The Digital Buddhism: Modern Decisive Moment in Sri Lankan Popular Buddhism

Culture is a rich and comprehensive term that is dynamic and always developing rather than stagnant. Religion, a fundamental component of culture, includes beliefs, rituals, values, and a higher power that control human conduct and society’s purpose. This paper attends to interpret the transformation of Sri Lankan Buddhism through the impact of digitalization. The study’s fundamental research question is how to create a complete Digital Buddhism manifestation from popular Buddhism in a cultural anthropological background, and the main research objective is to provide a new definition for the modern popular Buddhism in Sri Lanka, impacted by digitization. As a qualitative exploratory research based on qualitative data, the interpretive paradigm was utilized by the researchers with a phenomenological research design. As a theoretical foundation, the first principle of digital anthropology (dialectic nature of digital culture) proposed by Daniel Miller and Heather Horst in 2012 was applied. Key cases from digital platforms pertaining to digital Vesak celebrations were purposively selected and critically analyzed to achieve the research objectives. According to the key findings of this research we concluded that the modern popular Buddhism of Sri Lanka promptly changing due to the impact of digitization and the existing cultural change can be examined through the principles of digital anthropology. As a conclusion of the research, we identified the prominent academic gap in contributing new knowledge in modern Sri Lankan Buddhism. This study paves the path for numerous new research subjects in humanities, social sciences, and etc.