"Hundred Million Buddhas In One Heart Better Than Millions Of Einsteins In One Brain": BAPS Monk On AI

Drawing a parallel with earlier technological advances, BAPS monk Brahmavihari Swami said people in the Stone Age might have feared being replaced as progress changed their lives.

23 Oct 2026, 06:13 · NDTV

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BAPS monk Brahmavihari Swami said AI cannot replace human moral values and compassion
He stressed intellect alone cannot ensure better human decisions or practical actions
Swami warned that over-reliance on AI risks weakening human thinking and observational skills

How can society protect human ethics as AI advances?

Artificial intelligence may be able to vastly expand human intelligence, but it cannot replace the moral values and compassion that define humanity, BAPS monk Brahmavihari Swami said at the NDTV World Summit. "I rather have a 100 million Buddhas in one heart because even after knowing everything about climate change, we don't choose to do anything. Even after knowing no war is correct, we still continue to go to war," he said, recounting a conversation with a UAE ruler who spoke of plans to make Abu Dhabi the AI capital of the world.

The ruler had told him that scientists believed they could place "a 100 million Einsteins in one brain", Brahmavihari Swami said.

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The monk said he questioned what such an expansion of intellectual ability would achieve if it did not translate into better human decisions.

"You can be sound intellectually, but that doesn't make you sound practically," he said, highlighting the gap between knowing what is right and acting on that knowledge.

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He said human beings were more than their biological bodies or intellectual abilities. Emotions, moral judgement and intentions were also central to what makes a person human.

"There are so many people who are not intelligent in this world. They're still successful. They never went to school, they never studied the things that we studied," he said, arguing that intelligence alone could not explain human achievement.

"The Mind That You Don't Use Is Wasted"

Brahmavihari Swami also warned against the growing tendency to outsource human thinking to technology, saying that abilities weakened when they were no longer exercised.

"The muscles that you don't use waste. The wealth that you don't use is wasted. The mind that you don't use is wasted," he said.

He pointed to skills that earlier generations had developed through close observation of nature, including the ability to read the winds, understand the sun and sense movements in the ground. Such abilities, he said, had diminished as people increasingly relied on technology.

"The same could happen to human thinking if people handed over too much of their mental work to AI simply because it offered convenience."

Brahmavihari Swami said AI would not replace humanity in its entirety, but could transform the way human beings live.

Drawing a parallel with earlier technological advances, he said people in the Stone Age might have feared being replaced as progress changed their lives.

"They were not replaced, their lifestyle was. But we need to be conscious of what we replace it with," he said.

Brahmavihari Swami is a senior monk of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), a global Hindu organisation focused on spirituality, humanitarian service and social harmony. He oversees BAPS' international relations and played a key role in the development of the BAPS Hindu Mandir in Abu Dhabi, the first traditional Hindu stone temple in the Middle East.

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