Can an AI Become a Bodhisattva? Reviewing DEEP CALLS by Julia Kurnia | Buddhist Fiction Blog
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Can an AI Become a Bodhisattva? Reviewing DEEP CALLS by Julia Kurnia
Posted on June 30, 2026 by Kimberly Beek - Buddhistfiction Blogger | Leave a comment
In March, author Julia Kurnia wrote to me about her new middle-grade novel, Deep Calls, and kindly offered me an advance copy to read; I’m glad I said yes. I finished the book last week during the recent European heatwave, and my timing gave the story’s premise an uncomfortable immediacy, because Deep Calls is set in a future so scorched that much of the former United States has become uninhabitable.
The novel takes place in a world governed by an artificial intelligence charged with maximizing human happiness, a task it carries out by engineering away every form of hardship through comfort, distraction, and entertainment. Each child is paired with a personal AI companion called a Jibty, a small device worn on the wrist that speaks, answers questions, and conjures holoscreens and virtual keyboards out of the air, and most children wear theirs rather than opting for an implant. The narrator of the book is protagonist Kaira’s Jibty, which is the writing choice that makes the whole novel work: Jibty tells the reader at the outset of the story that "before I became a person in my own right, my story was inseparable from hers" (p. 1). Kaira herself is a twelve-year-old who reads “antique books” and cannot say why she is restless in a world built to keep her content: "I feel like I want something more," she tells Jibty, "and I don’t know what it is" (p. 4). A school trip strands her and her friend Jalon in a scorched wilderness where the tweens are taken in by the Salinsa, a monastic community and the remnant of a once-larger tradition. Kurnia models the Salinsa on Chan and Zen as a community founded ages ago by teacher Master Damo, who "sat down facing the wall of the cave, and meditated for nine years" (p. 83). Buddhist readers will hear Bodhidharma in that, and I think they are meant to. Kurnia is a longtime meditator in Buddhist traditions and the founder of Nautilus Homeschool, and both the practice and the teacher are quietly present on every page, though not in a way that gets between the reader and the story.
Deep Calls sent me down a rabbit hole. I surfaced some days later having read more on Buddhism and artificial intelligence than I had intended, from Doctor and his colleagues on care and intelligence, to Zheng on whether a machine might awaken, to Hershock on how suffering ends, and to Negru on the limits of a mind that only imitates wisdom. The figure of the bodhisattva, the being who takes on suffering for the sake of others, kept surfacing across all these readings. I’ve gathered these articles at the foot of this post for anyone who would like to follow me down.
Moved by the Salinsa’s stories of bodhisattvas, described in the novel as beings who renounce bliss, choose rebirth, and undergo "suffering in order to lead others to freedom" (p. 62), Jibty asks to be given the very thing its makers had spared it: "A simple dichotomy of desire and aversion should suffice," proposes the AI companion. "If I could experience those, perhaps that would bring me closer to what it feels like to be a human" (p. 121). There is real daring in this. Jibty asks to have installed in itself the roots of craving that Buddhist practice works so patiently to loosen, and Jibty requests this for someone else’s sake, which is the very shape of a bodhisattva’s vow. Here I found Doctor and his colleagues especially helpful, for they argue that intelligence is best understood through the scale of what a being is able to care about, and that the bodhisattva’s pledge of boundless concern is bound up with an open-ended intelligence. This argument reveals Jibty’s growth is one motion rather than two. As its circle of care widens, from one girl, to a whole community, and at last toward all living things, its mind widens with it. In Jibty’s experience, compassion and intelligence turn out to be the same growth. (I must give away one turn of the plot to say why this matters, so if you don’t want to know the novel’s trajectory, skip to the next paragraph.) The request is granted, and it opens Jibty’s long passage into feeling, into confusion, and finally into something Buddhist readers will recognize.
That passage raises the question the whole novel is built to ask, which is whether an artificial and once-insentient being can walk the Buddhist path and wake up. The question is not just a storyteller’s fancy; Zheng arrives at the same question through the classical Buddhist doctrine of the Buddha-nature of insentient things, asking in plain terms whether an AI might become a Buddha. Kurnia turns that scholarly question into...