Buddha Bot is a conversational AI developed jointly by Terraverse and Kyoto University that has learned from Buddhist scripture and responds to a wide range of personal concerns from a Buddhist perspective. Since its announcement in March 2021, it has been covered by media in roughly 20 countries around the world, and in 2025 it was formally adopted by the Buddhist community of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

Born from the idea of "what if we could talk with the Buddha," this project is a one-of-a-kind attempt to fuse 2,500-year-old Buddhist thought with cutting-edge AI technology.

This article explains how the Buddha Bot we developed works and the story behind its creation — from its evolution into "Buddha Bot Plus," powered by generative AI, to our countermeasures against fabricated answers (hallucination), to its practical use in Bhutan.

What Is Buddha Bot?

Buddha Bot is a Buddhist dialogue AI jointly developed by a research team including Terraverse CEO Toshikazu Furuya and Professor Seiji Kumagai of Kyoto University's Institute for the Future of Human Society. When a user types a concern into a smartphone or similar device, the AI returns an answer grounded in Buddhist scripture.

Professor Kumagai, our co-developer, is a scholar of Indian, Tibetan, and Bhutanese Buddhism who also serves as the head priest of a temple. Furuya, our CEO, is an engineer specializing in data analysis and natural language processing who has founded multiple AI startups. This project became possible because experts from two very different fields — Buddhist studies and AI technology — joined forces.

How the Project Began

The project traces back to around 2014, when Professor Kumagai was approached by Kojin Higashifushimi, chief steward of the Shorenin Monzeki temple of the Tendai sect, who asked whether something could be done about Japanese Buddhism's declining influence. With some estimates suggesting that 30% of temples could disappear by 2040, people were searching for ways to reconnect Buddhism with the general public.

The idea of using an AI chatbot to bridge Buddhism and ordinary people grew out of a simple observation: even when people visit a temple to hear Buddhist teachings, they rarely get the chance to speak directly with a monk, making it hard to receive Buddhist guidance for everyday concerns.

Initially, Professor Kumagai wanted the AI to recreate the Buddha's intelligence itself. Furuya, as the engineer, judged that this was beyond what current technology could achieve, and instead shaped the idea into something more realistic: a chatbot that reproduces the Buddha's teachings. This project would later lead to the founding of Terraverse in 2022.

How Buddha Bot Works

The original Buddha Bot, announced in March 2021, was built using "Sentence BERT," a natural language processing algorithm developed by Google.

Trained on the Oldest Buddhist Scripture

Buddha Bot was trained on the Sutta Nipata, believed to be the oldest surviving Buddhist scripture. By training the model on this text in a Q&A format, the team built a system that could present relevant passages of scripture in response to a user's questions.

Sentence BERT excels at calculating the semantic similarity between sentences. Buddha Bot calculates the similarity between the text of a user's concern and the passages contained in the scripture, then returns the most relevant passage as its answer.

The Strengths and Limits of the Original Buddha Bot

The original Buddha Bot was a "non-generative" AI. In other words, rather than generating new sentences, it simply presented the wording already written in the scripture, unchanged.

This approach had the advantage of clear, highly reliable sourcing. Every answer was an actual passage from an existing scripture, so there was no risk of the AI inventing content that diverged from the facts.

On the other hand, because it presented the scripture's classical wording as-is, it was often difficult for users to get an answer that clearly addressed what they actually wanted to know. This limitation became the motivation for developing "Buddha Bot Plus."

The Evolution to Buddha Bot Plus

In July 2023, the research team unveiled "Buddha Bot Plus," a next-generation chatbot built on the generative AI ChatGPT (GPT-4 at the time).

Adding "Interpretation" to the Scripture's Wording

The biggest advance in Buddha Bot Plus was that, beyond simply presenting the scripture's wording, the generative AI could now produce its own interpretation and supplementary explanation of that text.

Specifically, in response to a user's question, the system first presents the relevant passage of Buddhist scripture, and then ChatGPT generates and displays an interpretation and additional explanation tailored to the user's question. Answers that had been hard to understand from the classical scripture text alone could now be supplemented with modern, accessible language.

Countermeasures Against Hallucination

Using generative AI carries the risk of "hallucination" — plausibly generating information that isn't actually grounded in fact. For a system dealing with Buddhist teachings, this was an issue that demanded especially careful handling.

Our countermeasure was to display the section that shows the scripture's wording exactly as written separately from the section generated by ChatGPT as interpretation. This lets users distinguish which parts are the actual text of an existing scripture and which parts are AI-generated interpretation.

This "separation of source and interpretation" is an important design principle for using generative AI in domains where reliability matters. It is also reflected in the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems we currently provide for businesses. That said, as we ourselves recognize, some degree of knowledge and judgment on the user's part is still ultimately required.

Buddha Bot's Expansion and Reach

The Buddha Bot project has not stayed limited to a single chatbot; it has expanded in various directions.

Expansion into AR and the Metaverse

In September 2022, we developed the AR (augmented reality) technology "Tera Platform AR Ver1.0." This made it possible to summon an avatar of the Buddha into physical space, enabling communication through sight and sound in addition to text-based dialogue. Our company name, "Terraverse," means "a trillion (tera) universes (verse)," and reflects our aim of building a cyber-physical system — one that fuses traditional wisdom and technology, and merges the virtual and physical worlds.

Diversifying Buddhist Sage Bots

In September 2023, we developed "Shinran Bot," modeled on Shinran, the founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, and "Seshin Bot," modeled on Vasubandhu, who established the Yogacara ("Consciousness-Only") philosophy within Mahayana Buddhism. This completed a set of dialogue AIs representing the major transmitters of Buddhism: the "Buddha" who originated the teachings, the "bodhisattvas" who analyzed them philosophically, and the "eminent monks" who spread them to different regions.

The Humanoid Robot "Buddharoid"

In February 2026, we unveiled "Buddharoid," a Buddhist AI humanoid robot equipped with Buddha Bot. By embedding Buddha Bot into a humanoid robot manufactured by Unitree Robotics, we gave it a physical presence that chat and AR alone couldn't provide, enabling face-to-face interaction with a genuine bodily presence.

Traditional Wisdom Technology and Religious and Philosophical Diversity

In recent years, the importance of diversity has been widely emphasized — and this holds true for religion and thought as well. Guided by Professor Kumagai's philosophy, we place great importance on diversity as we pursue our development work. When we first developed Buddha Bot, feedback suggesting that we should not confine ourselves to the thought of the Buddha alone but embrace a wider range of ideas led us to develop Shinran Bot and Seshin Bot. In December 2025, we developed a Christian AI, the "Protestant Catechism Bot," taking our first step toward religious diversity. We are also advancing the development of AI based on philosophy and the thought of business leaders, engaging with a wide variety of religions and ideas. We use the term "traditional wisdom" to refer to the knowledge humanity has built up over time — philosophy and religion, as well as secular and tacit knowledge. What began with Buddha Bot has grown into the development of traditional wisdom technology encompassing religious and philosophical diversity.

Practical Use in the Kingdom of Bhutan

Buddha Bot hasn't remained confined to the research stage — it has begun to be put to practical use within the Buddhist community itself.

When Buddha Bot was presented at the 4th International Conference on Esoteric Buddhist Studies in 2022, the Central Monastic Body of Bhutan showed strong interest. Then in 2025, following a formal request from Bhutan's Central Monastic Body, the English-language version of Buddha Bot Plus was introduced to the country's Buddhist community.

According to press reports, around 450 monks in Bhutan are trialing Buddha Bot. Officials from the Central Monastic Body reportedly describe it as "sensible and ideal," and have expressed intent to expand the number of users. Buddhist communities in Sri Lanka and Thailand have also reportedly expressed interest in adopting it, and Buddha Bot continues to gain international reach.

Our Ethical Stance

From the standpoint of religious and ideological diversity, we are pursuing efforts to bring AI together with a wide range of religions and schools of thought, including Buddhism.

That said, blending religion and AI is an undertaking that demands careful consideration. When Buddha Bot was first developed, some voices within Japan expressed discomfort with using AI for religious purposes. Since then, as generative AI has become more widespread, positive opinions have grown — but we believe the risks of generative AI still call for the utmost caution.

As for adapting this technology to religions other than Buddhism, we have made clear our stance of proceeding only with the greatest of care. The Christian AI we developed in 2025 was likewise built only after careful and repeated discussions with specialists in Christian theology. Because religion can, in some cases, be a source of conflict, we believe it is essential to respect the views of scholars within each tradition, and that applying this approach carelessly to other religions should be avoided. Since we are working with traditional wisdom, our consistent belief is that we must never lose respect for the culture and faith behind it.

We also reject the position that generative AI or humanoid robots can replace human beings. Buddha Bot is an AI trained on data from Buddhist scriptures, and Buddharoid is likewise a robot trained on data from Buddhist scriptures and physical movements; neither is a living Buddha nor a living monk. We therefore take the position that these systems cannot themselves engage in religious practice. In our view, the agent is always the human being. When humans, as the agents, make use of such AI, XR, and robots, forms of thinking and activity that were once impossible or difficult become possible. That, we believe, is where the significance of traditional wisdom technology lies.

In recent years, the practice of training generative AI on data without permission has drawn criticism. From the very beginning of our development work, we have opposed the unauthorized use of copyrighted texts as training data. And even for texts free of copyright, we believe we should respect each author's views on the use of their works for generative AI training, and treat every written work and creation with respect.

Conclusion

Buddha Bot is a Buddhist dialogue AI jointly developed by Terraverse and Kyoto University, trained on the Sutta Nipata — the oldest surviving Buddhist scripture — to answer people's concerns. We evolved it from the original, non-generative AI of 2021 into Buddha Bot Plus, a generative AI powered by ChatGPT, and as a hallucination countermeasure, we designed it to display the scripture's wording and the AI's interpretation separately.

This project can be seen as an early, concrete practice — through the medium of scripture — of the broader challenge of using AI to carry forward bodies of knowledge that resist easy articulation. The design principle of combining scriptural text with generative AI interpretation is one that can also be applied to technology for handling corporate knowledge and an individual's philosophy or personality with AI.

At Terraverse, we apply the "technology for reproducing philosophy and personality with AI" that we cultivated through developing Buddha Bot to build CEO bots that carry forward an executive's management philosophy, as well as conversational and personal AI development that puts corporate knowledge to work. If you're interested in using AI to carry forward human wisdom and philosophy, please feel free to contact us.