Buddhism and Social Media: Speech, Likes and Monks Online

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 October 2026

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Buddhism and social media meet at speech: the early discourses judge what is said, and a post is said. They rule out false, divisive, harsh and pointless words, teach how to meet praise and blame, which in our reading likes and pile-ons make countable, and warn monastics against enjoying popularity. Named teachers, among them Alexander Berzin in the Tibetan tradition, apply them to posting, and monks now teach on the platforms themselves.

This page covers posting, comparing, and Buddhism online. Attention and devices are on Buddhism and technology, artificial intelligence on Buddhism and AI, and all of them sit under Buddhism in everyday life. Where we apply a text to a post, we say so or name the teacher who does.

Applying the speech teachings to a post

SN 45.8 defines right speech as “Refraining from speech that’s false, backbiting, harsh, or nonsensical” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato); treating a post as speech is our reading. Three further discourses bear on it. The first, spoken to the brahmins and householders of Sālā, defines backbiting:

Our reading, not the text’s: a screenshot passed from one group chat to another repeats in one place what was heard in another, and the question is whether the aim is to divide. The second, AN 5.198, gives the positive form, speech that is “timely, true, gentle, beneficial, and loving” (trans. Bhikkhu Sujato); it is addressed to monastics and mentions no audience, and the five marks are set out on right speech.

The third answers a chief minister, Vassakāra, who saw nothing wrong in reporting whatever one has seen or heard. The Buddha replies (AN 4.183) that he recommends talking about neither everything nor nothing: the test is whether talking about it makes “unskillful qualities” grow or decline.

Liked or disliked is not the test: MN 58

A Jain teacher sends Prince Abhaya to trap the Buddha, promising “Then you will get a good reputation”, with a dilemma: may the Realized One say what others dislike? The Buddha answers “This matter is not categorical, prince”, then sets out how he himself speaks:

Six cases, sorted by three questions: is it true, is it beneficial, do others like it? The third appears in every case and decides none. What is true and beneficial he says, liked or not, when he “knows the right time”; the reason is sympathy, pictured as a father hooking a stick out of his baby’s mouth “even if it drew blood”. This describes the Buddha’s own speech, not a rule laid down for followers. Our application: a like count measures only the question MN 58 sets aside.

Plum Village and Alexander Berzin on posting

The Plum Village community founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, in the Vietnamese Thiền tradition, recasts the five precepts as Five Mindfulness Trainings for its lay community (wording revised 15 June 2022). The Fourth includes “When anger is manifesting in me, I am determined not to speak” and the commitment “not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to utter words that can cause division or discord”. It does not mention social media; applying it to a repost is our reading.

Alexander Berzin, a scholar and translator in the Tibetan tradition whose Berzin Archives e.V. runs Study Buddhism, gave a seminar in New Delhi in January 2011 on Facebook, Twitter and texting. He says that “there definitely are benefits” to social media, calls devices such as iPods and text messaging not “evil” but limited, and asks of any post: “Why do I want to put this there?” Venting to the world “might make us feel a little bit relieved”, “but it certainly is not helpful for others”. He asks what is accomplished “by telling everybody what I had for lunch today”. He frames motivation through the lam-rim, the Tibetan graded path, and offers these as his own thoughts.

Likes, followers and the eight worldly conditions

The Pali discourses list eight worldly conditions (lokadhammā): “Gain and loss, fame and disgrace, blame and praise, pleasure and pain” (AN 8.6). Nobody is exempt:

The disciple does not avoid praise, but reflects that it is “impermanent, suffering, and perishable”. Of the ordinary person the text says “They favor praise and oppose blame”; of the disciple, “They don’t favor praise or oppose blame.” The Dhammapada adds that “no one in the world escapes blame” (Dhp 227), and its verse 81, the rock that wind cannot stir, is on Unshaken like a rock; the Mangala Sutta (Snp 2.4) counts it a blessing when a mind “touched by worldly conditions” does not tremble.

Our application: likes and follower counts are praise and fame made countable, and a pile-on is blame made countable. Read with AN 8.6, the practice is not to stop receiving them but to stop favouring and opposing them, the loosening described on letting go.

Berzin makes a similar move from another tradition. In a 2012 seminar in Kiev on mind training (lojong), he teaches the “eight worldly concerns” with the remedy “nothing special”. His pairs differ from the Pali list (he has things going well and badly, and good and bad news), so this is a Tibetan presentation, not AN 8.6. “Not everyone is going to press the like button on our Facebook page,” he says. “Some people just won’t like us.” On his own website, 6,000 visits in a day brought a happiness “very trivial”, 4,500 left him “a little disappointed”. “Nothing special” is not “whatever”, he adds: happiness and sadness are fine, but “we don’t go to extremes”.

Scrolling and comparing

Scrolling past other people’s good news can bring up envy, issā. Buddhism and jealousy covers envy and its counterpart muditā, gladness at another’s good fortune, one of the four brahmavihāras. The Zen priest and teacher Karen Maezen Miller offers a small practice for the feed: writing in Lion’s Roar in November 2019, she calls liking pictures of kids and pets “your chance to cultivate empathetic joy”, and asks, before you post a picture or story about anyone in your family, whether “you are exploiting their image”.

Does passive scrolling make people envious and unhappy? The research is divided.

• Verduyn and colleagues (2015), in two Facebook studies, a laboratory experiment and an experience-sampling field study, found that passive use (browsing without interacting) led to declines in affective well-being; the field study traced this to increased envy.
• Valkenburg, van Driel and Beyens (2022) reviewed 40 survey-based studies from January 2017 to October 2021: most did not support the claim that passive use goes with lower well-being (they did not measure envy), and 74% of the associations for public passive use refuted it. People respond very differently; in one study of adolescents they cite, the hypothesis held for 20%. The review excluded loneliness and anxiety, and its studies are observational, so they cannot settle cause either way.

What the texts say about envy does not depend on either study. Berzin’s own 2011 view is that likes “can give a false sense of self-importance” and “foster narcissism”. His remedy distinguishes the conventional “me”, which “doesn’t need affirmation to prove it”, from an inflated, false “me”; secure in the first, he says, “we’ll stop looking to others for approval”. That is one teacher’s Tibetan framing of non-self.

On checking more than you mean to, Berzin suggests a time limit you set yourself, and passes on Geshe Wangchen’s advice on ethical discipline that “the main thing is to set boundaries”. Attention and devices are covered on Buddhism and technology. For a comment you keep replaying after the phone is down, see Buddhism and overthinking.

Connection and loneliness online

Berzin does not dismiss the benefits: for those “who live isolated lives”, social networks “can help them feel part of a community”; the drawback is that the group “may be held together by something quite trivial”, and his answer is a network bonded by positive values, which he says need not be a Buddhist one. Writing about urban China, the scholar Francesca Tarocco notes that smartphones “present clear socially isolating features”, yet can “keep people connected”. Plum Village’s Fifth Mindfulness Training, which names “certain websites” among things that can carry toxins, is discussed on Buddhism and technology, and consumption itself on Buddhism and consumerism.

These are reflections, not treatment. If time online is deepening a loneliness that already weighs on you, Buddhism and loneliness and a local sangha are places to start, and the note at the top of this page lists human support.

Buddhism on social media

The three cases below come from different countries, schools and platforms; each holds only for its own place and time.

Urban China and Sinophone cities, roughly 2011–2016. Tarocco’s ethnographic article in the Journal of Global Buddhism (2017) studies elite Chinese clerics on blogs, Weibo and WeChat. The monk Daoxin posted on Weibo in 2011, in her translation, “Without the Internet, I would still be an ordinary monk living in a monastery”, and had over 190,000 followers of his blog by June 2012. In Taiwan she describes Fo Guang Shan (Buddha Light Mountain) and its app- and QR-code-linked “cybertemples”. She finds that online “a conversation takes place, one that clerics control”, and the view that new media dissolve religious authority “appears increasingly discredited”. The monk Jiqun and his followers, she writes, see the work as skilful means, upāya. See Buddhism in China.

Bangkok, 2021. Reuters reported in October 2021 on two monks at Wat Soi Thong, Phra Maha Paiwan Warawanno and Phra Maha Sompong Talaputto, whose weekly Facebook livestreams mixed Dhamma with jokes and drew hundreds of thousands of viewers. Reading comments and answering questions broke, in Reuters’ words, “the long-standing Buddhist convention of one-way preaching”. The previous month they had been summoned to a parliamentary committee on religion, and Srisuwan Janya, head of the Association for the Protection of the Constitution, said “Monks’ behaviour has to be respectable in the public eye.” Paiwan told Reuters: “I want Dhamma and the young generation to coexist.” We could not read the Thai press reports on how the monastic authorities dealt with these two monks, before or after this story, so we do not describe it. See Buddhism in Thailand.

Cambodia, 2023. Rest of World reported in March 2023 on Cambodian monks preaching on TikTok; one, Hak Sienghai, had more than 500,000 followers. Cambodian monks follow the Theravāda monastic code, the Vinaya, which the outlet says is “enforced by a multilayered bureaucracy under the national monk council”; breaking its most serious rules can mean expulsion from the order. According to Yon Seng Yeath, acting vice rector at a Buddhist university in Phnom Penh, at least half of the rules aim to keep monks from seeking public admiration or fame. That is his reading of the code as the outlet reports it, not a published rule on social media. In Laos, the Vientiane Times reported in April 2019 that the Lao Buddhist Fellowship Organisation would begin explaining regulations on monks’ use of social media, issued in 2017 by its Sangha administrative committee “to improve the image of monks” with the public; the report does not say what they forbid. (On judging a teacher you first meet online, see finding a Buddhist teacher.)

SN 17, a chapter of discourses taught to mendicants, treats popularity as a danger. In one, the angler is Māra, the tempter:

The hook is enjoying popularity, not being known. Whether a monk with half a million followers has swallowed it, or is reaching people who would never enter a temple, no outsider can tell from the text.

When Buddhism is criticised or praised online

The Long Discourses open with a wanderer criticising the Buddha while his pupil praises him. The Buddha tells his monks:

It does not counsel silence: they are to “explain that what is untrue is in fact untrue”, and, when praised, not to become “thrilled, elated, and excited” but to “admit that what is true is in fact true”. Applying this to a comment thread is ours.

Quotes that are not the Buddha’s

Bodhipaksa, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order since 1993, runs Fake Buddha Quotes to slow the spread of misattributed sayings, and names where he finds them: “Twitter, Facebook, blogs, quotes sites”. The shared line about anger as a hot coal is, he finds, a paraphrase of a passage in the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa’s fifth-century treatise, not of the discourses. Quotes the Buddha never said traces it and others; for sourced ones, see Buddha quotes.

How the traditions frame it

The Pali discourses give lists and cases, some addressed to monks (AN 5.198, SN 17.2, DN 1), some to lay people (MN 41). Berzin works within Tibetan mind training, where the remedy is an attitude, “nothing special”. Plum Village writes first-person commitments for its lay community. In one 2019 article the Zen priest Karen Maezen Miller offers small habits for using Facebook rather than rules. Among the Chinese clerics Tarocco studied, Jiqun and his followers frame online teaching as skilful means; the Thai critic Reuters quoted warns that changing to please the young will bring Buddhism’s decline. In Cambodia, as Rest of World reports, the monastic code is enforced through the national monk council.

A reflection before posting

This is our own synthesis, not a canonical rule, building on the checklist on right speech:

1. Do I know it to be true? (MN 58; Plum Village’s “news that I do not know to be certain”)
2. Will it make unskillful qualities grow or decline? (AN 4.183)
3. Would I post it if nobody liked it, and drop it if it would be liked but do harm? (MN 58)
4. Am I repeating here what I heard there, to divide? (MN 41)
5. Is this the right time, and am I angry? (MN 58; Plum Village’s Fourth Training)
6. Why do I want to put this there? (Berzin, 2011)