From Star Wars to The Three-Body Problem, science fiction repeatedly turns to Buddhism to imagine humanity’s future in space. Drawing on its doctrines of emptiness, interconnection, and cosmic plurality, Ben Van Overmeire argues that Buddhism offers a ready-made cosmology for thinking about alien life and a decentered universe – an alternative to Western narratives of conquest, colonisation, and divine centrality. This cross-cultural perspective offers vital insight into how we should approach outer space, which is an urgent question as commercial spaceflight expands and new powers enter the space race.

In an iconic scene from the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back (1980), a young rebel named Luke Skywalker, having crashed his spacecraft into a swamp on a godforsaken planet, meets a tiny green alien. He isn’t looking for such an alien; he is looking for a great warrior named Yoda. He expresses as much to the alien, who immediately rebuts in his typical syntax: “Ohhh. Great warrior. Wars not make one great.” But of course Luke is being taken for a ride: this joyous little being, who rummages through Luke’s stuff, eats his food, and spars with his robot, is that same master Yoda. Luke is being tested and taught a lesson, which Yoda tries to teach him again and again: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

The Empire Strikes Back was directed and produced by people deeply interested in Asian religions. Master Yoda himself, with his typical way of putting verbs at the end of sentences, was inspired by a living Zen Buddhist master, Shunryu Suzuki, whom the producer George Lucas met in California. Yoda’s urging for Luke to forget what he has learned is a version of the title of Suzuki’s most famous book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970), while his emphasis on ethical behavior (wars are not great) reflects Buddhism’s broader ethical core teachings that discourage killing. One of the most famous science fictions about humanity spread across outer space thus draws strongly on Buddhism for its cosmology and ethics.

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I’ve come to think of Buddhism as the global counterculture of space exploration.

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Yoda is not unique. Indeed, a walk through the science fiction halls of fame reveals that many visionary authors gave Buddhism a substantial place in their imagination of a space-borne humanity. Before Star Wars, Arthur C. Clarke, the so-called “prophet of the space age” and the driving imagination behind the epoch-changing film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), imagined Buddhism to be the only religion that survives humanity’s contact with a wiser alien species. Closer to our own time, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion (1989) sage repeatedly casts massive AI entities that regulate our outer space travel as Zen Buddhist masters. In East Asia the presence of Buddhism is even more pronounced: as I have shown elsewhere, Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem cycle, the most popular Chinese science fiction series of all time recently turned into a Netflix TV series, draws strongly on Zen to elaborate its bleak, Hobbesian vision of outer space, while his colleague and second most influential Chinese science fiction author Han Song imagines a dystopian future where the Buddhist ethics of care penetrate every aspect of our existence.