<p>Humanoid Buddhist robots are often discussed as novelties, as signs of a supposedly distinctive East Asian comfort with technology, or as prompts for metaphysical questions about whether a machine can become religious. This article argues that such framings miss the institutional and ritual problem that makes these cases sociologically significant. The more productive question is not whether robots can become monks, bodhisattvas, or ritual specialists in any ontological sense, but why religious institutions repeatedly place them in reception, explanation, sermon performance, guided meditation, and other carefully delimited forms of public pedagogy while stopping short of fully replacing human clerics. Building on scholarship on digital religion, mediation, ritualization, and bounded religious automation, the article develops the concept of <i>bounded ritual automation</i>. This concept highlights the selective delegation of visible, repetitive, and affective religious labor to machines together with the retention of high-risk forms of ritual authority by human actors. Through a comparative analysis of Kodaiji Temple’s android Kannon Mindar in Kyoto, Longquan Monastery’s robot monk Xian’er in China, and the use of Pepper in Japanese funerary settings, the article shows that East Asian Buddhist robotics does not represent frictionless technological substitution. Rather, it reveals calibrated strategies of institutional adaptation under conditions of demographic aging, temple decline, platformization, and state regulation. “Electronic Buddhas” are therefore best understood not as curiosities, but as diagnostic sites where authority, presence, labor, and legitimacy are renegotiated in contemporary East Asian religion.</p>