Buddhism and Technology: Printing, Devices and Attention

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

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There is no single Buddhist view of technology: the suttas were composed long before phones or screens existed. What Buddhism and technology share is a history and a set of applied teachings. Buddhists were among the earliest users of printing and now put whole canons online, and modern teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh apply canonical teachings on intention and attention, such as AN 6.63 and SN 35.247, to phones. Research on whether a nearby phone affects how we think is more contested than its best-known finding suggests.

This page covers the broad relationship: history, the texts that bear on tools, and attention and devices. Posting and scrolling have their own page, Buddhism and social media; what Buddhist thinkers make of machine minds is on Buddhism and AI. All of them sit under Buddhism in everyday life.

Buddhists and early printing

The oldest printed book with a secure date is Buddhist. In a 2024 peer-reviewed study, Amanda Goodman and Jessica Lockhart of the University of Toronto identify it as the British Library’s copy of the Diamond Sutra, dated 868, and add a detail: “While discovered at Dunhuang, this copy of the Diamond Sūtra was printed in Sichuan.”

It was found in Mogao Cave 17, the sealed “library cave” near Dunhuang, which held an estimated 60,000 manuscripts. Goodman and Lockhart estimate the printed items at “a number approaching 200”, from long rolls of repeated small votive images to dhāraṇī sheets. Their possible uses ran “from books copied for merit, to talismans for successful childbirth”, and the authors suggest that single-sheet prints circulated in a local “economy of merit”, much as painted votive images did.

How much printing did to spread Buddhist texts is still argued. As Goodman and Lockhart report, some scholars read the tiny share of print in the cave as evidence that in tenth-century Dunhuang printing “still played very little role” in producing and spreading Buddhist texts. The historian T. H. Barrett questions that reading, and they quote him:

Or did the impact of printing lie elsewhere, in ordinary homes, about which we know virtually nothing?

Goodman and Lockhart’s own study takes up Barrett’s challenge. The argument concerns one archive in one region, and it is not settled. Barrett’s own book, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (Yale, 2008), centres on the Chinese empress Wu and, in its publisher’s words, explores “the motivating role of her private religious beliefs”.

Japan offers another early example. Fabio Rambelli, a professor of Japanese religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes in a 2018 journal article that around 770 the Japanese government ordered one million copies of a prayer, the Hyakumantō darani, to be printed, placed inside miniature pagodas and distributed to temples all over Japan. He calls it “a well-documented fact” that Japanese Buddhism, historically, “often has favored and contributed to technological developments”, but adds in a note that, without wider comparative studies, it is impossible to say whether this holds for Buddhism in general or is particular to Japan.

Korea holds another record. Jikji, a compilation of Zen (Seon) teachings by the monk Baegun, was printed with movable metal type at Heungdeok-sa temple in Cheongju in July 1377. The Republic of Korea’s nomination to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register calls it “the world’s oldest existing book printed with movable metal type”, while noting that earlier metal printings are mentioned in old Korean books. The surviving second volume is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and UNESCO’s Jikji Memory of the World Prize commemorates the book’s entry on the Register. The same nomination says metal type produced only a limited number of copies, so the book was printed again from woodblocks to spread Baegun’s teaching. A woodblock canon on a far larger scale, the Tripitaka Koreana, is covered on Buddhism in Korea.

Devotion found its own devices too. A Tibetan prayer wheel holds a mantra printed many times over; some are spun by hand, others kept turning by water or wind. Rambelli also describes rinzō, multisided bookcases on a rotating axis that hold the scrolls of an entire Buddhist canon. Zen monks brought them to Japan in the late fourteenth century, and in the early seventeenth century many large temples that owned the canon built one. They served, he writes, both to display a temple’s prestige and to share the canon “with the illiterate and semi-literate masses, to many of whom the sutras were accessible only through this device.”

The canon, digitised

Several large Buddhist canons can now be read free online, each project run by its own community. SuttaCentral, the source of the Sujato translations quoted on this page, says it is “supported entirely by donations” and “has no advertising or tracking”; our guide to Buddhist apps describes it and the other free libraries.

In Taiwan, the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Texts Association (CBETA) was founded on 15 February 1998 at the initiative of Ven. Heng-Ching (恆清法師). Its electronic canon includes the Taishō canon, the Xuzang and the Jiaxing canon, and the database can be downloaded free. For the Tibetan canon, 84000 says it is “dedicated to bringing the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon to the world”. By its own count, more than half of the Kangyur, the collection of the Buddha’s words, had been published in English as of 2025.

A meditation app may come from a Buddhist community or teach secular mindfulness with the Buddhism taken out; either way, what an app company says about its product is not a research finding.

What the texts say that bears on tools

None of the discourses quoted here teaches about technology as such, but one verse reaches for the technology of its day. It uses three crafts as images for training the mind:

The verse is a metaphor, not a verdict on crafts; its meaning is on the wise control themselves. Two teachings come closer to an ethics of using things. The first defines kamma, action, by its intention:

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu translates the same line “Intention, I tell you, is kamma”, the wording explained on intention is kamma. The sutta says nothing about tools, and applying it to them is a modern step, not the sutta’s claim.

The second is a list of trades that, the Buddha tells the mendicants, a lay follower should not engage in:

Where Sujato has “living creatures”, Ṭhānissaro has “business in human beings”. The sutta is about what one sells, not which tools one uses, and it names no technology. Extending it to a modern industry is an argument someone has to make. The wider teaching is on right livelihood.

Attention, distraction and devices

The Pali discourses have a good deal to say about attention. They say it about the six senses, not about screens, but one simile pictures a mind pulled several ways at once. A man ties six animals together by a knot in the middle and lets them go:

The animals are a snake, a dolphin, a bird, a dog, a jackal and a monkey. The sutta’s answer is not to remove them but to tether them to a strong post, by which, worn out, they “stand or sit or lie down”. It explains the image itself: “‘A strong post or pillar’ is a term for mindfulness of the body.” Restraint, as it describes it, is a way of meeting what is pleasant and unpleasant: “If it’s pleasant they don’t hold on to it, and if it’s unpleasant they don’t dislike it.” Our page on letting go takes up that loosening of grip.

The text is spoken to monks and concerns sense restraint. Reading it as a picture of a divided mind facing a feed is our application. The same holds for a line from MN 19, where the Buddha recalls sorting his own thoughts before his awakening:

MN 19 is about thoughts of sensual desire, ill will and cruelty and their opposites. It is not about apps. Stretching it from kinds of thought to what one repeatedly looks at is, again, our application, not the sutta’s. The same line is the real source behind a popular misquotation, discussed on quotes the Buddha never said. The next sutta’s five methods for unwanted thoughts are on Buddhism and overthinking. Practical habits are on their own pages: waking without reaching for the phone on a Buddhist morning routine, and single-tasking and screen breaks on mindfulness at work.

How named Buddhist voices apply this

Thich Nhat Hanh and Plum Village

A worked-out set of practices comes from Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village community he founded. In Happiness (2009), in an excerpt posted by Deer Park Monastery in California, he starts by granting the phone its use: “The telephone is a very convenient means of communication, and the cell phone even more so.” Then he adds: “But the telephone can also tyrannize us.” “There is a force that pulls us to the phone. We cannot resist. We can become the victim of our own telephone.”

His practice is to let the phone ring while breathing, “Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile”, and to pick it up after the third ring. Plum Village counts a ringing telephone among its bells of mindfulness, explained on why Buddhists ring bells. Before making a call he suggests a verse:

Words can travel thousands of miles. / May my words create mutual understanding and love. / May they be as beautiful as gems, / As lovely as flowers.

Plum Village’s restatement of the five precepts, the Five Mindfulness Trainings (revised 15 June 2022), carries this into consumption. In the Fifth Training the practitioner is “determined not to gamble, or to use alcohol, drugs, or any other products which contain toxins, such as certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations.” The word is “certain”, not all. The same training asks the practitioner to look into “the Four Kinds of Nutriments”; consumption more broadly is the subject of Buddhism and consumerism. The nutriments teaching is canonical. In SN 12.63, Sujato translates the four as “fuels”: edible food, contact, mental intention and consciousness. Thich Nhat Hanh’s introduction says plainly that he has “translated these precepts for modern times”. That makes this one community’s reading, not the traditional precept.

Plum Village’s talk archive describes a talk he gave on 10 November 2013 at Upper Hamlet, “Who Is the Driver – The Horse is Technology”. In the archive’s summary, not his own words, he encouraged the Sangha to disconnect from email, the Internet and social media during that Winter Retreat, shared insights from a visit to Google, and emphasised “intentional use of technology”. The community also builds technology. The free Plum Village app, offered by the Centre for Applied Ethics, a London non-profit, presents itself as part of his vision of an “Online Monastery”, and its About page quotes him: “We can make good use of technology in order to help people go home to themselves and take care of themselves and their families.”

What monasteries ask of devices

The Vinaya, the monastic code, was set down long before phones, so rules about devices come from later bodies and from individual communities. Two communities’ own pages show what that can look like.

Plum Village’s talk archive says that a revised Prātimokṣa, the monastic code, for its monks (bhikshus) was released in Seoul on 31 March 2003, and lists among its highlights “One hundred mindful-manners precepts focused on freedom and community use of cars, computers, internet, and communal living”. The archive warns that its descriptions “may contain inaccuracies”. Parallax Press published Thich Nhat Hanh’s update of the code as Freedom Wherever We Go: A Buddhist Monastic Code for the Twenty-first Century (2005).

Abhayagiri Monastery in Redwood Valley, California, which follows the Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism (the lineage described on the Thai Forest tradition), asks overnight guests “to refrain from using their phones for calls, text, or email while staying here and to leave their tablets and laptop computers at home”, to keep the monastery “a haven of quiet, simplicity and solitude” (its guest page, read 21 October 2026). That rule is for visitors, not a statement of the monks’ own discipline. These are two communities’ practices, not a Buddhist rule.

Peter D. Hershock

A book-length Buddhist treatment is Peter D. Hershock’s Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (SUNY Press, 1999). Hershock was then a Fellow of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He defines technologies broadly, as “value-laden patterns of conduct” oriented “to successfully correct or forestall trouble”. He distinguishes “technologies of contribution and technologies of control”, and concludes that “All technologies are thus deeply political.” His publisher says the book “Suggests that certain Buddhist notions may act as an antidote to the adverse effects of high-tech media”, and that it acknowledges “the need for new forms of practice”. Hershock warns that some of his generalisations “border on caricatures”. This is one thinker’s argument from 1999, not a school’s position. His later book on artificial intelligence, Buddhism and Intelligent Technology (2021), is discussed on Buddhism and AI.

What the research on a phone’s mere presence shows

The best-known claim, that a phone takes up mental capacity just by being nearby, has a short and instructive record. Ward, Duke, Gneezy and Bos (2017) reported from two experiments that, even when people kept their attention on the task, the mere presence of one’s own smartphone “reduces available cognitive capacity”, most of all for people most dependent on their phones. Ruiz Pardo and Minda (2022) ran a pre-registered direct replication of the second experiment and found that the effect “did not replicate”. A meta-analysis by Douglas Parry, published in 2024 (online in 2023), (k = 56, n = 7,093) found only one significant pooled effect, on working memory. It called the support for the idea “limited”, the effect “smaller than theorized”, and the literature’s power to settle the question limited too.

None of these studies tested a Buddhist practice, and nothing in them shows that meditation protects attention. For how meditation research is weighed more generally, see Buddhism and science.

If your use of a phone, games or a feed feels out of your control, the teachings above are offered for reflection, not as treatment. A doctor or counsellor can help, and our page on Buddhism and addiction sets the teaching on craving beside real-world help.

Social media, AI and consumer culture

Posting is a form of speech, and the Pali texts’ tests for speech are the subject of Buddhism and social media. That page also covers comparison, scrolling and Buddhism online, and the teaching itself is on right speech.

Whether a machine could be sentient, and what the teaching of non-self implies about minds, artificial or otherwise, are questions for Buddhism and AI. That page sets out named Buddhist thinkers’ positions rather than a single verdict.

Devices are also products, and the craving that sells them, with the contentment that answers it, is the subject of Buddhism and consumerism.