The Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth
The Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (MAPLE) is a Buddhist monastery in Lowell, Vermont founded in 2011. It aims to develop a new sect of Buddhism suited to the digital age in order to address the global technological crisis.
What is the global technological crisis?
Humanity is using technology to destroy the biosphere. This has been accelerating over the past millenia, and modern technology is accelerating it even more. For more information on this crisis, see Civilization Research Institute's Reality Check report from 2025.
Is the destruction of the biosphere really happening? Is it really human-caused? Is it really a bad thing?
It is really happening, it is really human-caused, and it is really a bad thing. The desire to claim otherwise comes from avoiding the discomfort of grief and shame.
Why an ideological solution?
History moves by a feedback loop of ideologies and material structures. Marxists and those influenced by them rightly emphasize the importance of material structures as a corrective to the ungroundedness of Hegelianism and Great-Man History, but it should be admitted that in this feedback loop, the node of greater leverage for making change is ideology, because that is where choice is located.
Why should this ideology be a new sect of Buddhism?
Buddhism is the stem cell
of ideology: it can become
just the ideology needed for a given circumstance. Learn more
on the Buddhism page.
This is quite an ambitious mission. Do you really think it will work?
More specifically, the Monastic Academy avoids the following pitfalls of many approaches to the global technological crisis that I have seen:
- Mere critique of the status quo, without also putting forward a positive vision
- All talk, without taking practical steps
- Approaches that even if 100% successful would only solve a smaller problem than the global crisis
The Monastic Academy is the only organization I have
encountered with an approach to the global technological crisis
the meets the bar of being worth a shot
— that
doesn't mean it is likely to succeed.
Are you at the Monastic Academy to achieve its mission, or just to receive monastic training?
Both. Monastic training is very transferable, so even if this organization fails at its mission, I will still be able to use the training to continue working on the global technological crisis. Furthermore, the Monastic Academy's focus on how to align technology towards global well-being aligns very well with my own mission to align mathematics in this way.
I Googled the Monastic Academy and found allegations of harm. Why are you at such a place?
Unfortunately, some of our community members have attacked us online with false allegations. Due to a perverse culture of information, people tend to take these allegations seriously even with no prior relationship of trust with their author or awareness of the larger context.