Buddhism in Russia in the internet dimension

This paper describes the peculiarities of the presentation of Buddhism in Russia on the Internet. Nowadays religious activities have infiltrated the virtual space through the different ways. The Internet becomes a field of religious constructing and deconstructing with wide prospects for virtual religious development. Buddhism has a strong position in the Internet, surpassing the religious boundaries, and acquiring the features of mass culture. Buddhist ideas are presented in mass media, popular fiction and films, often without the original sacral content. Millions of people have received or transmitted Buddhist information on the Internet. Contemporary religious Internet studies are growing. C. Helland has proposed theoretical distinction for online religion and religion online, H. Campbell has defined four different forms of religion in the Internet, and has outlined digital religion studies. Such terms as cybersangha, virtual Buddhism and blogisattva were invented for the description of the Buddhist activity on WWW. The authors made a series of requests to the Google search engine for the keywords concerning Buddhism to find out some results of its representation. It was found that results in English are more prevalent than in Russian. Also it seems that queries are connected to the territorial but not ethnic attributions of Buddhism. It should be noted that a lot of results are linked with educational queries. Social media is a growing Internet phenomenon, which includes social networking websites, video hosting services, forums and blogs. Some of these social media websites contain Buddhist information.