I am following the online lecture series NYU Space Talks: History, Politics, Astroculture. The first, on 15 September, was Ben Van Overmeire's, with Ruixiang Hu (Duke Kunshan University): “A Mountain in Space: Taixu and the Buddhist Imagination of the Cosmos”.

Taixu (1890–1947), a reformer and institution-builder, is presented as the founding figure of modern Chinese Buddhism. The point of the talk: when he writes about other worlds, he is not a fringe eccentric, he is the establishment.

The cosmos he writes from is the Buddhist one: countless worlds, as in the Amitabha Sutra, and a world made of fragrance in the Vimalakirti Sutra, where scent does the work of speech. It is empty, but emptiness is not nothingness: everything changes, and nothing stands alone (Indra's net).

In his 1940 diagram, the solar system is Mount Sumeru, the cosmic mountain of Buddhist cosmology. The four inner planets are its four continents, the four outer ones the retinues of the four Heavenly Kings. Earth is the southern continent; Mars is the northern one, Uttarakuru, a utopian human realm: physically identical inhabitants, eugenic evolution, no possessions. The planets of modern astronomy, from Mercury to Neptune, are placed inside a Buddhist cosmos.

The talk also takes Liu Cixin's “Three Body Trilogy” as a point of comparison: “hard” science fiction with Buddhist elements woven through.

What stays with me: nothing stands alone. In Indra's net every thing exists through the others, and Taixu's cosmos holds the Buddhist world and modern astronomy in one picture. And a hidden centre: the cosmos is organised around a mountain no one sees, Sumeru, which Taixu draws as the solar system.

Our culture and our myths shape our technologies and the way we enquire into the world around us, even in science. Taixu does not put myth and science side by side: he draws the planets inside the myth.