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Paper short abstract

This paper explores pilgrimage among Western Karma Kagyu practitioners as a space where digital technologies, embodied practice, and ritual presence intersect. It examines how travel, ongoing practice, and digital engagement are intertwined, reflecting Stengers’ notion of cosmopolitics.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research among Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism under the guidance of the XVII Karmapa Thaye Dorje, this paper explores how digital technologies support pilgrimage and religious practice across mobility and immobility. I conducted fieldwork at the 2025 Kagyu Monlam in Bodh Gaya and during journeys to meet the Karmapa in India and Europe, drawing on a complementary autoethnographic perspective as a practicing member of the community.

In Tibetan Buddhism, direct transmission is considered essential, making pilgrimage a crucial mode of engagement with teachers and sacred sites. The paper shows that technologies—including messaging platforms, social media, streaming services, and applications—are central to organising travel, responding to ritual opportunities, maintaining embodied practice, and negotiating presence and absence. For many Western practitioners, personal participation is often constrained by economic, personal, or professional limitations. Beyond travel, digital tools sustain religious engagement. Livestreamed rituals, shared recordings of teachings, and online meditations are only some of the ways in which buddhists maintain continuity of practice across distance and time.

This integration of digital and embodied practices resonates with Stengers’ notion of cosmopolitics, highlighting the need to negotiate multiple agencies and forms of presence in a shared world, and demonstrates how digital infrastructures enable, extend, and sometimes redirect sacred mobility and practice in a world marked by contingency, uneven access, and movement.