The Neon Bodhisattvas are a Buddhist-influenced movement of roughly 4,000 adherents who practice what they call 'engaged digital dharma' — the application of Buddhist principles to life in a hyper-augmented, corporate-dominated city. Founded by a former Ringo marketing executive named Hana Park-Oduya who left her Tier-4 life after a mental health crisis and ordained in a traditional Buddhist lineage before returning to GLMZ with a mission, the Bodhisattvas operate on a simple premise: suffering in GLMZ is not an aberration but the predictable result of attachment, craving, and ignorance operating at institutional scale. Corponations are attachment engines. Augmentation is craving made metal. The entire city is a monument to the second noble truth.

The Bodhisattvas don't withdraw from this system — that's the 'engaged' part. They work within it. Members maintain jobs, use augmentation, participate in the economy. But they practice mindfulness techniques — some traditional, some BCI-enhanced — designed to maintain awareness of the suffering the system produces and to respond with compassion rather than complicity. Their meditation centers, called 'Nodes,' offer free meditation instruction, mental health support, and a rare space in GLMZ where the only thing anyone is trying to sell you is the suggestion that you sit still for twenty minutes.

The Bodhisattvas run the most effective suicide prevention network in the Shelf, staffed entirely by volunteers who combine traditional Buddhist compassion practices with BCI-mediated crisis intervention. This single program has saved more lives than most religious movements in GLMZ can claim, and it has given the Bodhisattvas a moral authority that their small size would not otherwise warrant.