With so many problems on our planet, it can seem irrelevant to wonder, to hope, that there are Buddhas on other planets. Or that there are sentient beings with capacities for spiritual aliveness such as attention, gratitude, playfulness, wonder, and love. And yet it may be just what some of us need, in order to find hope and courage to face the problems. Buddhism and Process Philosophy, along with images from the James Webb telescope, can help us.

​Are there Buddhas on other Planets?

Imagining Extraterrestrial Spiritualities
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Process Philosophy: Extraterrestrial Beings as
Having Capacities for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

“On other planets with the conditions for life to emerge and to evolve for many billions of years, we should expect there to be some with creatures that, no matter how different in physical constitution and appearance, would share some of our capacities, such as those for mathematics, music and morality, or, more generally, truth, beauty and goodness.”

- David Ray Griffin, Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism​

Buddhism: Many World Systems as
​Habitats for Many Forms of Life

"On certain occasions, the Buddha has commented on the nature and composition of the universe. According to the Buddha, there are some other forms of life existing in other parts of the universe. The Buddha has mentioned that there are thirty-one planes of existence within the universes...The existence of these other-world systems is yet to be confirmed by modern science. However, modern scientists are now working with the hypothesis that there is a possibility of other forms of life existing on other planets.

As a result of today's rapid scientific progress, we may soon find some living beings on other planets in the remotest parts of the galaxy system. Perhaps, we will find them subject to the same laws as ourselves. They might be physically quite different in both appearance, elements and chemical composition and exist in different dimensions. They might be far superior to us or they might be far inferior.

Why should the planet earth be the only planet to contain life forms? Earth is a tiny speck in a huge universe...When we consider the vastness of the many universes making up what is popularly known as 'outer space', the hypothesis that other-world systems might exist is scientifically feasible.

What Buddhists Believe, Venerable L. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera

Extraterrestrial Spirituality
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Images from the James Webb telescope cannot help but make us wonder: Is there life on other planets? And, if so, is there intelligent life on other planets? 

To these questions I add: Is there spiritually-sensitive life on other planets? Here I have in mind beings who may, as David Griffin says, have very different constitutions and appearances, but who embody emotional qualities such as attention, a sense of beauty, felt connection, compassion, curiosity, devotion, faith, forgiveness, gratitude, generosity, listening, love, meaning-making, nurturing, openness, playfulness, questioning, wonder, vision, and zest for life.

I borrow these from the spiritual alphabet offered by one of the world's leading interfaith organizations, Here is the alphabet in its entirety:

​​​attention  -  beauty  -  being present  -  compassion   -  connections  -  devotion  -  enthusiasm  -  faith
forgiveness - grace -  gratitude  - hope - hospitality - imagination  - joy -  justice - kindness - listening
love  -  meaning  -  nurturing  -  openness  -  peace - play  -  questing  -  reverence - shadow - silence
​teachers   -  transformation   -  unity  -  vision   -   wonder  -  x, the mystery  -  yearning  -  you  -  zeal

Let these be names for what we might call spiritual sensitivities: terrestrial and extraterrestrial. 

Of course, I don't know if there are sentient beings on other planets with extraterrestrial spiritualities. We may be utterly alone when it comes to nurturing and openness, peace and play, love and listening. It is possible that our planet is the only planet among the billions of habitable planets in the billions of galaxies, on which sentient life unfolds. It is possible that we and only we can be enlivened by wonder and vision, enthusiasm and kindness. I doubt it, but it is possible.

What I know is that Alfred North Whitehead, Andrew M. Davis, David Ray Griffin, and images from the James Webb Telescope, open my own imagination to the possibility that there are indeed living beings on other planets with capacities for what Davis calls aesthetic experience, and that the kinds of experience named above are examples of such experience. Hence the title of this page: Are there Buddhas on other planets? And the subtitle: Imagining Extraterrestrial Spiritualities. 

Any confirmation of such life depends on evidence, whatever form it takes. And any further consideration of the possibility depends on a view, important to Davis and others, called panexperientialism.

Panexperientialism

a foundation for considering
Buddhas on other planets
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Panexperientialism is the view that, wherever there is actuality of any sort, on our planet or on any other planet, there is something like experience. This was Whitehead's view.

For Whitehead finite experience is always momentary, with the exception of one everlasting experience which he named the Harmony of Harmonies.  Finite experience is an event, a happening, in which an actual entity feels influences from its past actual world; responds to those influences with emotions (subjective forms) and creativity of its own; gathers the whole into complex, aesthetic unity; and enjoys the immediate result in a moment of satisfaction, after which the subjective immediacy perishes. These dynamics would obtain in quantum events in the depths of atoms, in a single moment of human experience, and, if such exist, in a single moment of experience in the life of an extraterrestrial being.

​In human life, says Whitehead, moments such as these - "occasions of experience" - are the very building blocks of our lives. We ourselves are not objects that endure unchanged through time; we are a series of such experiences extending from birth (and perhaps before) to death (and perhaps after). Each experience is itself a concrescence of the universe: a place where the universe as a whole comes together in the immediacy of the moment. In this concrescence, a certain kind of beauty is realized. The concrescence is, to use Davis's term. an aesthetic achievement and, I add here, an emotionally felt achievement. It is satisfying,

Here an interesting question emerges: Might there be living beings whose aesthetic achievement awakens them to the truth of the metaphysical perspective just articulated?  In extraordinary moments of awareness, might they awaken to the fact that each moment is a concrescence of the universe and thus understand the profound inter-becoming of all things? They would see into the very nature of things. For the sake of discussion, let us call them enlightened ones or Buddhas. Or, if you wish, Whiteheadian Buddhas.

​To be sure, among some Buddhists enlightened beings are imagined as transcending the world altogether, leaving it behind for a distant nirvana. There seems to be a dualism of a sort, with nirvana as one reality and the universe another. But other Buddhists offer a non-dualistic image of a Buddha. They say that nirvana and the universe are not different; that this very world, rightly understood, is nirvana.  On this view, a Buddha is someone whose ego drops away, awakening to fact that the whole of the universe is present in each moment; seeing the universe along the lines of a network of mutually reflecting jewels, each mirroring one another; and reaching out to others with an impulse to help them become enlightened, too. In their reaching out, they become Bodhisattvas: enlightened sages who return to the world again and again, promising never to enter final nirvana until all beings can join them.

Might there be Buddhas on other planets? 

The answer is Yes, at least from a Whiteheadian perspective. In From Negation to Exemplification A Deeper Whiteheadian Cosmotheology,[1] Andrew Davis suggests below that any form of extraterrestrial life will embody creativity and aesthetic attainment as described above. This would be true of very simple forms of extraterrestrial life, analogous to single cells and bacteria, and of (what we take to be) more advanced forms with capacities for wisdom and compassion, creativity and kindness. Davis ends his remark with a quotation from David Ray Griffin, who observes that, if the extraterrestrial life at issue has been evolving for billions of years, they would probably share with some capacity for mathematics, music, and morality, and, more than that, a concern for truth, beauty, and goodness. Here is how Davis puts it:

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​"For Whitehead, the fact that biological, mental and moral realities have emerged through human beings as part and parcel of nature, means that they cannot be limited to human expression alone; rather their metaphysical antecedents must be found in various degrees across the natural order.

While particular human expressions of life, mind and morality on our planet are certainly cosmologically peripheral, the more fundamental antecedents of evolutionary organism, creative experience and aesthetic attainment are metaphysically central. It is on this assumption of metaphysical uniformity, moreover, that we necessarily face implications of extraterrestrial commonality across these domains.

However more or less advanced different alien species, intelligences, minds and moralities may be, they will still share these ontological antecedents. Affirming an ontology of organic evolution, mental experience and aesthetic attainment meaningfully connects us to billions of potential beings that also exemplify these same principles in their own way. It is on the basis of such an ontology that David Ray Griffin utters the following conviction:

“On other planets with the conditions for life to emerge and to evolve for many billions of years, we should expect there to be some with creatures that, no matter how different in physical constitution and appearance, would share some of our capacities, such as those for mathematics, music and morality, or, more generally, truth, beauty and goodness.”

- Andrew Davis, From Negation to Exemplification A Deeper Whiteheadian Cosmotheology

If Davis and Griffin are right, we can well imagine that there are Buddhas on other planets. To be sure, there may also be many other kinds of beings: evil beings, lonely beings, confused beings, greedy beings. There is no reason to think that all beings on any planet are naturally inclined toward truth, beauty, and goodness. And yet, so process thinkers propose, there is in our universe an inwardly felt lure toward wisdom, compassion and creativity - toward truth, goodness, and beauty - by which all beings are beckoned into forms of aesthetic achievement and in which more advanced beings are beckoned into uniquely rich forms of experience. For Davis, this inwardly felt lure is God: the Poet of the world. For a Pure Land Buddhist, it would be Amithaba. The general idea is that the universe is embraced by, and included within, a larger life whose very nature is compassion and who seeks the well-being of each and all, wherever they happen to be: a Cosmic Bodhisattva.

For centuries Buddhists have spoken of multiple world systems in which multiple Buddhas are present. Some of these world systems are the galactic systems we see with our physical eyes (and now telescopes) and some are immaterial systems in various regions of the space-time continuum. In the latter respect we are reminded of Whitehead's idea of an extensive continuum with multiple dimensions, in which various kinds of actual entities may exist. The Buddhist idea is that there are indeed these multiple dimensions and that in other dimensions, as well as in the visible and galactic systems, there are awakened ones. In our time, the James Webb telescope has, for many, made the general idea of life on other planet more and more plausible. It is hard to imagine that there is not life on other planets of some sort, and perhaps countless forms of life. 

- Jay McDaniel


[1] Forthcoming. quoted with permission from Andrew M. Davis

So What?

Imagination, Wonder
Connection, Adventure
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The James Webb telescope has made Buddhists of all of us. It invites us to recognize that we live in a universe composed of billions upon billions of star systems, many of which contain planets on which life may evolve. Buddhists have been saying this for centuries. They say there are Buddhas in other star systems and on other planets, and add that we take inspiration from them, too.

Images from the telescope makes it even more likely that there are forms of life on other planets, and that, as David Ray Griffin observes, some other planets are inhabited by beings drawn to very ideals so important to us: truth, goodness, and beauty. If we think of Buddhist enlightenment as an awakening to the absolute inter-becoming of all things, combined with an impulse to help others awaken as well, then surely, on some planets, there are Buddhas, too.

This does not mean that all life on other planets is highly sentient. Nor does it mean that all life-inhabiting planets have Buddhas, or that all highly sentient beings on Buddha-inhabited planets are Buddha-like. There may be hungry ghosts, mean-spirited politicians, religious fundamentalists, and self-deluded bigots. 

Still, it is good to imagine Buddhas on other planets. We may or may not call upon them, as do some Buddhists. But the very possibility that there are Buddhas on other planets, bolstered by Griffin, Davis, and Whitehead, adds zest to our lives. In the spiritual alphabet "H" is for hope, "I" is for imagination, and "W" is for wonder. Entertaining the very possibility of Buddhas on other planets can help elicit each of these sensibilities, providing a bit of hope for us on our small planet, too. In our quest for wisdom and compassion, creativity and joy, we are not alone. That is good news.

Equally interesting is the possibility that highly sentient beings on distant planets might partake of the spiritual alphabet noted above. In sending messages to the heavens, we are tempted to send mathematical formulas and information about DNA. All to the good. But I suggest we find ways of sending the spiritual alphabet, too, perhaps rendered into musical or pictorial form. Of course, our sending may be in vain. Nothing may receive it. But the very act of sending is itself a spiritual activity on our part, a reaching out for connection with something more. In the spiritual alphabet, "C" is for connection and "Q" is for questing or, to use a Whiteheadian word, Adventure. 

In a world so fraught with pain and terror, with violence and greed, we rightly seek and hope that others might at least understand our pain, share with us their own trials if they have them, and jointly seek our respective kinds of wholeness. Until and unless we meet them, we can write science fiction. But, who knows, someday science may help us catch up with our fiction. That would be good news, too.

- Jay McDaniel

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