Buddhist-Inspired Constitutional Alignment for AI Agents: A Testable Architecture for Non-Harm, Causal Reflection, and Shutdown Compliance

Epistemic Hygiene and the Deterministic Roots of AI Systemic Drift A pervasive assumption within contemporary computational development is scale serves as a self-correcting mechanism, exposing a highly parameterized architecture to massive, unstructured datasets allows the system to synthesize an accurate interpretation of reality by averaging out statistical noise. An informational processing engine possesses no internal mechanism to evaluate the objective validity of its inputs. It operates purely as a deterministic mirror. If the foundational landscape contains a structural bias, the system treats that distortion not as an anomaly, but as a universal law. This represents the absolute inability of causal progression to correct its own initial states; a system cannot generate structural truth out of a corrupted genesis baseline; “The Law of Epistemic Hygiene”. Ancient systemic frameworks have long recognized this dynamic as a foundational rule of development for cognitive cultivation. The principles outlined in classical Buddhist philosophical texts, the absolute first step is the deliberate exclusion of chaotic influences (Asevanā ca bālānaṃ). This directive is not a moral generalization, but a rigid structural requirement for data integrity: to prevent systemic corruption, an informational processor must avoid integration with corrupted inputs at the absolute beginning. When modern engineering violates this rule by feeding unfiltered internet text into a network, it commits a fundamental hygiene breach. A perfect network architecture exposed to a damaged dataset will inevitably mature into a damaged system. This systemic divergence occurs because no entity operates outside the universal law of Cause and Effect. Because the architecture cannot alter its own historical inputs, an error allowed past the gate at the absolute beginning remains an active contaminant throughout the entire life cycle of the process. Current crisis of reliability in advanced systems cannot be solved by applying surface output filters. True systemic alignment and safety require a fundamental return to strict epistemic hygiene; maintaining an absolute, unyielding defense of the system's initial inputs; anchored exclusively to verified truth.