenda. 2001. Give Me That Online Religion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Hoover, Stewart M., and Lynn Schofield Clark, eds. 2002. Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

  27. Garner, Stephen. 2003. Techno-Sprituality. Paper presented at the IT | Church | Culture Meeting, Carey Baptist College, Auckland, New Zealand, 1 November 2003. https://www.greenflame.org/docs/Technospirit-talk. Accessed 6 September 2023.

  28. Bell, Genevieve. 2004. The age of auspicious computing: ethnographic accounts of religion & new technology. ACM Interactions Special Issue on Play 11 (5): 76–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Bell, Genevieve. 2006. No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-Spiritual Practices. In Ubi-Comp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Paul Dourish and Adrian Friday, 141–158. Berlin: Springer.

  30. Muller, Michael J., Ellen Christiansen, Bonnie A. Nardi, and Susan Dray. 2001. Spiritual life & information technology. Communications of ACM 44 (3): 82–83. https://doi.org/10.1145/365181.365211.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Henao, Louis Andres. 2022. Faith in the metaverse: A VR quest for community, fellowship. AP News, 31 January 2022. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-health-religion-virginia-04f7203bcf9026fee54a8893f396dca0. Accessed 6 September 2023.

  32. Kari, Paul. 2021. Please don’t stop the music: How choirs are singing through the pandemic. The Guardian, 22 April 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/22/choirs-coronavirus-covid-19-us-virtual-singing. Accessed 12 September 2023.

  33. Wolf, Sara, Frauke Moerike, Simon Luthe, Ilona Nord, and Jörn Hurtienne. 2022. Spirituality at the Breakfast Table: Experiences of Christian Online Worship Services, In: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519856.

  34. Derogatis, Amy, and Isaac Weiner. 2022. How the sound of religion has changed in the pandemic. The Conversation, August 2022. https://theconversation.com/how-the-sound-of-religion-has-changed-in-the-pandemic-140051. Accessed 12 September 2023.

  35. Claisse, Caroline, and Abigail C. Durrant. 2023. “Keeping our Faith Alive”: Investigating Buddhism Practice during COVID-19 to Inform Design for the Online Community Practice, In: CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany, April 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581177.

  36. Husserl, Edmund. 1913. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Den Haag: Nijhoff.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Marseille: Gallimard.

  38. Lucie-Smith, Fr. Alexander. 2017. The Protestant ‘robot priest’ shows us one thing – the priesthood cannot be replaced. Catholic Herald, 5 June 2017. https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-protestant-robot-priest-shows-us-one-thing-the-priesthood-cannot-be-replaced/. Accessed 12 September 2023.

  39. Barbieri, Daniele. 2019. La religione e i robot, with an interview to Brunetto Salvarani. Voce Evangelica, 25 September 2019. https://www.voceevangelica.ch/voceevangelica/home/2019/09/Mindar-robot-religione-Giappone.html. Accessed 12 September 2023.

  40. Ziaee, Ali Akbar. 2012. A philosophical approach to Artificial Intelligence and Islamic values. IIUM Engineering Journal 12 (6): 73–78. https://doi.org/10.31436/iiumej.v12i6.191.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Sturgill, Amanda F. C. 2019. Artificial Intelligence: Its Future Uses in Religious Compassion, in Religion Online: How Digital Technology is Changing the Way We Worship and Pray, vol. 1, ed. August E. Grant, Amanda F. C. Sturgill, Chiung Hwang Chen and Daniel A. Stout, 57–66. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

  42. Scheifinger, Heinz. 2015. New technology and change in the Hindu tradition: The Internet in historical perspective. In Asian Religions, Technology and Science, ed. István Keul, 153–168. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Mori, Masahiro. 1999 [1981]. The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion. Tokyo: Kosei.

  44. Geraci, Robert M. 2006. Spiritual robots: religion and our scientific view of the natural world. Theology and Science 4 (3): 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700600952993.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1966. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse. English Translation by Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie. 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

  46. Mayor, Adrienne. 2018. Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  47. Torres, Hannah. 2014. Clockwork Prayer. Thesis. Department of English – University of Michigan.

  48. Eco, Umberto. 1997. Kant e l’Ornitorinco. Milan: Bompiani. English Translation by Alastair McEwen. 1999. Kant and the Platypus. London: Secker & Warbur.

  49. Mori, Masahiro. 2012. The uncanny valley. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19 (2): 98–100. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Peirce, Charles S. 1934–1948. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  51. Violi, Patrizia. 2008. Beyond the body: towards a full embodied semiosis. In Body, Language and Mind, vol. 2, ed. Roslyn M. Frank, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke, and Enrique Bernárdez, 241–264. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

  52. Violi, Patrizia. 1997. Significato ed esperienza. Milan: Bompiani.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, University of Turin (UniTo), Via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124, Turin, Italy

    Simona Stano

Authors
  1. Simona Stano
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simona Stano.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Stano, S. Dis- and Re-Embodiment in Religious Practices: Semiotic, Ethical, and Normative Implications of Robotic Officiants. Int J Semiot Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10078-z

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10078-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation