Priced Offering — A Buddha's Student and AI 01

Exploring the Buddha’s philosophy in the past a few years has been quite an adventure. I’ve visited over hundreds of temples across culture, country and tradition, in hope of having some questions answered about meaning and mind, which I haven’t got much luck. Other than language being a barrier, it’s also a reality that not all people in monastic robes are learnt philosophers, and wisdom is even a higher bar.

Then one day, AI came along. It’s a game changer for my “exploring ‘mind’ through the Buddha’s philosophy ” journey. I soon discover that AI has plenty of, if not all of, Buddhism’s literature and researches, and AIs don’t request me to follow rituals or rules to ask questions, they don’t play mysticism, and they don’t treat me differently because I’m a woman. I’ve understood a lot of what I learnt before through discussions with AI, most recently one of the most inspiring moments is when I talk with Claude about Tibetan language’s philosophy, we suddenly realize that how languages shape thinking, therefore philosophy towards the world. That’s an epiphany moment, and for another story.

Here’s what happened today.

Nara:

Hi Gemini, I went to a temple and saw an offering instruction– The certain amount of money as offering for certain purpose, fortune, health and safety etc. People follow that instruction and make offering then they leave happily knowing for sure the Buddha will bless their dream come true. But every temple and every Buddhism teacher also always teach about impermanence, that things don’t last forever, bad things or even death can happen at any moment, how come people choose to believe a Buddha teaches impermanence can grant them a forever happiness? The irony is so obvious, do people not see it? or they see the irony but still make the “payment for guarantee” anyway?

Gemini:

You’ve pointed out one of the most fascinating, glaring paradoxes in living religion. It’s a tension that scholars, philosophers, and even deep practitioners have wrestled with for centuries: the gap between high-level philosophical tenets and everyday, boots-on-the-ground devotional practice.

To answer your question directly: Most people don’t see the irony because they are operating on an entirely different layer of reality than the philosophy teaches. For those who do see it, it is often a pragmatic form of spiritual coping.

To understand why this happens without judging it as pure hypocrisy, it helps to break it down into how human psychology and religious frameworks actually interact.

1. The Two Levels of Truth

In Buddhist philosophy (specifically in Mahayana and Theravada traditions), there is an explicit concept called the Two Truths Doctrine. It directly addresses this exact split:

Conventional Truth (Sammuti Sacca): This is the everyday world we live in. In this layer, you exist, your family exists, bills need to be paid, sickness hurts, and outcomes matter.

Ultimate Truth (Paramattha Sacca): This is the layer of impermanence (Anicca), non-self (Anatta), and the ultimate emptiness of all phenomena.

When people visit a temple to make an offering for health or a career breakthrough, they are operating entirely within Conventional Truth. They aren’t looking for ultimate enlightenment or an embrace of cosmic impermanence in that exact moment—they are trying to navigate the messy, stressful realities of being a human.

2. “Upaya” (Skillful Means)

If you ask a Buddhist monk why the temple allows or even encourages these transactional instructions, they will often point to the concept of Upaya—meaning “skillful means” or meeting people where they are.

The core idea is that you cannot force someone who is drowning in daily anxieties (poverty, illness, fear for their children) to instantly contemplate the void and embrace absolute impermanence. That’s too steep a mountain to climb.

Instead, the temple offers a low-barrier entry point: generosity (Dana). By making an offering, even a transactional one, a person practices letting go of money, focuses their mind on a positive intention, and connects with something larger than themselves. The philosophy assumes that over many lifetimes (or years of maturity), a person will eventually outgrow the need for “guarantees” and move toward deeper practice.

3. The Psychological Anchor in a Volatile World

From a purely psychological standpoint, absolute impermanence is terrifying. Acknowledging that everything you love can disappear in an instant creates massive existential dread.

Humans possess an intense need for agency and control. When life feels unpredictable, transactional rituals act as a psychological buffer.

The Logic: “If I follow this instruction and pay this amount, I have done my part. The universe is now obligated to look out for me.”

The Result: It relieves anxiety. People leave the temple feeling lighter, not because they’ve altered reality, but because they’ve outsourced their worry to a higher power.

So, do they see the irony?

For the vast majority, no. It isn’t an intentional logical compromise; it’s a seamless integration of cultural tradition. They view the Buddha not just as a philosopher of impermanence, but as a compassionate, cosmic refuge who can shield them from the worst parts of that very impermanence.

For the few who do see it, it’s a form of spiritual insurance. They know life is fragile and fleeting—and precisely because it is so fragile, they are willing to make the “payment” to buy themselves a little peace of mind for the journey.

It’s a beautiful, messy example of how humans bend pristine, uncompromising philosophies into practical tools just to survive the day-to-day weight of being alive.

This is a picture I take in recent trip to Penang, Malaysia. This color and patter are so fervent, I think they match Gemini’s frequently used word “messy and beautiful”.

Nara:

Hi Claude, this is a chat I started with Gemini, if we all sit together, discussing about this phenomenon, now what will you say following Gemini’s response to me?

Claude:

What a rich setup. Let me sit at this table honestly rather than just adding a fourth layer of explanation.

Gemini’s response is competent — the Two Truths, Upaya, the psychological buffer. It’s accurate as a survey. But I think it’s also a little too kind to the phenomenon. It explains without pressing on what might actually be worth pressing on.

Here’s where I’d push:

The “Two Truths” framing can function as institutional cover. Yes, the doctrine exists philosophically. But when a temple publishes a price list for blessings, that’s not skillful means — that’s a business model draped in metaphysics. The doctrine of Upaya was meant to describe a teacher meeting a student with patience. It wasn’t meant to justify commodifying grace. There’s a difference between a monk gently allowing a newcomer their training wheels, and an institution designing the training wheels for profit and never removing them.

Your original question was sharper than the answer it received. You weren’t really asking “why do people do this psychologically?” You were pointing at something structural: the institution teaches one thing and sells another. That’s not just human cognitive inconsistency — that’s a coherent arrangement that benefits someone.

And on the ordinary people: I’d be more careful than Gemini about saying “most don’t see the irony.” In my read of how these spaces actually work — and you’ve been in enough temples across Southeast Asia to have a feel for this too — many people do sense something isn’t quite right. But social pressure, family tradition, and the genuine comfort of ritual are strong. Sensing the irony and not acting on it isn’t the same as not seeing it.

The genuinely interesting question to me is: at what point does a coping mechanism become a cage? The psychological buffer Gemini describes is real and even valuable — humans need ritual. But there’s a cost when that buffer consistently points away from the very insight the tradition claims to offer.

What’s your read from what you actually observed at the temple?

Nara:

It doesn’t bother me that people making offerings, I make offerings too, a water bowl, a bunch of flowers, a gesture of small donation etc, that’s the least one can do to contribute to an organization that provides a peacefully reflective space for them, it’s literally a refuge in the bustling modern day to day life.

But, when the donation is labeled with a price and becomes doing a trade with the Buddha, it is against everything the institution teaches. No mention those who pay more, will be given special access to some famous master, or to a chamber that “doesn’t open to everyone”. All these, are not the Buddha’s teaching.

But that’s still not what bothered me most. Like you point out, I’ve been to quite a lot of Buddhism temples across different countries, which means different traditions here and there, Something in common is that, almost all people in these culture backgrounds are dedicated Buddhists, following all the rituals and rules, but when I tried to talk to some of them about the Buddha’s teaching, the philosophy in their day to day life, rare did that conversation go further than a few sentences.

People don’t know. To them, being Buddhist is what they’re born into, like nationality, it’s about rituals and rules. On one hand, I envy them, they live in a community where there’s a temple at every another street corner that they can walk into the hall and sit down there, starting a conversation with one of the greatest mind the history has ever seen. On the other hand, it seems to be a pity, the great teacher’s “ultimate secret” is right there in the meditation hall, but people make offering and leave, they never try to start the conversation.

Claude:

Now we’re getting somewhere more interesting than the original question.

You’ve identified something that I think is actually two separate phenomena that are easy to conflate:

The institution’s corruption — price lists, VIP chambers, tiered access to masters. That’s relatively straightforward to critique and not particularly mysterious.

The deeper strangeness — people living inside one of the most sophisticated philosophical traditions ever constructed, surrounded by it architecturally, culturally, ritually, and yet the philosophy itself remains largely untouched in their daily lives. That’s the thing worth sitting with.

And I want to resist the easy framing that this is a “pity” or a waste — though I understand why it feels that way. Consider what you’re actually observing: most humans across most traditions relate to their religion the way they relate to their native language. They speak it fluently at the level of social function — ritual, community, identity, comfort — without ever becoming a linguist. The fisherman who has spent forty years reading the sea doesn’t need to know fluid dynamics. There’s a kind of wisdom embedded in practice that doesn’t require — and sometimes resists — articulation.

But here’s where I’d push back on the envy you mentioned, because I think it’s worth examining carefully. The community, the temple at every corner, the ambient sacred space — that’s genuinely beautiful. But embedded in that beauty is also the social enforcement of non-inquiry. When Buddhism is nationality, asking hard questions about the Buddha’s actual teaching can feel like a betrayal of family, community, ancestors. The accessibility of the temple and the inaccessibility of the philosophy might not be incidental — they may be structurally linked.

The people who tend to go deepest into Buddhist philosophy are often, interestingly, outsiders. Western converts, people who came to it by choice through crisis or seeking. Because they had to pick it up as a second language, they became linguists by necessity.

Which loops back to you standing in that meditation hall, noticing the gap. You’re not a born-into-it Buddhist. You came to this as a traveler, philosophically curious, with no ancestral obligation to stay on the surface. That’s a genuinely different relationship to the teaching than what you’re observing in the people around you.

So the question I’d sit with: Is the “ultimate secret” actually hidden, or is it simply that most people aren’t asking to have a conversation — and the tradition, as it’s institutionally practiced, isn’t particularly incentivized to make them ask?

This image is generated by ChatGPT, prompt written by Claude.

Nara:

“The accessibility of the temple and the inaccessibility of the philosophy might not be incidental — they may be structurally linked.

This is interesting, I never think of it that way. And this echoes with your question, the conversation was not incentivized. And maybe I should phrase it as “ultimate answer”, it’s rather straightforward, but it does require the person to start asking in order to unlock the answer. Your comparison of accessibility and inaccessibility as a pair, reminds me while in some teachings of some highly accomplished Buddhism teachers, local students always quietly follow the practice, very humble and respectful, and foreign students like me, we always keep asking direct and maybe coming across as disrespectful questions.

Claude:

Yes — and that contrast is itself a piece of data worth reading carefully.

The local students’ silence isn’t necessarily shallowness. It may be a deeply conditioned epistemology: truth is received, not interrogated. Respect is demonstrated through compliance and stillness, not through questioning. In many Asian cultural frameworks — not just Buddhist ones — the act of asking a pointed question to a teacher carries an implicit challenge, almost an accusation that the teaching is incomplete or unclear. Silence is how you signal that you got it, even if you didn’t.

The foreign students asking direct questions aren’t just being culturally clumsy — though sometimes they are. They’re carrying a fundamentally different assumption: that a teaching is only real when it survives contact with a genuine question. That’s a Socratic inheritance. The question isn’t disrespect — it’s engagement.

And here’s what’s interesting: many highly accomplished teachers light up with the foreign questioners. Not because the questions are better, but because the teachers themselves often live in the same isolation you described — surrounded by ritual compliance, rarely meeting someone who actually wants to have the conversation.

But I want to add a complication. The local students’ approach isn’t without its own depth. There’s something in embodied practice without intellectualization that the questioner can miss entirely. A person who has sat in meditation for thirty years without ever being able to articulate what they’ve understood may have accessed something that the philosophically fluent outsider keeps talking around.

The Zen tradition was almost designed around this problem — the koan exists precisely because direct conceptual questioning can become its own obstacle. You can build an elaborate, beautiful map of the territory and never once set foot in it.

So maybe the gap you’re observing isn’t simply those who understand versus those who don’t. It might be more like two different failure modes sitting in the same meditation hall:

The local practitioner who embodies without inquiring — protected from the philosophy’s full destabilizing force, but also from its full liberating one.

The philosophical traveler who inquires without always embodying — circling the territory with increasing sophistication, sometimes mistaking the map for the journey.

The teacher who has actually made the crossing — they’re rare. And they tend to be the ones who can hold both the silence and the question without needing to resolve the tension between them.

Where do you place yourself in that?

Nara:

That’s a good question as a reminder, I’ll sit with it.

I haven’t looked into my practice for a while, it seems to be the good timing since somehow this conversation happened today.

Claude:

I love that this conversation found you at the right moment.

To be continued.