In late May 1966, a slight Vietnamese monk, 39 years old, walked through the gatehouse of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was on a speaking tour arranged by Al Hassler of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He had come to tell Americans what the newspapers left out about the war destroying his country. The South Vietnamese government already disliked him. His friends feared that going home might mean prison or worse.
He spent two days with Thomas Merton. The next day Merton told his novices that their visitor was “a perfectly formed monk.” For proof, he offered something the monk had said about practice: before you can meditate, you must learn how to close the door. Merton pointed out that his own monks, hurrying to choir, left a trail of slammed doors behind them. The novices laughed.
That summer Merton published a short essay called “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother.” The monk was Thich Nhat Hanh. “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality,” Merton wrote, “because he and I see things exactly the same way.” Nhat Hanh did not go home. South Vietnam refused to let him back, and after the war the communist government kept him out too. The exile lasted until 2005, 39 years in all.
A Trappist and a Zen monk recognized each other by the way one of them closed a door.
More than inner peace
Ask most Westerners what Buddhism is about, and you will hear meditation, letting go, inner peace. That is part of it. It is not the whole of it. Buddhism has always had a social dimension, where compassion, community, and liberation are the same goal seen from different angles.
Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has spent 135 years, since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, insisting that justice is a shared project and not only a private virtue. Set side by side, the two traditions push each other to take collective liberation more seriously. In 2026, they also offer a practical way to judge artificial intelligence (AI) by how it shapes community, work, and power.
The third jewel
Buddhists take refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma (the teaching), and the Sangha (the community). In early Buddhism, Sangha meant the ordained community of monks and nuns. Many traditions now use the word more broadly for the whole community of practitioners. In either sense, its place on the list says something important. Awakening was never meant to be a solo project. The community forms, challenges, and holds the practitioner accountable.
Catholic thought has a close cousin to this idea. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965) teaches that the human person “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (§24). The vocabulary differs, but the instinct is the same: people are changed in relationship, not in isolation.
Four threads of Engaged Buddhism
Thich Nhat Hanh made the term “Engaged Buddhism” known in the West, most prominently in Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hill and Wang, 1967). The idea predates the phrase. It draws on Vietnamese Buddhist reform movements and on the Chinese monk Taixu’s “humanistic Buddhism” earlier in the century. Four threads run through it.
It starts on the inside. Buddhism names three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. Engaged Buddhists treat them as more than personal failings. In The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (Wisdom Publications, 2003), teacher David Loy argues that the poisons become institutions: an economy built on greed, militarism built on hatred, and media built on delusion. Reform the system while ignoring the poisons, and the same harm comes back in a new shape. CST makes the same move with its call for conversion of heart. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1888) speaks of “the permanent need for inner conversion” if social change is to serve the person.
It does not stop there. Suffering (dukkha) gets built into economic and political arrangements. Pope John Paul II gave the Catholic version of this insight its best-known name in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (30 December 1987): “structures of sin” (§36), patterns of injustice that outlast and exceed any one person’s wrongdoing. Both traditions reach the same conclusion. Compassion without analysis does not go far enough.
Non-violence is a way of seeing, not just a tactic. The first Buddhist precept is to refrain from taking life. Nhat Hanh’s teaching of “interbeing” grounds that precept in the fact that all beings depend on one another, so harming one harms the web. Catholicism’s record is more mixed. The Catechism still sets out conditions for legitimate defense (§2309). Recent popes, however, have moved steadily toward active non-violence. Francis devoted his World Day of Peace message of 1 January 2017 to “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace.” In Fratelli Tutti (3 October 2020, §258), he wrote that it is now very difficult to invoke the old just war criteria at all.
The community practices what it preaches. Engaged Buddhism asks the Sangha to live right speech, mutual care, and shared responsibility now, rather than waiting for a better society to arrive. CST calls this the common good: “the sum of those conditions of social life” that let groups and individuals reach their fulfillment (Gaudium et Spes §26). In both traditions, community is already a form of justice, not only a tool for getting there.
The convert at Nagpur
On 14 October 1956, in Nagpur, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar took the Buddhist vows. The scale is where accounts differ: about 400,000 to 500,000 people converted with him. Ambedkar had been born into a caste regarded as “untouchable.” He chaired the committee that drafted India’s constitution, and twenty years earlier, he wrote Annihilation of Caste. He chose Buddhism as a direct rejection of caste. He died less than two months later, on 6 December 1956. His movement, sometimes called Navayana, still counts millions of followers.
The pairing of Buddhism and social justice did not begin in the West. It has deep roots in a movement against a specific, named system of harm.
Others carried the same current elsewhere. A. T. Ariyaratne founded the Sarvodaya Shramadana village movement in Sri Lanka in 1958. Maha Ghosananda led peace walks through war-torn Cambodia in the 1990s. Robert and Anne Aitken helped found the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 1978. Sulak Sivaraksa of Thailand co-founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists in 1989.
The strongest objections
This convergence can be overstated, and fairness means saying where it breaks down.
The biggest difference concerns the self. CST rests on the dignity of the human person, created in God’s image. Buddhism teaches anatta, non-self: nothing permanent lies at the core of a person. Both traditions honor the person, but they give different accounts of what a person is. A comparison that hides this does neither tradition any favors.
Neither tradition has a clean record on violence, either. Brian Victoria’s Zen at War (Weatherhill, 1997) documents Japanese Zen leaders who blessed imperial militarism. In Myanmar, nationalist monks helped stir the hatred behind the 2017 campaign against the Rohingya. The Catholic record needs no rehearsal. Some scholars also argue that Engaged Buddhism is a modern reinterpretation shaped by Western social thought rather than the recovery of an ancient ideal.
These objections are serious, but they do not sink the comparison. They show that both traditions agree on something more important than their own innocence: good doctrine does not protect a community from structures that betray it. That is exactly the lesson the AI moment needs.
See, Judge, Act: the machine that feeds craving
AI can magnify those same structures if no one examines them. Joseph Cardijn built the See-Judge-Act method for young workers in Belgium. John XXIII endorsed it in Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961, §236). It is the most portable tool I know for turning conviction into a decision, and it offers a clear way to read the AI moment.
See. Much of the AI economy runs on attention, and attention runs on craving (tanha), which the Buddha named as the engine of suffering. A recommendation engine learns what a person wants to feel and supplies more of it. The work behind the systems is often hidden. In January 2023, Time reported that OpenAI, through the contractor Sama, used Kenyan workers paid less than 2 USD an hour to label violent and abusive text. The data centers that run these systems consume large amounts of energy and water. The minerals inside the chips often come from mines in the Global South. No single engineer intends any of this, which is exactly what a structure of sin looks like.
Judge. Both traditions offer measures. Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path includes right livelihood and right speech. Its teaching on interdependence has no concept of an externality, because what a system pushes out of sight still lands on someone. Catholic teaching measures technology against human dignity, the dignity of work, and the common good.
Pope Leo XIV, who took his name partly to echo Leo XIII’s response to the Industrial Revolution, signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. Its subtitle is “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It calls for AI to be “disarmed,” warns against concentrating power in private hands that “surpass” many governments (§5), and returns to “structures of sin” (§36). It also asks for “personal and communal conversion” alongside “structural reforms” (§22), a phrase any Engaged Buddhist could have written.
Defenders of AI have a strong case, and it deserves a full hearing. These tools already help detect disease, translate between languages, and open the world to people with disabilities. Many Buddhists would add that a tool has no poison of its own; the poison lives in the mind that uses it. That is true as far as it goes. But a system trained to maximize engagement is not neutral. Its design encodes a decision about which desires to feed. Both traditions hold that people answer for the structures they build, not only for their private intentions.
Act. Merton’s question applies here: what is happening to the human person? A tradition that treats the Sangha as a jewel will not accept a technology that dissolves community into isolated users. A tradition built on the common good will not accept one whose benefits flow to a few while its costs fall on the unseen.
An index card for the week
Close the door first. Before adopting an AI tool, notice what craving it serves.
Name the structure. Ask who labeled the data, who bears the energy costs, and who profits.
Judge by People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone, not by capability alone.
Refuse violence in code and in the street. Support efforts to keep AI out of weapons of war.
Build a Sangha around the machine. Decide together, in a parish, a workplace, or a school, how the tools will be used, rather than letting each person negotiate with the algorithm alone.
Questions to sit with
Where in your life or community do inner work and outer action run in separate lanes?
Ambedkar used Buddhism to dismantle a specific structure. Which specific harm could your own tradition help you dismantle?
Can you name a structure in your workplace, neighborhood, or feed that produces harm without anyone intending it?
For you, is non-violence a strategy or a conviction about how the world works? Does the difference matter when the weapon is software?
If community is already a form of justice, what would it take for your community to embody its values in the way it uses AI?
The door
In 1966, a monk taught a monastery how to close a door. Sixty years later, the doors in our pockets never close. They open onto a feed designed so that nobody walks away.
The practice is the same as it was at Gethsemani. Close the door gently, then walk out together to change what lies on the other side.
That is where the work begins.
And that is Wisdom Speaking.
Sources
Jim and Nancy Forest, “Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh”
Thomas Merton, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” via Buddhistdoor Global
Daniel J. Adams, “Thich Nhat Hanh Then and Now,” The Merton Seasonal
Deekshabhoomi, History
Dhammachakra Pravartan Din
Billy Perrigo, “OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour,” Time
Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
USCCB, “In first encyclical, Pope Leo urges world to ‘disarm’ AI”
Magnifica Humanitas, Wikipedia
Church documents: Gaudium et Spes §§24, 26; Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §36; Catechism of the Catholic Church§§1888, 2309; Fratelli Tutti §258; Mater et Magistra §236
Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.
The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.
So when I write essays, keynotes, and articles, I run the result through Grammarly. It fixes spelling and punctuation. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.