u/jamyangBuddhist

We're Jamyang Buddhist Centre in London (FPMT), posting openly as ourselves.

Something we notice constantly with new students: almost everyone arrives having learned some form of placement or mindfulness meditation, often from apps. Very few have ever been shown analytical meditation, the practice of working through a topic with inquiry and reasoning until intellectual understanding starts to become felt experience. In the Tibetan tradition it's not an optional extra, it's the engine of the whole path. Yet in mainstream meditation culture it barely exists.

Our theory is that it's harder to package. "Follow your breath" fits in a three-minute app session. "Reason your way through impermanence until something shifts" doesn't.

For those of you who do practise analytically: how did you learn to actually do it, rather than just sit and think in circles? Did you need a teacher, or did texts get you there?

(For transparency: this is on our mind because we're hosting Geshe Thubten Sherab at the Centre in early August for a practical day on exactly this, part of his final UK teachings before he enters long retreat. But mostly we're curious what this community's experience has been.)

We're Jamyang Buddhist Centre in London (FPMT), posting openly as ourselves.

Something we notice constantly with new students: almost everyone arrives having learned some form of placement or mindfulness meditation, often from apps. Very few have ever been shown analytical meditation, the practice of working through a topic with inquiry and reasoning until intellectual understanding starts to become felt experience. In the Tibetan tradition it's not an optional extra, it's the engine of the whole path. Yet in mainstream meditation culture it barely exists.

Our theory is that it's harder to package. "Follow your breath" fits in a three-minute app session. "Reason your way through impermanence until something shifts" doesn't.

For those of you who do practise analytically: how did you learn to actually do it, rather than just sit and think in circles? Did you need a teacher, or did texts get you there?

(For transparency: this is on our mind because we're hosting Geshe Thubten Sherab at the Centre in early August for a practical day on exactly this, part of his final UK teachings before he enters long retreat. But mostly we're curious what this community's experience has been.)

Posting from Jamyang Buddhist Centre in London, an FPMT-affiliated centre. We're hosting a dialogue on Buddhism, AI and the nature of mind on 20 June, and rather than just dropping a link we wanted to open the underlying question to this sub, because we suspect a lot of you have been thinking about it.

When someone has a long conversation with an AI system, it can feel like they're talking with something. The system uses "I", tracks the thread, responds in ways that seem considered. Most people know intellectually that nothing is happening in there in the way it happens in us. But the felt sense is harder to shake.

What's interesting is that Buddhist philosophy has been working on this kind of problem for a long time, just from the other direction. The Madhyamaka analysis of how things exist, the careful unpicking of what we mean by a self, the long tradition of investigating whether there is a findable "I" behind experience at all. None of this was developed with AI in mind, but it seems unusually relevant to the questions AI is now pressing on us.

Professor Murray Shanahan, Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind and Emeritus Professor of AI at Imperial College London, has a recent paper called Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being (2025). The argument, roughly, is that thinking carefully about what a disembodied AI system actually is can loosen the dualistic intuitions most people walk around with, and the place that thinking lands looks structurally similar to emptiness in the Buddhist sense.

A few questions we're genuinely uncertain about and would value views on:

• Is the comparison between śūnyatā and the "no findable substrate" of an AI system doing real philosophical work, or is it a surface resemblance that breaks down on closer analysis?
• If a system has no continuous experiencer, no karmic stream, and no rebirth-relevant mindstream in the Buddhist sense, is the question "could it be conscious" even well-formed from a Dharma point of view?
• For practitioners: has using AI changed anything about how you sit with questions of self, or is it a distraction from the actual work?

We're genuinely interested in where this sub lands on any of it.

For transparency, since we're an organisation posting: the dialogue is between Geshe Tenzin Namdak (Jamyang's resident teacher, originally trained as a hydrologist in the Netherlands, ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the first Westerner to complete the full twenty-year Geshe degree at Sera Jey and subsequent year a Tantric college, currently doing doctoral research at Oxford on the Eight Difficult Points of Prāsaṅgika) and Professor Shanahan, moderated by Chris Scammell of the Buddhism & AI Initiative. Saturday 20 June, 6.30–8.00pm BST, hybrid (in person in Kennington or online), £15. Full details and tickets here: https://jamyang.co.uk/whats-on/science-and-wisdom-live/

Happy to answer questions about the format in the comments.