Bodhidharma's Social Media Feed
Last Updated: 2026-03-11 00:00:00 -0500
I’ve been toying for a few months now with the idea of a pithy aphorism, something along the lines of “the curse of sentience is its desire to be self-indulgent”. It’s not a commentary on craving chocolate, but this idea that somehow, in all our self-aware brilliance, there is a compulsive need to know about everything going on, to “monitor the situation”. Sometimes, this drive is taken so seriously that we latch to it as though it were potentially a moral failing not to keep up with goings-on. There’s a whole subset of modern Buddhist discourse concerned with Engagement; keeping an eye on the state of the world and attempting to nudge it in the ways best suited.
To be clear, I don’t think that these are inherently bad ideas; I’m not here to argue that the moral reality is the opposite or that there’s no moral character at all to how much attention we pay to the outside world. I’m not sure there would be much interest in such a document anyway. I’m certainly not here to promote or take down the idea of Engaged Buddhism. I merely want to answer a question I’ve been asking myself slowly for a couple of years now, as I migrated to the Fediverse and started thinking hard about what my goals for the use of Social Media actually are. That question being:
If Bodhidharma had a social media feed, what would that look like?
The short pithy answer is that Bodhidharma’s doctrinal decision to teach zazen as an exercise in staring at blank cave walls probably means he wouldn’t have a social media feed at all. For many of us that’s probably the “best option”. If you have no need of social media I really wouldn’t advise anyone to ever actually use it.
But I’m not sure that anyone exists who has no need for social media. The internet has become a solid contender for a third place for all mankind. I for one, having had social media, would be loathe to give it up even if the only use I had for it was socializing with like-minded peers, and that’s not the only valid use. Creatives of all kinds ply their trades in large part due to being able to promote their work effectively on social media. There’s good reasons to use it.
There’s also bad reasons to use it. Social media platforms which are supported largely by the ad revenue they can generate have a financial incentive to keep you engaged with their platform, scrolling down your infinitely-scrolling feed, so that they can interweave ads into the content. And of course, the more ads they add the more you’ll get annoyed with them, so they have to make sure the feed they’re showing you is so engaging that you’ll actually feel the need to continue scrolling in spite of their advertisements. For this reason, feeds that are algorithmically crafted tend to farm strong emotions - the easiest of which to capitalize on is outrage.
And boy, are we in a time of plentiful reasons to be outraged.
So, whether you’re just a cartoon dog on the internet or a writer doing their best to build a following and engage with their community, you’ve got a few good reasons to be on the social media.
What you don’t really need - what I would certainly advise against - is confusing Social Media with a news source. That isn’t to say that politics should never be discussed and that you shouldn’t have a broad swathe of people you’re paying attention to who might, depending on where they live and who they are, be Going Through It™. What it does mean is that there’s nothing wrong with keeping your social media feeds as pleasant as can be managed.
News Sources aren’t going to be posting their nuanced positions on character-limited ActivityPub and Bluesky feeds. Your favourite Radio Hams aren’t going to have the latest report from Kerson (and even if they did, you don’t likely need the latest report from Kerson). If you want your X feed to be nothing but accounts that automatically post photos of birds native to your special interest continents, that’s not the worst use of bandwidth of all time.
Zazen is Zazen, and Samu is Samu.
It might surprise people to learn that the majority of a Zen monastic’s time is not spent in seated meditation staring at the wall (outside of things like osseshin). Running such a facility takes an enormous amount of work. There’s floors to clean, fields to plow, rounds to make, laundry to fold, and all those things. Such institutions recognize work as a second occasion for meditation - Samu. It’s not the same as Zazen, but it is. It’s an extension built upon it, a recognition that “yes, yes, this is all very well and good on the cushion, but if you can’t bring it into the waking world, what’s the point?”
Your engagement with the world can lso be like this. You are under exactly no obligation to have your social media feeds be the entirety of your day, and even if you can’t help but spend all day with a mastodon tab open or sitting in a matrix chat, you don’t have to let your every conversation be about The Situation™. There’s an old tumblr saw about the internet being a place you visited, because you had to travel to Desktop to get onto a Browser and go to The Internet. I like this thought very much. I think it is wonderfully extended if you remember that the news used to be a thing you got by “Reading the Newspaper”. It was a thing you got by going to a place to get the news and sitting down consciously and engaging with the news. Sure, news conversations would arise at work or at the pub or in the barber shop, but you made a decision to engage with the goings-on.
And I think creating that space for yourself, that distinction between “I am checking in with the situation” and “I am catching up with my friends”, that’s so important to re-create in how we engage with media.
I don’t have a good system for creating that division yet, but I think, looping back to our original question, that it would be something like Bodhidharma’s Social Media Feed. This is a man who cut off his own arm to demonstrate a point to a student. I can’t really picture the red-bearded foreigner exposing himself to a constant stream of the happenings at court.
If you are going to chop wood, chop wood. If you are going to carry water, carry water. If you are going to catch up with friends, catch up with friends. If you’re going to look at films of people’s pet rabbits, do that. If you need to read the news, do that, on purpose.
After all, a huge part of zen is learning how to resist the urge to control the uncontrollable by accepting that it’s out of your control. Unplugging from the constant news and turning it into the news you fetch when you need to know about it is a first step toward realizing that most of this stuff is beyond your control anyway.
Whether or not it’s worth witnessing in spite of how you can’t control it is an exercise that needs to be left to you, because at the end of the day, we each only have our own perspective to work from, however hard we try to incorporate the perspectives of others. Though on that, I will add this: when the cabin is compromised and the air pressure is gone, you have to put your own breathing mask on first before you can help anyone else. The Bodhisattva who is staying behind in Samsara until all sentient beings are liberated needs their own liberation before they can do their work.
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