How do religion, language and Industry 4.0 interact? First, let’s remind ourselves again of what “Industry 4.0” means. The term originated in 2011 at the Hanover Trade Fair, where it was used to describe the automation of manufacturing. Today, it includes the Internet of Things, cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI). And, sometimes, Industry 4.0 is referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Now, let’s turn to religion. Even if you’re not one of the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, you’ve probably heard of Christmas. The festival is part of our global cultural heritage. The same goes for Ramadan, the 30-day fasting period observed by 1.8 billion Muslims around the world. But what about the more than one billion Hindus and 25 million Sikhs? Do they have a special day? Yes, they do. It’s called Diwali.
Then there’s Vesak. I must admit I hadn’t heard of Vesak until the Jakarta Post, which describes itself as “Indonesia’s leading English-language daily” newspaper, published a multimedia story called “Vesak 2019: Buddhism moves to adapt to Industry 4.0”. That’s how I learned that, for the world’s 500 million Buddhists, Vesak is the event that commemorates the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha.
According to The Jakarta Post, Buddhists from across the world gathered at the Tam Chuc pagoda in Vietnam’s northern Hà Nam Province to celebrate Vesak. “Hundreds of international and Vietnamese scholars, as well as Buddhist dignitaries, shared ideas on how Buddhism has adapted to Industry 4.0 and utilized digitalization to preserve Buddhist values and promote the religion,” said the final caption of the video clip.
How has Buddhism adapted to Industry 4.0? The Jakarta Post doesn’t say, but the religion’s tradition of meditation has offered millions upon millions of believers a method of coping with change for more than 2,000 years — and Industry 4.0 represents change in ways that the world has never experienced. If Buddhists wish to have their own definition of Industry 4.0, they can because, especially in English, such definitions are naturally flexible.
In 1865, the English author Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He followed up on its success in 1872 with Through the Looking-Glass, which includes this conversation:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Kay Calpo Lugtu, however, prefers the original meaning of Industry 4.0. At the same time as The Jakarta Post was reporting about Vesak and Industry 4.0, she wrote a story for The Manila Times titled “Industry 4.0: Is PH ready?” (“PH” means “the Philippines”). For the second part of the story, she went to Pistoia, “a quiet sleepy town north of Rome”, where she visited Ricciarelli S.p.A, a 175-year-old company that produces packaging equipment for pasta makers. It plans to survive for another 175 years with the help of Industry 4.0.