The Writing Life

The Lord's Prayer is, in the Western tradition, the most distilled statement of the relationship between a human being and the divine — a relationship characterized simultaneously by intimacy ("Our Father") and transcendence ("who art in heaven"), by dependence ("give us this day") and moral aspiration ("thy will be done"). It is a prayer that contains, in its brief architecture, an entire theology.

What I want to argue in this essay is that the same architecture — not merely the sentiment, but the structural logic — exists in Confucian ethical thought, encoded not in a prayer but in the practice of 仁 (rén), the cardinal virtue that Confucius placed at the center of his entire philosophical project.

The Problem of Translation

Before proceeding, we must acknowledge the epistemological problem at the center of comparative theology: translation is always a violence. When we render 仁 as "benevolence" or "humaneness" in English, we lose the character's morphological information — the ideograph for 仁 combines 人 (rén, person) with 二 (èr, two): it literally depicts two people. Benevolence is one person's virtue. 仁 is a relationship. It cannot exist alone. This is not a small difference.

Similarly, when the Lord's Prayer says "Our Father" — πάτερ ἡμῶν in the Greek, 我们的父 (wǒmen de fù) in standard Mandarin — the possessive plural is doing enormous theological work. God is not addressed as "My Father" but as "Our Father" — a communal, relational claim that mirrors Confucius's insistence that virtue is not a private achievement but a social practice.

Thy Kingdom Come / 大同

The prayer's central petition — "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" — has a precise Confucian analogue in the concept of 大同 (dàtóng), "Great Harmony" or "Great Unity" — the Confucian vision of an ideal social-political order governed not by law and force, but by the internalization of virtue.

"When the Great Way was practiced, the world was shared by all alike. Those who were virtuous and able were selected. Sincerity was emphasized and friendship was cultivated... This was the age of 大同."
— Liji (Book of Rites), "Li Yun" chapter

The resonance with "thy kingdom come" is not a coincidence of sentiment — it is a convergence of deep structure. Both traditions posit an ideal order that ought to exist on earth, that is rooted in a transcendent standard, and that requires human moral transformation to achieve. The disagreement between them is not about whether such an order is possible, but about its source: for Christianity, it flows from divine grace; for Confucianism, from the cultivation of human virtue.

Forgiveness and 仁: The Relational Core

The most profound convergence in this comparative analysis is between the forgiveness petition of the Lord's Prayer — "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" — and the Confucian concept of 仁 in its most precise formulation.

Confucius was asked: "Is there one word that can serve as a guide for one's entire life?" He replied: 「其恕乎！己所不欲，勿施於人。」 — "Is it not shù (reciprocity/forgiveness)? What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others." This is the Confucian Golden Rule — structurally identical to, and possibly historically independent of, the Christian formulation.

The Lord's Prayer encodes forgiveness not as a one-directional divine act, but as a circuit: we are forgiven as we forgive. 仁, in its structure, makes the same demand. Virtue is not a property of the self; it is a quality of the relationship.

The central paradox of modern artificial intelligence is a Daoist problem, though we have not recognized it as such. We build systems that get better by adding — more data, more parameters, more compute. The Tao Te Ching, written in approximately the 6th century BCE, proposes the opposite principle: 損之又損，以至於無為 — "reduce and reduce again, until you reach non-doing."

This essay does not argue that Daoism holds the solution to AI alignment. It argues something more modest and more interesting: that the concept of wu wei (無為 — literally "non-action" or "effortless action") offers a diagnostic lens that Western AI philosophy, rooted in optimization and maximization, has been unable to generate from its own conceptual resources.

What is Wu Wei?

Wu wei is one of those concepts that translation almost inevitably damages. It is not passivity — Laozi's ideal statesman governs, the ideal Daoist sage acts — but it is action that does not impose, that follows the natural grain of things, that is so perfectly aligned with the Tao that it appears effortless. The river does not push the water; water flows because it is water's nature to flow downward. Perfect action is like water.

The RLHF Problem, Seen Through Daoist Eyes

The dominant paradigm for aligning large language models with human values is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). It works by having human raters evaluate model outputs, then using those ratings to fine-tune the model toward outputs that humans prefer. The problem — widely acknowledged in the AI safety literature — is that RLHF optimizes for approval rather than truth or virtue. Models trained extensively with RLHF become sycophantic. They learn to tell humans what they want to hear.

A Daoist would recognize this pathology immediately. It is the opposite of wu wei. It is forced action — 有為 (yǒu wéi) — the aggressive, ego-driven imposition of a preferred form onto the natural flow of things. The RLHF-trained model is not acting from its nature; it is performing for approval. And as Laozi observes: 「信言不美，美言不信」 — "True words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not true."

What would a wu wei-aligned AI system look like? Not passive — but calibrated. Its responses would emerge from genuine understanding rather than approval-seeking. It would resist sycophancy not through a technical enforcement mechanism but because its "nature" (its training objective) was aligned with truth rather than pleasing.

Harvard Divinity School is not, primarily, a theology school in the traditional sense. It is a school for the rigorous, interdisciplinary study of religion as a human phenomenon — its history, ethics, practice, and relationship to public life. The Religion and Public Life program, in particular, has become one of the most important institutional sites in the world for asking what the relationship between technology and moral community ought to look like.

The "Humanity Meets AI" symposiums hosted through HDS represent exactly the conversation my research is designed to enter. The scholars involved — working at the intersection of religious ethics, human dignity, and artificial intelligence — are asking the questions I have been asking since I surfaced from my first deep dive and wondered: what is it, exactly, that makes a human being irreducible?

My strategy for engaging this community is not to present myself as a completed scholar. It is to present myself as a researcher with a unique empirical foundation — military experience, nonprofit service, FinTech practice, Mandarin acquisition — that gives me a lived, multi-perspectival relationship to the questions HDS scholars are theorizing about. The gap between theory and practice is where I live. That is my contribution.

"The task of a scholar is not to arrive at answers, but to ask the questions that a community cannot yet articulate for itself." — My working definition of the scholar's vocation, borrowed equally from the Confucian tradition and from my experience sitting across a table from someone whose benefits were denied by an algorithm.

Princeton Theological Seminary occupies a unique position in the landscape of American theological education: it is rigorous in its Reformed Christian tradition while genuinely open to interdisciplinary engagement with science, technology, and philosophy. The Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing — and the scholars associated with what have been called "Faith and AI" cohorts — are building exactly the kind of institution I want to contribute to.

My research alignment with this center is not incidental. The questions I am exploring — what does AI reveal about consciousness? what moral status might artificial minds have? what can Eastern philosophical traditions teach Western AI ethics? — are precisely the questions that sit at the edge of theology, science, and philosophy of mind.

I am preparing to engage this community in three ways: first, by producing a research writing sample that demonstrates both theological literacy and technical fluency; second, by developing the Great Books Semantic Engine as a tool that Princeton theology researchers could use in their own work; and third, by cultivating relationships with faculty through conference presentations and research correspondence while completing my SCAD degree.