Can other living beings practice Zen?
This work writes the Heart Sutra by controlling a cockroach’s direction of movement through electrical stimulation.
One aim of Zen is to dismantle the world as divided by logic and language and to experience it without those divisions. The ideal of selflessness suggests a state of complete absorption in which the distinction between subject and object dissolves.
Writing with a cockroach can also be understood as a Zen practice. I apply electrical stimulation in response to its spontaneous movements; it changes direction in response to my stimulation. The distinction between us seemed to dissolve. I felt as though our awareness was blending and drifting.
Could this be a glimpse of an intuitive encounter between humans and other organisms, made possible within the field of computing?
Buddhism holds that all sentient beings possess Buddha-nature. Even if they cannot attain enlightenment on their own, could contemporary computer technology allow them to participate in Zen-like activities and communicate with us in another way?
Motivation, process, and its effect on me
Why should another organism need enlightenment? Is that not simply human ego? I do not presume to help a cockroach attain Buddhahood. The concept of Umwelt suggests that a cockroach perceives a world organized differently from ours. Trying to describe that world in language immediately draws it into human categories.
I began to wonder whether Zen might offer an intuitive understanding that does not depend on language or logic. If I was approaching the state of mind sought in Zen, perhaps the cockroach was participating too. Through this work, the question “Can living beings practice Zen?” became inseparable from “Practicing Zen using a living being as a tool.” This became the focus of my investigation.