Article Sacred realms in virtual worlds: The making of Buddhist spaces in Second Life 2019, Vol. 7(2) 147–167 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/2050303219848039 journals.sagepub.com/home/crr Jessica M Falcone Kansas State University, USA Abstract Second Life, a virtual world, has been heralded by some scholars and transhumanists as a sacred, “heavenly” space. Through detailed ethnographic work on Buddhist religious spaces in Second Life, this article argues instead that just as in actual life, virtual life is comprised of both sacred and profane spaces. By demonstrating different types of Buddhist spaces, communitypractice-oriented and individual-practice-oriented, and the meaning that these spaces hold for practitioners, readers come to understand that the sacrality in Second Life is just as contingent and constructed as it is in the actual, physical world. Keywords Buddhism, digital religion, sacred space In a small college town in the Midwestern United States, on a bright, warm fall afternoon in 2010, I was reading on my balcony outside in the sunshine when a quick, panicked check of my watch revealed that I was cutting it close; it was time to go do fieldwork.1 I hastily went inside and logged into Second Life (SL), a virtual world, so that I would be on time for a scheduled community meditation session. My personalized avatar—my onscreen representation— manifested at the Buddha Center’s welcome area, and as I had done many dozens of times before, I directed her to teleport to the main altar room. In actual life (AL),2 I settled into my chair and used my computer mouse to move my cursor atop Corresponding author: Jessica M Falcone, Kansas State University, 204 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS 66502, USA. Email: jfalcone@ksu.edu 148 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) a digital orb that was floating on-screen in the very back of the altar room; when I clicked the glowing orb it ran an animation that enabled my avatar to prostrate three times to a large Buddha statue in the meditation space. There were several other avatars in the room already, all sitting on cushions arrayed in a semi-circle around the central statue. With another right-click, I claimed an empty cushion in a relatively empty area of the room.3 My avatar was now sitting cross-legged, back straight, facing the statue. I glanced at my computer’s clock. The facilitator was still absent, which was unusual. After the scheduled start time came and went, Sign Cymbal arrived and settled onto a raised cushion at the front of the room. Looking at us fanned out in front of her, she typed in the chat box that she would be a stand-in for the regularly scheduled guide. Sign Cymbal then sent the group this message in our chat boxes: We will begin silent meditation with 3 rings of the bell and end it at 11:30 with 1 ring. Please center yourself by becoming aware of your breathing. . . At the end of every out breath there is a tiny space from where silence speaks to your heart – if you listen mindfully. Followed immediately by: “Be the silence that is listening. Be the space that is awake and aware. May the sound of the bell be your guide into silence. _/\_” This last set of characters was a text-based emoticon meant to evoke hands pressed together in prayer. Halfway through the meditation session, our avatars sat in total silence; there was no voice plug-in activated, nor chat box activity, as one would find if our guide was leading a more active teaching or guided meditation. In SL, our avatars sat meditating, and in AL, we were all supposed to be meditating too.4 Suddenly, the virtual silence was shattered by a newcomer. An avatar named Frank Aardvark had wandered into the temple, and he was furiously typing comments in the chat box; he asked us what we were doing, followed by a stream of random questions about consciousness, meditation, and Buddhist belief. The facilitator tried to silence him with a curt explanation that we were in the middle of silent meditation, but he kept typing for a while anyway. I found it distracting—and watched his monologue in the chat box instead of trying to meditate further in AL. A short time later, at 11:30 am SLT (Second Life Time), Sign Cymbal rang the virtual bell, which we could all hear in AL (if the relevant audio feature was turned on). Meditators typed various thanks to the facilitator and then some avatars suddenly disappeared—teleporting to other SL regions, or signing out of SL altogether. Frank had lingered and he typed that he was still confused about why we had been sitting in silence. Now that the meditation session was officially over, several interlocutors began to try to explain it to him in more detail.5 Later in an informal interview, one of the other meditators, Jennif Meanderly, told me that Frank Aardvark seemed “loud” and “obnoxious” to her, and “disrespectful,” although she acknowledged that such things (and worse)6 happen from time to time. She said, “It was like he’d defiled a sacred space. It was typed graffiti. Noise pollution.” When I asked if she would have felt that way anywhere in the Buddha Center’s virtual grounds, she said, “No. . . only in the places where there are Buddhas watching.” In referencing the “Buddhas watching,” Jennif Meanderly was referring to the spaces where Buddha statues virtually stand in the simulation (sim) of the Buddha Center.7 Jennif Meanderly’s pronounced respect for the Buddhist landscapes of SL was consistent with the views of my other Buddhist-engaged informants in SL: there are virtually sacred Falcone 149 Figure 1. Meditating at the Buddha Center. Source: Photo taken by Author in February 2018. spaces that engender a shift in proxemics and behavior. This article will examine SL’s Buddhist spaces to understand how they were created, enabled, and sacralized by virtual actors. Furthermore, I demonstrate that sacred spaces in SL were not set apart by virtue of technical innovations or virtuality in and of itself, but rather they were endowed with such respect by the Herculean efforts made by SL actors to painstakingly reproduce offline, actual, material Buddhist spaces online. This argument runs counter to the “mind-only” view—the notion held by those futurists, transhumanists, or other thinkers who understand the virtual world to be essentially and holistically sacred—since it was only the spaces that were built to replicate actual supramundane places that were deemed distinctively sacred by my Buddhist informants. That is, just as in the actual world, virtual groups are enculturated to treat certain spaces as sacred and other spaces as profane. For the record, Buddhist practitioners were not the only religious communities to sacralize digital spaces through ritual practices; for example, Deborah Ross (2011, xlviii) discusses the experiences of online Hindu prayer sites and “Virtual Hajj.” “Sacred” is itself a difficult word to define (e.g. see the Durkheim-Sapir debate as explained in Klass 1995), but this article does not seek to define it in essential terms; I use it in a phenomenological manner, as my interest is in how my informants set supramundane space in opposition to mundane space. I recognize it as a mutable, shifting, and contextually constructed in actual or virtual iterations. This emic approach serves to reinforce the voices of my informants regarding what they meant when they used words like “sacred” or “magical” in virtual spaces. My informants denoted these supramundane spaces as those that are designated for spiritual contemplation or ritual. This accords with what Hillis (2009, 54) noted, “a ritual itself can define what becomes ‘sacred,’” or the way that Sharf (2005, 247) argues that the “sacred” is established by the “sense of being set apart from mundane existence.” Christopher Helland (2013, 27) addresses this constructively in his thinking about religious 150 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) practice in cyberspace: My own definition of ritual has always been a simple one: ritual is purposeful engagement with the sacred (whatever the sacred may be for those involved). This is general enough to recognize individual and personal ritual activities alongside formal rites and group rituals. It also recognizes the fluid nature of ‘the sacred,’ which for many people can be something that does not seem ‘religious’ to the outside observer. It is not that virtual and actual sacred materials and spaces were treated as if they are precisely the same—for that matter, not that all Buddha statues or sacred objects in AL are treated the same8—rather, ethnographic data show that religious practices in virtual worlds can render certain objects and spaces as more sacred than mundane objects on the same platform. In general terms, SL was mostly comprised of secular community spaces, residences, commercial spaces, and entertainment areas;9 all told, religious areas were a very small portion of the virtual acreage and most actors in SL did not regularly interact with religious spaces.10 Although, as Grieve (2017, 77) observed, “in Second Life’s Buddhist community, an often heard phrase was ‘I’m spiritual but not religious,” religion did have its place in SL. Furthermore, the spiritual and mundane spaces do sometimes intersect and overlap; as Heine (2012, 34) notes about his field site in Tokyo: unlike the case of cutting a pie into portions, the functional relation between sacrality and secularity should not be characterized as a one-to-one, zero-sum game in the sense that one of the realms begins only where the other leaves off, as there are profound connections, similarities, and disguises that link these spheres of influence. Intersecting or not, sacralization is a cultural process created and maintained (or abandoned) only through the practices of social actors. Through enculturation, communal recognition, and ritual practices, a multiplicity of religious spaces in SL were socially imbued with a veneer of the sacred. The virtual as the sacred? Margaret Wertheim (1999) wrote that as spiritual space recedes in the real world, it may be reemerging and transformed in cyberspace. In his book, Apocalyptic AI, Robert Geraci (2010) follows Wertheim, and suggests that the transhumanism movement is investing virtual worlds with salvific anticipation and hope. Geraci argues that there is something essentially spiritual about cyberspace to many of its users, especially those who subscribe to the “Apocalyptic AI” perspective that suggests that soon humans will be able to download ourselves into virtual cyber heavens. He writes, “cyberspace advocates have infused the realm with a magical aura and expect the divinization of humankind in cyberspace” (77). While this may be true, Geraci does not just report the views of transhumanists, such as Hans Moravic and Ray Kurzweil; he seems swayed by them to overstate the prevalence of transhumanism in mainstream cybercultures today. For example, Geraci suggests that denizens of contemporary virtual worlds are usually in accordance with transhumanist ideals. He wrote: The residents of Second Life often find life online more enjoyable and more conducive to personal expression and self-fulfillment than they do earthly life. Not only is SL heavenly to many Falcone 151 of its residents, it is explicitly understood through the categories of Apocalyptic AI. Many SL residents accept apocalyptic visions of transcendent heavens and individual immortality: some believe that their avatars are distinct “persons,” without necessary connection to the biological person who created them, and others hope to upload their minds into SL or an equivalent virtual world. (Geraci 2010, 4) Thus, Geraci—not unlike many of those who write about virtual spaces, according to Murray and Sixsmith (1999)—has emphasized a mind-only experience of virtual world spaces. Murray and Sixsmith (1999, 318) counter the mind-only fallacy with the conclusion that “the experience of using VR is an embodied experience,” a perspective that is shared by many others studying cyberculture (Grieve 2010; Hayles 1999; Tufekci 2012). This view of embodiment indicates an extension of the physical, actual body, and not an erasure of it. Gregory Grieve (2010, 38) explains the connection this way, “virtual embodiment indicates that the Body is not a preexisting stable platform on which one inscribes an identity, but rather a condensation of performances, feelings and desires grounded in lived practices.” When game studies scholar, Gee, writes about the extension of the self into the game, noting that the actual self must necessarily perform according to the on-screen self, he does not write the corporeal body out of the experience altogether; he observes that microcontrol over virtual objects “gives us the feeling that our bodies and minds have extended into this virtual space and that the space of the real and virtual are joined” (Gee 2008, 262). Since the mind–body connection persists in virtual spaces, as “embodied virtuality” (Hayles 1999, 1), the ways that avatar bodies move through virtual space is much more complex than the hypothetical disembodied, sacred utopia promoted by some transhumanists. Just as the mind-only view of virtuality is unfortunately propagated by some cyberculture scholars and thinkers, the actual-virtual binary is similarly overstated by transhumanists and others. Geraci’s (2010, 89) claims here echo his transhumanist subjects as well, “Second Life is rather like the earthly world, with just enough difference that people avidly seek to enter it forever.” Furthermore, Geraci (92–93) gushes that the virtual is a space of “collective effervescence” full stop: As the gamers—the ‘we’—come together online, they join together in a group, feel the effervescence engendered during critical moments, and thus enter a sacred world separate from the everyday. . .The ecstatic experience of virtual reality is a natural result of the demarcation between virtual and conventional realities. . .Because we have set cyberspace apart from everyday space, collective effervescence emerges in online life. Online worlds are sacred worlds, they are places and times removed from the everyday routine, the places where meaning emerges and where we are exposed to the sacred. Are we to understand that SL is occupied by blissed out residents simply jazzed to be apart from AL together? Geraci’s breathless pronouncement that virtual space is sacred space was not borne out in long-term cyberspace fieldwork. First, virtual and conventional worlds are not as separate as one might think, as was perfectly articulated in T.L. Taylor’s (2009, 9) ethnography of Everquest, which essentially “weaves together the offline and online, the real and the virtual, as well as muddying the formal boundaries of ‘game’ and ‘not game.’” In his work studying Buddhism in SL, Grieve (2015, 25) strategically employs the Buddhist notion of the “middle path” to show that virtual and actual worlds are not merely oppositional categories: “A 152 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) conventional ethnographic approach suggests that digital ethnography should take a middle path between denying the cultural distinctiveness of virtual worlds, and maintaining that they are radically different social spaces.” Elsewhere, Grieve (2017, 203) noted that “the virtual interpenetrates the actual” and therefore they are socially co-constituting. Contra Geraci, ethnographers have found that SL residents skillfully moved back and forth between actual and virtual worlds, so that the virtual folded into the contemporary human experience (Boellstorff 2008), thus, in the social life of SL there was no fixation on entering SL permanently. People are not moving their avatars around in a constant state of ecstatic collectivity. The moments and spaces of collective effervescence in SL—at a large protest (Boellstorff 2008, 113), a wedding (168–169), a campfire concert (Grieve 2017, 179), a group memorialization of an anniversary of shared subcultural import (Pearce and Artemesia 2011, 245), a desi dance club (Gajjala and McComas 2012, 123), a commencement ceremony for Strayer University (Hillis 2009, 5–7), or a group Buddhist meditation (Falcone 2015, 173)—are offset by the many glum or subdued moments in SL, such as feeling alone, bored, unimpressed with the person you just met, or unsatisfied with the limits of the platform. Furthermore, when Geraci (2010) argues that virtual phenomena writ large currently resists the disenchantment people feel in AL, he ignores the fact that there are both secular and sacred experience in each of these worlds. In addition, he does not take into account the extent that these realms often interpenetrate each other (Heine 2012). Finally, Geraci (2010) undermines his own argument about the exceptional, essential sacredness of SL by telling the stories of the apparently few transhumanist or immersionist pockets of SL (such as Extropia) that serve to demonstrate the relative singularity of these views. Instead of looking for the particular sacred spaces in SL, Geraci overburdened the entirety of the virtual with a heavenly aspect. I could not disagree more when Geraci (2010, 104– 105) writes. The sacred separation of online society from its profane counterpart on Earth allows the experience of collective effervescence and helps structure a sense of virtual reality as religion. Cyberspace is sacred space, where residents come to set aside the banality of mundane existence. . .The virtual world is a sacred gathering place where collective effervescence unites people and gives them reason to believe in the religious promises of Apocalyptic AI, which provides the ideological identity of cyberspace religion. (emphasis in original) Thus, Geraci simultaneously overstates the sacred and undermines secular aspects of extant virtual spaces. In both actual and virtual spaces, there is utility in noting that for social actors certain spaces evoke the sacred in contrast with those that do not. Eliade (1987, 11) explains the phenomena of sacrality in these terms, “Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane.” Importantly, these constructions and understandings of the sacred and profane are fluid, flexible, and temporal. Thomas Tweed’s (2006) notion of the “sacroscape” is useful in showing the mutability and movement of sacred spaces in practice, as he asks us to attend to the traces and ripples that follow from religious practice. Based on long-term fieldwork in SL, I will show that while there is ample evidence of sacred spaces in SL, the claim that there is an essential “magical aura” (Geraci 2010, 77) that permeates all aspect of a virtual world does not capture the sociological distinctions made by actors between Falcone 153 spiritual, domestic, and commercial spaces inside of that virtual world. Thus, the article will now discuss some of the “sacroscapes” that were built and revered in SL, as their presences show the distinctive and dynamic ways in which sacred space was created and how those spaces were occupied in a virtual world that was at least as mundane as it was magical. A sacred SL space for communal devotional practices: the Buddha Center and the Kannonji Sangha There were dozens of user-generated Buddhist spaces built in SL, but there were only a handful of successful, resilient Buddhist communities. During the course of my fieldwork, two of the most prominent Buddhist sanghas in SL were the Buddha Center and the Kannonji Sangha. These were both communities comprised of mostly nonheritage Buddhist practitioners, that is the members of these SL communities were almost all enculturated into other spiritual traditions (or none at all) growing up in AL, but gravitated to Buddhism later in life.11 The Buddha Center was founded in 2008 by Delani and Zino,12 both nonheritage Buddhists, who began the sangha by themselves by teaching at a single small temple they built in SL. The community grew at a fast pace and within just a few years they boasted 2500 members and a wide expanse of virtual spaces through which to teach their “universal Buddhism” (Connelly 2010, 15). The Buddha Center grew to become an ecumenical Buddhist congregation, that is, they allowed teaching and practices from multiple sects and traditions of Buddhism: Tibetan Mahayana and Vajrayana, Zen Mahayana, Thai Theravada, Chinese Pure Land, etc. They hosted guided meditations, silent meditations, dharma talks, chanting sessions, and philosophical/theological discussions (see Figure 1). In her teachings, Delani noted that in AL she had learned and taken vows into a form of Korean Buddhism associated with the Kwan Um school of Zen. Her teachings had ecumenical tendencies, for example when she asked the assembly at a SL to offer White Tara mantras in the Tibetan style on behalf of a sick Buddha Center teacher. The Buddha Center placed a premium on making sure that their Buddhist teachers in SL were vetted and reputable. For example, they worked to ensure that no one could claim to be a monk, nun, or guru of some kind in SL without comparable accomplishments in AL. Teachers need not be AL monastics to be approved, but they had to get a stamp of approval from the key directors based on: experience with, or knowledge of, Asian religions (most teachers were Buddhist, but some Hindu practices were taught there as well); skill of delivery of presentation; and reliability. Schedules were posted at the beginning of each week; they varied from week to week, so members would check in via the information area of the Buddha Center in SL or on other digital platforms where the Buddha center had a presence (their Web site, and their Facebook page, for example). The Buddha Center region itself, an island in the SL world, was comprised of sacred and secular spaces. From more to less sacred spaces, it had communal worship areas, personal meditation areas, information stations, retail spaces (where Buddhist art, fashion, and furniture was available for purchase), and also some residential spaces (where avatars could pay to set up a virtual home). Buddha statues were arrayed liberally across the SL landscape occupied by the Buddha Center. Some of the statues were in designated group teaching spaces, such as the ones in Deer Park and the main temple, while others were scattered about 154 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) Figure 2. Deer Park arrayed with candles on behalf of a sick teacher at the Buddha Center. Source: Photo taken in 2010 by author. the landscape of the sim—a giant Buddha statue sat in the midst of a gushing waterfall, for example—to mark the site as wholly Buddhist one. Mahank and Lotus Butterfly—both meditation facilitators at the Buddha Center in 2011—provided an example of newly-minted, nonheritage Buddhists who found Buddhism, and one another, in SL; both were former Christians who told me that they never would have had the courage to walk into an AL temple or read books about Buddhism for fear of being mocked by friends and family. Mahank described himself to me as a fifty-three-year-old former landscaper who had spent the majority of his life angry, resentful, and traumatized after having been molested in his younger years. He had been on SL for more than two years when we talked, and he described the effects of having found Buddhism in SL as having profoundly transformed his life. He had met and fallen in love with Lotus Butterfly in SL and would meet her occasionally in AL. He credited that relationship and their mutual infatuation with the Buddha dharma over the past several months as having given him the strength and will to forgive his abusers. He told me, “There was something greater that was always hidden. Everything in our past and future makes sense. Buddhism made everything come into view. I don’t know if Buddhism found us or we found Buddhism.” He and Lotus Butterfly had latched onto the Dhammapada as what they considered “the essential teachings of the Buddha,” and Mahank especially had little patience for ritual or “the yellow robes vs. the red robes” (his manner of reflecting upon the sectarian tensions between Theravada and Mahayana). Only after having really tried on the fit of Buddhism in SL did Mahank “have the courage” to announce his conversion to Buddhism to his AL family and friends. Eventually he shaved his head in AL as a physical reminder of Buddhist commitments, and he told me that he hopes to live the life of a monastic someday. Although some Buddhists in SL, like Mahank, expressed an ambivalence about Buddhist ritual, there were many layers of ritual in the Buddha Center community practices. For example, in 2010, one of the regular teachers at the center, Lama Lamrim, a monk who had Falcone 155 Figure 3. A meditation space in the Kannonji Sangha area. Source: Photo taken in 2018 by author. long been wrestling with cancer at home in Europe, was admitted to the hospital in AL. The teachers and practitioners immediately started holding healing rituals, “metta meditations,” and lighting candles in SL in his honor—and dedicating all merit to his health and wellbeing (see Figure 2). Aura attachments were shared, so that those attending the rituals could make their avatars emanate with beams of light during the course of these rituals. As I mentioned earlier, Delani exhorted those of us at her talks to “do White Tara mantras” on his behalf. These rituals went on for days with the expectation that they would continue as long as Lama Lamrim was hospitalized. The Kannonji Sangha was another successful SL space, but one that embraced a particular Buddhist sect as opposed to the Buddha Center’s big tent approach. Practice at Kannonji was almost completely comprised of Zen meditation (zazen) and teachings. Kannonji was a long-running and resilient community with a set weekly schedule, as well as special events. As one might imagine of a Zen space, its design aesthetic unabashedly echoed Japanese styles. Some spaces were constructed for public gatherings, but other spaces were designed for individual use, such as the Zen garden (see Figure 3). In October of 2010, I interviewed Zacharious Physique, an organizer and builder at Kannonji to ask about how the virtuality of the landscape, materials, and actors in SL actually affect Buddhist practice. Zacharious Physique insisted that in their essentials, there was very little difference. He told me that at Kannonji most people view the SL platform as a technological means of making a sangha. As he talked about a particular SL teacher, he said, “I don’t see him as an avatar. I know him. The question assumes that we are looking at this in a virtual context. This is just the utilization of technology. Not any stock in the virtual aspect.” He argued that there is no difference between a statue in SL and in AL. A statue is just a representation. He said. When you see someone bow in either SL or AL, they bow to human potential. No statues are consecrated here [at Kannonji]. Different people have tried it. It doesn’t lend itself well to SL. 156 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) We could do the rituals. Most people are here for the human connection. . .Statues are bronze or wood out there, but here they are pixel. This perspective, notably from a nonheritage Buddhist relatively recently converted to Buddhism, shows that his tendency, like many Western nonheritage practitioners, is to be more agnostic about the “magic” in holy objects than one would expect of a more heritage Buddhist practitioner. His description of how bowing to a statue is just a mere celebration of human potential is a very particular one—one that shares much in common with nonheritage Buddhists who are less likely to believe in the essential sacredness of objects and spaces to begin with—and thus it is important to note that nearly all of my SL informants in Buddhist sanghas were nonheritage Buddhist practitioners (or even just Buddhist-leaning). My discussions with Zacharious Physique and other Kannonji meditators underscored the notion that the conventional beliefs and practices of their SL sangha tracked more closely with what one would find in a nonheritage Buddhist Zen institution. Another way to put this is to note that the Zen practices and beliefs one finds at Kannonji resemble those of the Diamond Sangha (founded in Honolulu by Robert Aitken and Anne Aitken in 1959) more than those of the Soto Zen Mission in Hawaii (founded in Honolulu by Japanese Soto Zen monks in 1913— and still operated by monks doing relatively short-term missions from Japan). However, my visits to Kannonji impressed upon me that, just as at the Diamond Sangha, there was a shared understanding of the deference one ought to show for Buddhist “sacroscapes.” At Kannonji, a kind of nonheritage Buddhist version of sacredness was constructed and mutually respected. A teacher at the Buddha Center, Phra Paisan (a nonheritage Thai Buddhist monk), had a similar manner of conceptualizing of space as loosely sacred. Insofar as he viewed any spaces and objects sacred in AL, so too were they in SL. When I asked him whether he saw the Buddha Center or any other SL Buddhist places as “sacred spaces,” he replied: I haven’t seen a monastery in SL yet. The Buddha Center is a cosmopolitan space—more of a community center. Is it sacred space? Sacred is more of a cultural thing. Buddhism is about understanding reality. Buddhist temples were not in the Buddha’s time. The idea of sacred came later. Monasteries were not sacred. Maybe the Buddha image could be considered sacred. [In SL], I created a prostration animation—I need them. I’m not selling them. People use them. Phra Paisan saw the places where Buddhas stood as places that required deference; he needed to prostrate, and made sure that he could show this. While the notions of sacred space circulating in SL may not have been exactly those that one might expect in a traditional, heritage Buddhist sacred space in AL, I observed a great deal of work being done by nonheritage practitioners in SL to replicate AL sacred space in a manner meaningful to them. By and large, SL’s nonheritage Buddhists tended to see between approximate and sacredness. In sum, the Kannonji community and the Buddha Center built spaces that served to evoke Buddhist atmosphere for various users: seekers who wanted to learn more about Buddhism; Buddhist practitioners who found that an online sangha could help them maintain a more regular practice schedule; Buddhists unable to commute to a temple or congregation in AL; and all those who found camaraderie and connection in their respective virtual sanghas. The institutional edifice was maintained by those who stayed and taught. While Falcone 157 they represent flexible, fluid Buddhist sanghas, they maintained relevance over time through the construction of veritable Buddhist sacred spaces and practices. Sacred space and solitude: enabling quiet devotional practice Besides the community-oriented Buddhist spaces, there were other public Buddhist spaces in SL that were geared toward individual meditation and practice. There is no schedule of public meditation at the Kuan Yin Terraces, the Drolma Lhakhang, or the other Buddhist spaces that seem oriented toward individual visitors. A person could teleport their avatar to explore these Buddhist spaces at their leisure, and sit and meditate in solitude. I visited the Drolma Lhakhang several times in the spring of 2018. It was invariably still and empty, so I was alone to peruse the statues and sacred art. I would “imitation-touch” (Connelly 2010, 17) prayer wheels at the entrance and watch them spin. The Drolma Lhakhang was sponsored by the AL organization, Free Tibet, likely as a means to spread awareness of the disenfranchisement of Tibetans under Chinese colonial rule with a light touch, as there was no explicitly political information disseminated here. There was no schedule of events, nor did a community regularly congregate in the lhakhang (Tibetan: chapel). Often as my avatar sat in front of the virtual altar, I would meditate in AL. At the Drolma Lhakhang, on the main altar, a large golden Green Tara bodhisattva sat flanked by a smaller golden Green Tara on the left and another Tara statue on the right. A photo of the Dalai Lama was perched on the altar just next to the main statue. In front of the statues, there were flowers, fruit, a crystal stupa, and light, water bowl, and red coral mandala offerings. There were several thangka paintings, most of various iterations of Taras, but there was a protector deity thangka as well (just as one would likely find in an AL Tibetan gompa, or temple). The builder of the Drolma Lhakhang had also made teaching prims— digital books that distribute teachings such as the 21 Praises of Tara—available. There were also several meditation cushions where one could sit and read, chant or meditate. Each statue had an object profile accessible via right-click. I clicked an orb and my avatar prostrated continuously until I right-clicked to make her stop. During one visit, I recognized full well what many of my SL informants told me: the virtual picture of serenity was affecting me in a visceral way in AL. It was night in SL, and lamps gently illuminated the chapel. It was a serene space, clearly assembled with care, precision, and reverence, and I relaxed into it. I walked my avatar outside, just as dawn was on the horizon. I made a donation of Linden dollars to the temple and a different donation in a Milarepa pot to sponsor the creation of new dharma content. Outside the gompa, there was a juniper incense burner blowing subtle wisps of unscented digital smoke that were so well-crafted that I could almost smell it.13 The Buddhist space designed for individual worship that I came to know best in my first few years in SL was Druk Yul, a Nyingma Temple. Druk Yul was a replica of a temple in AL that Tornado Alchemy had built as an offering to his AL Bhutanese Buddhist teacher.14 In his years in SL, Tornado Alchemy built several other Buddhist places and holy objects, such as the Kuan Yin Terraces and oracle. In 2011, Tornado Alchemy told me that his main intention in building Druk Yul in SL was to facilitate the Buddhism of others, as well as honor Gangteng Tulku Rinpoche, his Bhutanese teacher in AL. He indicated that he attended SL Buddha Center gatherings once in a blue moon, but that generally he felt more comfortable sticking to his own practice in 158 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) his own space. Druk Yul served as a place of mostly private reflection, as there were rarely events held there. Since Druk Yul was accessible to anyone who wanted to enter, he told me that he hoped that it would be a place of refuge in a region built to celebrate creativity and play. Right outside of Druk Yul, Tornado Alchemy had designed and installed a set of two giant prayer wheels to look like a set of prayer wheels that he had taken a photo of at his teacher’s AL center in Colorado. During an interview, Tornado Alchemy carefully dissembled one of the duplicate prayer wheels that he had made to show me how he had done it (see Figure 4). He showed me the pieces, and how, underneath an opaque shell, there was a cylinder with a digital “texture” copied from a document and then pasted upon the object’s outer surface. The texture was an “om mani padme hun” mantra in Tibetan script that he had downloaded and then copied ten thousand times (see Figure 5). He made sure that when he animated the wheel to turn it would turn clockwise, in the proper direction according to mainstream Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Since a prayer wheel in AL is heavy, he made sure that someone’s avatar would have to keep touching the SL prayer wheel in order for it to keep spinning. When an avatar touched the wheel, a notecard was offered up to the user automatically; the digital notecard said that the merit earned from turning a prayer wheel in SL is the same as the merit earned by performing the same action in AL. Figure 4. Tornado Alchemy Un-Builds His Prayer Wheel. Source: Photograph taken by author in October 2011. Falcone 159 Tornado Alchemy was interested in his Buddhist digital creations (or “builds”) being as close as possible to the actual thing. He told me that the entire exercise was spiritually beneficial. He viewed his builds as service to others as well as being beneficial to himself. For Tornado Alchemy, who explained to me that his Buddhism is rather syncretic and unconventional, merit-making was not the main motivation for building Buddhist holy objects and spaces: I don’t ever think about making merit. There are people who are very focused in on that . . . If your focus is on acting out of compassion then there will never be a need to think of merit. It might accumulate merit. Fine. The point is: if you are working towards a bodhisattva existence, then you are not thinking of merit any more. You are working to help other sentient beings to ease their suffering. Merit can help you get to a place when you can cleanse your karma and bodhisattva commitment is everything. Merit is a lower rung on the Buddhist ladder. What’s going on in your karmic bank account is no longer important. In actual fact, mantras are not important if cleansing. If your focus is bodhisattva vows then merit comes, but it doesn’t enter into the—I make the prayer wheels as a service to others, not to make merit for myself. Figure 5. The Mantras Inside Druk Yul’s Prayer Wheel. Source: Photograph taken by author in October 2011. 160 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) Given conventional Nyingma dogma about Buddhist holy objects, it is clear that Tornado Alchemy had a different perspective on holy objects in general than his teacher would. That aside, he was able to build in SL as part of his Buddhist practice; it was a way to merge his interests in creativity, play, and Buddhism. He told me: Buddhist actual world objects. . . their point is to bring about internal change. Turning an actual life prayer wheel or circumambulating a stupa may affect an internal world, for me, rather than an external one. That notwithstanding, a real world place may have a tangible atmosphere, built up over time, that may also affect me. My feeling is that SL objects do not have inherent power and hence do not have sacredness, though they may be worthy of respect simply because of the effort that someone expended in creating them. . . interacting with a [Buddhist] SL object might engender similar internal changes in me as interacting with an actual world object. Having said that, some of the catalytic effect may come from the environment, so an SL object out of context might be much less effective unless part of a careful build. During my initial research period, I found that Druk Yul very clearly evoked the dedication of its builder, evoking a pronounced sense of it being a sacred space. Upon my return to SL five years later, I was surprised when I found that Druk Yul was gone, and there was no sign on the landscape that it had ever existed. Virtual sacred spaces, while imbued with some measure of spiritual integrity, are nonetheless in a more precarious state than AL spaces. I felt the absence, the loss, of Druk Yul keenly,15 so I contacted Tornado Alchemy to ask him about it. When we got back in touch, Tornado Alchemy told me that he no longer had a relationship with the AL teacher that Druk Yul had been built to honor, and so he had simply removed Druk Yul temple from SL. (He told me that he may have deleted it, though he said that it may still be in his SL object inventory.) On the other hand, one of the giant prayer wheels that he had so carefully constructed had been moved to the Kuan Yin Terraces, so that it was still in use, activating another Buddhist landscape. Figure 6. The relocated prayer wheel. Source: Photo taken by author in May 2018. Falcone 161 The Kuan Yin Terraces, another Buddhist sacred space for solitude and quiet reflection, had secured a sponsor, and did not rely on individual donations to maintain itself. I had been there many times before, but after catching up with Tornado Alchemy, I returned to specifically search for the relocated prayer wheel. As I teleported my avatar into the Terraces, I waited a few moments until the visual details of the virtual space and my avatar slowly “rezzed” (appeared on-screen) before me. I walked my avatar around the area, exploring the changeable landscape until I found the wheel situated happily between a beautifully blooming cherry blossom tree and a gushing waterfall (see Figure 6). Afterwards, I walked my avatar over to the Kuan Yin Oracle nearby and made a donation to get a reading; this particular virtual oracle was modeled on the stick/drawer divination system at the Kannon temple at Asakusa in Tokyo, Japan. I drew stick 61, which read: “Your path has taken you through soft fields and rocky hills. What is round the next corner is still a mystery. Your adventure continues - sing with joy!” Concluding thoughts My research supports Gregory Grieve’s (2017, 12) contention that Buddhist life in SL is wholly authentic Buddhist practice: Digital Dharma critics frequently assume that digital religion is inherently alienating because as a simulacrum it robs users of their humanity and connection to reality. . . however, such alienation did not hold for most Second Life residents, who found the creativity and alternative roles opened up by the virtual world to be liberating. This article shows that one of the primary ways that SL invites authenticity is through the creation of evocative sacred spaces designed to mirror AL Buddhist spaces. There were a multiplicity of Buddhist places in SL—some existed to encourage individual devotion and peaceful contemplation, while some Buddhist spaces instead emphasized community building, group meditation, and virtual teaching. Interestingly, while these spaces were built to be achingly beautiful, they were not as imaginative or whimsical as one might guess. In fact, with the exception of a few little oddities found here and there—at the Buddha Center in 2018, for example there was a tree whose leaves were fashioned as little red hearts which were programmed such that every now and again a lone heart-shape would drift down the tree into the waterway below—what one found in Buddhist SL is not unlike what one might find at most nonheritage Buddhist centers in AL. There were no surprising mash-ups of various religious figures made manifest in virtual stone. There were no Buddha animations teaching day and night for the benefit of avatars passing through. There were no Pure Lands or celestial realms built by these dharma communities. In the Buddha Center one meditated on cushions, not inside bright, delicately opening lotus flowers. These religious spaces derived their power and authenticity from mimesis, the good copy, and the best possible rendering. In other words, it was SL’s resemblances to AL that gave it its potency, and not its divergences from it. Anthropologist George Marcus (2012, xv) has suggested that virtual ethnography in online worlds has similarities to religious ethnography more generally, as the spheres of magic, cosmology, and belief are often as intangible to nonbelievers as virtual worlds are to those who have never entered them: 162 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) virtual worlds were in a sense the currency and intellectual challenge of much past ethnographic description and analysis in anthropology. Think of ethnographic efforts to grasp and descriptively report on the Dreamtime of Australian Aboriginal peoples. Think of the rich literature on shamanistic belief and ritual systems that mediate intimately the everyday lived realities of people with parallel, unseen worlds of beings and spirits that mirror and track everything that happens in the everyday.16 If that were indeed the case, then religious practice in virtual worlds is doubly mediated, doubly virtual, but this is not the case. In fact, Marcus’ comment misses the mark, since virtual worlds are not imaginary or mythological spaces, activated by belief or imagination. Entering a virtual worlds does not require a leap of faith, it only requires the relevant technology. George Marcus’ conflation of Dreamtime with whole virtual worlds like SL seems to indicate a misunderstanding of the diversity of human experiences in virtual worlds; SL’s Buddha Center may be sacred space to its community members, but SL’s bars, strip clubs and shopping malls are hardly sacred landscapes. Surely it is problematic to equate the study of sacred Aboriginal landscape with the study of virtual landscapes that include economic, sexual, social, and spiritual phenomenon. If George Marcus is simply focused on the pixilated quality of virtual experience, then I again take him to task for suggesting that extant virtual worlds are somehow unseen; they are, as Phra Paisan would say, merely less vividly physical than AL, but no more or less an illusion for that. I would argue that all of our actual and virtual spaces are mediated, and all have substance in terms of their cultural significance. The virtual spaces of SL were quite diverse, but in their essentials, these virtual landscapes reflected our actual ones; there were bars, beach cabanas, art galleries, clothing shops, homes, educational sites, and religious congregations. Counter the mind-only view of virtual space as essentially sacred, I have demonstrated that the sacred spaces in virtual worlds are made so not because they are putative otherworlds that are essentially supramundane. It is helpful to consider what Eliade (1987, 118) wrote: “a sacred stone is venerated because it is sacred, not because it is a stone; it is the sacrality manifested through the mode of being of the stone that reveals its true essence” (italics in original). A Buddhist temple in a virtual world is respected because it is built to replicate a sacred space (and community members are enculturated to treat it this way), not simply because it an object in a virtual world. Ethnographic work inside SL reveals that—just as surely as in our actual world—virtual spaces are comprised of both enchantment and disenchantment, both the sacred and the profane, and both the spiritual and the mundane. Notes 1. I conducted regular fieldwork on Buddhism in SL from 2010 to 2012 and returned for several months of work in 2018. My fieldwork in AL with nonheritage and heritage Tibetan Buddhists and Zen Buddhists from 2005 to 2007 and 2015 to 2018, respectively, also informs some of my arguments here. I followed many of the conventions of ethnographic methodology outlined by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2008): I identified myself as an anthropologist to SL avatars (in my “bio” and in conversation) and I only did interviews with those who had given informed consent to proceed. I have given all informants SL pseudonyms disguising both their already fictive SL handles and AL names, except when they insisted that I do otherwise. I have not changed the names of public figures, AL businesses, or SL place names. I also follow the Falcone 2. 3. 4. 5. 163 convention espoused in Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, when I assert that long-term participant observation is necessary for anthropological fieldwork in virtual worlds, just as one would expect to see in AL spaces (Boellstorff et al. 2012). I am ambivalent about calling the nonvirtual world “real” life, although many interlocutors do call it “real life” or “RL.” Following Boellstorff (2008), I prefer “actual” as opposed to “real.” The resistance to using the word real was well-articulated by an SL user interviewed in The Atlantic; the writer noted that “Alice doesn’t particularly like the terms real and virtual. To her, they imply a hierarchical distinction, suggesting that one part of her life is more ‘real’ than the other, when her sense of self feels fully expressed in both” (Jamison 2017). Alice’s view is not uncommon. For example, one scholar wrote of SL avatars, “Although outsiders often consider avatars in virtual worlds as ‘just a matter of image,’ hence not real, there are users who consider their avatars to be just as real as they are” (Ikegami 2011, 1158). I do see the sociological value of making a distinction, which perhaps Alice would herself be ambivalent about, but I find that it unsettles fewer SL users in practice when I studiously avoid suggesting that one world is more “real.” AL and virtual life can both provide spaces for real community-building, identity construction, and religious practices. I observed in my fieldnotes that I decided not to sit next to someone else’s avatar given that there were plenty of empty areas in the room. In other words, I respected the same proxemics in SL that I would have in AL. According to Gregory Grieve (2015, 185) and his research team, at their particular Buddhist site in SL (not the Buddha Center, but another Buddhist community), approximately 80% of practitioners reported that they were “always or usually meditating in real life when their avatar meditated in Second Life.” I have shared the communal disciplining of Frank here (editing typos and adding pseudonyms), since it shows the way that a SL actor is taught to think about the community at the Buddha Center. I have shared a short screen grab here, but the conversation went on for nearly a half hour. (Time given is in SLT, which is Pacific Standard Time, given that the Linden Lab is located there.) [11:33] total Snorkel: we get together and do silent meditation. we practice any type of meditation we are comfortable with [11:33] Zelsa Zoo: i think what Frank is wondering . . . about dharma talks, etc. [11:33] Frank Aardvark: So, everyone meets to be quiet and then leaves? :( [11:33] Wicked Peachinesses: no, we meditate [11:33] Frank Aardvark: With no discussion? [11:34] Stone Hapsbourg : sometimes we also have dharma talks and lessons you can listen to, Frank [11:34] total Snorkel: we have teaching sessions Frank [11:34] Wicked Peachinesses: some people do lessons or discussions [11:34] Zelsa Zoo: sometimes yes . . . depends on the group . . . and there r teachers and dharma talks Frank . . . if that’s what u mean [11:34] total Snorkel: we also have guided meditations [11:34] total Snorkel: where the leader walks you through a meditation practice [11:34] Frank Aardvark: Oh. Ok. [11:35] total Snorkel: you should come to some of our lectures. Sign cymbal might have the schedule [11:35] Sign Cymbal: Just check the board downstairs to see what is scheduled [11:35] Stone Hapsbourg : and sometimes you have guided meditations here, Frank [11:35] Frank Aardvark: I see. . . [11:35] Zelsa Zoo: yes and if u like . . . u can be a group member and will be notified about upcoming events [11:35] Wicked Peachinesses: i joined and i get all the invites [11:35] total Snorkel: if you are interested in guided meditation I have a place in the internet which 164 Critical Research on Religion 7(2) is very good [11:35] Frank Aardvark: Hmmm. . . [11:35] total Snorkel: let me know [11:36] total Snorkel: yes, peachinesses. [11:36] Sign Cymbal: Poor Frank seems to be quite overwhelmed now [11:36] Sign Cymbal: : ) [11:36] total Snorkel: sorry [11:36] Frank Aardvark: I am more interested in discussion than meditation. [11:36] Zelsa Zoo: i know . . .¼) [11:36] Zelsa Zoo: then u would enjoy dharma talks [11:36] Wicked Peachinesses: I’m interested in both [11:36] Frank Aardvark: Perhaps so. [11:36] Wicked Peachinesses: they both have benefits 6. Also known as “griefing” or trolling behavior, some avatars teleport in and disrupt meditations by dancing or yelling. I have seen avatars “streak” through virtual meditations and dharma talks with the sole intention of aggravating the meditators and refusing the implication of sacrality. In his chapter, Helland overstates the extent that the sacred is undermined by these moments when he wrote: in Second Life there are amazing recreations of sacred churches; however, the behavior of many online avatars is anything but sacred or respectful in these environments. There is no collective ‘ritual memory’ that grounds people’s behaviour and orients them toward the sacredness of the events occurring (Helland 2013, 34) 7. 8. 9. 10. Trolling was not the norm in Buddhist ritual spaces during my work; it was occasional. Moreover, unquestionably in communities like the Buddha Center and Kannonji there is collective ritual memory and understanding. Upon further questioning, my informant said that she did not believe that the Buddhas were actually, literally present in the pixels (nor even in the statues in the temple of her AL sangha), but she felt that the SL statues give the illusion of being watched by Buddhas, which she found calming and motivating. She felt a sense of respect and integrity was due to such spaces, in both SL and AL. There are wide variations in how actual Buddha statues and holy objects are treated and understood by devotees. For examples, some objects are consecrated (see Swearer 2004 on Thai statue consecration, or Gombrich 1966 on Sinhalese consecration) or authenticated (see Falcone 2018 on Tibetan Buddhist relic authentication). Relics, in particular, are highly valued in Buddhist practice, especially relics thought to be the corporeal remains of the Buddha, since they are thought to be especially efficacious in terms of removing obstacles from the path of Buddhist practice (Trainor 1997). In contrast to highly sacred statues and stupas that themselves hold significant relics, there are Buddhist objects that are much less revered but still treated with respect due to being used in ritual spaces and contexts. For example, there are also factory-made mass-produced Buddha statues being sold in temple gift shops and stores. On a nonheritage altar one is as likely to find mass-produced Buddha statues as artisanal objects. For an exposition on Buddhist holy objects in SL, see Falcone 2015. Although 36 million SL accounts had been created as of 2013 (Jamison 2017), the amount of regular monthly users peaked in 2009 at about 1 million; since 2009, the number of regular monthly users declined, and settled down closer to six hundred thousand (Hall 2014) or eight hundred thousand (Jamison 2017). Grieve (2015, 62) and his research team discovered that consumerism is a major aspect of SL culture; in 2010, 67% of their informants indicated that shopping is a significant activity for them in SL. For more on the residential, real-estate, service, and retail worlds in SL, see Boellstorff (2008) and Malaby (2009). Falcone 165 11. Here I am referring to what I have called the “heritage spectrum” for (Falcone 2018) practitioners that privileges enculturation and upbringing as the manner of distinguishing between Buddhists (2018). Nonheritage Buddhists were not enculturated into Buddhist practice by family; rather, nonheritage Buddhists found and choose Buddhism (in some form) later in life. 12. I use their avatars’ first names (sans pseudonym), since they have already been written about without pseudonyms elsewhere (Connelly 2010), and are the equivalent of public figures. 13. Louise Connelly (2010, 23) explained the function of virtual incense in SL: there is an expectation that the visual depiction of the incense will resonate with a memory of the smell. An alternative explanation is that the visual depiction of the incense acts as a reminder for the person to light incense offline when they are participating in the religious practice online. In her work, she made a compelling case for the extension of senses to virtual spaces: “it is through the use of sight, hearing and imitation-touch that religious practice is not only feasible online but provides continuity between real life and Second Life” (31). 14. Based on my interviews with Tornado Alchemy in 2010 and 2011, I would suggest that he is a fairly unique nonheritage Buddhist student, since he wove together disparate traditions such as “heathenry,” and various Buddhisms, in order to craft an individual practice that suited him. 15. There is much to be said about the precarity and vulnerability of virtual sacroscapes, thus I currently working on another article to address that issue in more detail. 16. To be fair, Marcus is not the only scholar to make this analogy, as I found a similar notion articulated in a Daniel Miller piece. In 2009, Miller (2009, 8) wrote that an Aboriginal informant eschewed things and preferred the digital world, saying one could try to stretch the Aboriginal inheritance: the laptop as a kind of digital dreamtime that connects current relationship with those of the dead, a place he comes in and out of, as more real than merely real life. Miller’s (8) earlier work then sets up a false premise of digital as immaterial—“In his devotion to immateriality he prefers anything digital”—that his later work comes to refute. It was Miller (with co-author Horst) (2012, 3), remember, who asserted that the digital is material, and who wrote that “humanity is not one more iota mediated by the rise of the digital.” References Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor 2012. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Connelly, Louise. 2010. “Virtual Buddhism: An Analysis of Aesthetics in Relation to Religious Practice within Second Life.” Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 4, no. 1: 12–34. Eliade, Mircea. 1987. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. 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Exploring the Pristine Ruins of Second Life and Other Online Spaces.” The Atlantic, July 13, 2014. Accessed February 20, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/what-happens-when-digital-citiesare-abandoned/373941/ Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heine, Steven. 2012. Sacred High City, Sacred Low City: A Tale of Religious Sites in Two Tokyo Neighborhoods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helland, Christopher. 2013. “Ritual.” In Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, edited by Heidi A. Campbell, 25–40. New York: Routledge. Hillis, Ken. 2009. Online A Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. Durham: Duke University Press. Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. 2012. “The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology” In Digital Anthropology, edited by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, 3–35. London: Berg Press. 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Murray, Craig D. and Judith Sixsmith 1999. “The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality.” Ethos 27, no. 3: 315–343. Pearce, Celia and Artemesia 2011. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ross, Deborah. 2011. “Introduction.” In Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, by Victor Turner and Edith Turner, xxix–lvii. New York: Columbia University Press. Falcone 167 Sharf, Robert H. 2005. “Ritual.” In Critical Studies for the Study of Buddhism, edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr, 245–270. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swearer, Donald K. 2004. Becoming the Buddha: The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thailand. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, TL. 2009. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Trainor, Kevin. 1997. Relics, Ritual, and Representation in Buddhism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tufekci, Zeynep. 2012. “We Were Always Human.” In Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects and the End of Anthropology, edited by Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Wesch, 33–47. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Tweed, Thomas A. 2006. Crossings and Dwellings: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertheim, Margaret. 1999. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Author biography Jessica M Falcone is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University where she teaches courses on religion and culture. When not studying in Second Life, her religious studies fieldwork in Actual Life has been conducted with various subcultures: Tibetan Buddhists in India and abroad, Hindus and Sikhs in the US diaspora, and Zen Buddhists in Hawai’i.