Guru Logics after Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

AI-mediated forms of guruship are proliferating across South Asia and beyond, yet they have scarcely begun to receive sustained scholarly attention. This article takes their emergence as an occasion to revisit the conceptual vocabulary through which guruship has been understood, asking what becomes of ‘guru logics’ after artificial intelligence. AI gurus are not merely technological curiosities; nor are they straightforward successors to human gurus. This article treats them as analytic provocations through which longstanding conceptions of guruship can themselves be reconsidered. Guru studies had already been grappling with many of the problems that AI now makes newly conspicuous: imitation and performativity; presence in absence; distributed and non-human personhood; the mediation of charisma; embodiment and its displacement; succession and charismatic continuity. AI therefore strains an existing conceptual repertoire while also showing what it can still do. The article develops the notions of ‘code-born syncretism’ and ‘ambient guruship’, alongside ‘Transhuman Guru Worlding’ and ‘guru cosmoi’, to explore what happens when the guru becomes generative and responsive. ‘Doctrine by interface’ further draws attention to the ways theological possibilities are shaped through the design and affordances of AI systems, while ‘simulation as method’ considers what experimental encounters with such systems might contribute to the ethnographic study of guruship. These concepts are developed through discussions of devotional recombination, embodiment, programmed continuity of the guru after death or exile, and the political economies within which AI gurus are made and encountered. The article takes up histories in which the guru has already exceeded the bounded human body, becoming distributed through multiple material and mediated forms, and examines how generative interaction and recombination rework these inherited guru logics, while letting these forms scale and personalise in novel ways. What emerges is therefore neither unprecedented rupture nor straightforward continuity, but a recursive transformation of existing forms of guruship through computational mediation. The article offers a conceptual framework and analytic repertoire for an emerging field of ethnographic inquiry rather than a completed ethnography of AI guruship. Its larger proposition is that AI gurus matter for more than what they might tell us about religion in an age of artificial intelligence. They also provide an unusual vantage point from which to return to the conceptual problems that have long animated guru studies and to ask what artificial intelligence allows us to see differently about guruship itself.