I recently came across an essay by the Buddhist teacher Jiqun: Let AI Be AI and Let Us Be Ourselves.
At first, the title sounds reassuring. Amid all the anxiety about AI, it seems to offer a clean arrangement: machines do their work, people do theirs, and neither intrudes on the other.
But reading it left me uneasy, both about the conclusion and about the route taken to reach it. I respect the teacher's practice and commitment. Respect need not put an argument beyond question.
“The Finger and the Moon” explored a familiar image. A teacher points at the moon. What should the student look at? The moon, not the finger. Yet attention can settle on the finger's shape, angle, and texture, until the student forgets to look up.
Language is the finger; truth is the moon. In this metaphor, a teaching is a guide, including the essay at issue here. A finger can point well or badly. It can help someone see, or obstruct their view.
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that a respected teacher said it. Where does this finger actually point?
The argument↗
In the reprint available for comparison, the discussion moves from the value of human activity to competition with AI and a possible crisis of meaning. It proposes inward reflection and Eastern wisdom as a response. It also recognizes that less time at work could leave more room for cultivation and spiritual life.
What troubles me is the intervening step: it predicts anxiety, depression, and even mental disturbance for someone who rejects an aimless life, lacks faith, and cannot find meaning. An invitation to attend to inner life has become a nearly certain psychological prognosis.
It feels like being led to a cliff and then handed a rope. But that response does not establish an intention to frighten. Recommending one path does not, by itself, explicitly rule out every other.
The questions are more precise: how deep is the cliff? Why should this rope be enough? Are there other paths?
Does human value really rest on “doing things”?↗
Bees build nests; ants cooperate. If doing things simply means completing activities, it cannot by itself distinguish humans from other animals. If it means deliberate practices with social significance, that more specific meaning needs to be explained.
Even without settling what is unique to our species, a more important question remains: why should being surpassed in an ability diminish a person's worth?
Questioning meaning, creating despite knowing that things perish, being moved to tears by music, loving and knowing that one loves: these need not all be uniquely human capacities to matter. Nor must they win a competition to deserve a place in a life.
A comparison of task performance cannot, by itself, settle the worth of a life.
The essay is not denying human worth; it is trying to preserve it. But if the crisis begins with AI performing tasks better, a step is still missing. Why should losing an advantage threaten the meaning of existence? Losing work can involve real losses of income and identity. That is different from a life losing its value.
Are giving up and breaking down the only alternatives?↗
The passage connects an unwillingness to drift, an absence of faith, and a lack of meaning to a frightening outcome. Those conditions do not themselves establish a clinical disorder. An essay offering reassurance cannot use that inference to make religious faith a necessary protection against psychological collapse.
Are the ways of finding meaning really so few?
Meaning can lie in making something. A clumsy poem or a scribble need not outperform AI. The process matters because it passes through a particular life.
Meaning can lie in experience. Flying a kite needs no justification. Dancing need not prove anything. A mountain can be climbed without an audience.
Meaning can lie in curiosity. There is so much world, and so much still to ask. Being alive can itself be an adventure.
These are not prescriptions that guarantee happiness, nor must they exclude faith. They make a smaller point: inward reflection can open a door without turning every other path into a wall.
Does the contrast between East and West hold?↗
The essay contrasts Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist cultivation with an emphasis on ability, technology, and status under Western influence. Instrumental thinking and the pressure of social roles are worth criticizing. They cannot, however, be neatly distributed between two civilizations.
Is inward inquiry absent from Western traditions? In Plato's Apology, 38a, Socrates places the examination of life and virtue at the center of his practice. Section 1 of Epictetus's Enchiridion begins by distinguishing what is within our control from what is not. Neither stands for the whole “West.” They are enough to show that self-examination is not the exclusive property of one part of the world.
Conversely, does living within an Eastern tradition prevent someone from becoming trapped by rank, identity, or social expectation? Assigning the illness to one side and reserving the remedy for the other risks pointing toward one's own monastery while overlooking thought beyond its gates.
Can humans and AI really keep to separate worlds?↗
Return to the title.
If it means delegating some work to tools without treating efficiency as the whole of human life, there is something valuable in it. The essay's own references to using AI well and returning to spiritual life should not be read as a ban on every form of collaboration.
But if it means that machines stay over there and people stay over here, so that turning inward removes the need to confront technological change, the boundary is drawn too easily.
In many settings, recommendation systems help determine what appears next, search tools organize answers, and generative tools take part in making images and text. People are not always standing opposite AI. They are already acting through it.
This does not make every boundary meaningless. Privacy, responsibility, and the judgments that should not be delegated require careful limits. Those limits must respond to particular tasks and the people who bear the consequences. A slogan cannot draw them on its own.
Collaboration can make it easier to begin a short film, try a prototype, or approach an unfamiliar field. But knowing how to use AI offers no guarantee against replacement. Time saved may be consumed by checking, reworking, and new dependencies. Whether a capacity is amplified depends on the task, the capacity, and who judges the result.
Standing on AI's shoulders still requires watching where one puts one's feet.
For me, the self is not only a noun to be preserved, but also a verb still unfolding. It can be recognized through inward reflection and formed through encounters with the world, including encounters with AI. That is one way of understanding a self, not a demand that everyone adopt AI to live seriously.
Beyond the finger↗
I understand the concern the essay addresses: technology is changing how things are done, and people need somewhere to ground their worth.
The concern can be sincere while the argument remains too narrow. Conversely, identifying a gap in the argument does not show that inward practice has no value.
A finger is useful. It can offer a direction, somewhere to look. But the finger is not the moon. Looking up remains one's own task.
The questions of the AI age include both drawing necessary boundaries and living with these tools within them. How can collaboration preserve agency? How can a tool be used without letting it define its user? Beyond efficiency, what place remains for beauty, love, and things that need not be useful?
Those questions will not disappear because a slogan sounds reassuring.