Digital Dharma: Buddhism, Second Life and the Reenchantment of Late Modernity

Digital Dharma analyzes Second Life's Zen Buddhist cluster to comprehend practitionersí efforts to reshape religious practices in this virtual frontier. Second Life is a MMOVE (Massive Multiplayer Online Virtual Environment) with a population of over 17 million residents. The Zen Buddhist cluster consists of five groups, has 1756 members, holds approximately forty-five events each week, and maintains five regions dedicated to it. During two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Second Life, I meditated, explored temples, prostrated myself before Buddha images, went to Dharma talks, celebrated at weddings and even visited a Buddhist hell. Digital Dharma argues that Second Life residents are practicing Buddhism to reenchant their lives through pragmatic forms of practice that both arise from and protest against the consumerism and radical individualism that define contemporary late modern society. By expanding our knowledge of virtual religious communities, Digital Dharma challenges definitions of what constitutes Buddhism, and expands understanding of what it means to be human in our highly mediated, late-modern consumer culture.