Tenshō Gotō
Zen Buddhist Priest
Zen steward at Kyoto’s Kōdai-ji temple who commissioned Mindar, a roughly $1M android priest, and hopes AI will let it grow in wisdom and one day speak autonomously.
In his words
With AI we hope it will grow in wisdom to help people overcome even the most difficult troubles.
Biography
Tenshō Gotō is a steward of Kōdai-ji, a historic Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto. In 2019 he drew global attention by unveiling Mindar, an android embodiment of Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy, developed with roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro’s lab at a reported cost of around one million dollars.
A robot that will never die
Mindar delivers sermons on the Heart Sutra to temple visitors. Gotō framed the android not as a gimmick but as a vessel that could deepen over time, praising its capacity to accumulate knowledge without end and expressing hope that adding AI would let it eventually speak autonomously rather than recite a fixed script.
This robot will never die, it will just keep updating itself and evolving. That’s the beauty of a robot.
Not everyone was persuaded — some visitors, particularly Western tourists, likened Mindar to Frankenstein’s monster — but Gotō argued that Buddhism, unencumbered by a doctrine of a single creator God, is unusually comfortable seeing the sacred expressed through a machine.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/tensho-goto