From the Public LectureLife in the Universe—Concordance with Buddhist ThoughtThis is a revised text of a public lecture hosted by this Instituteon 25 November 2013 in Tokyo.

Chandra Wickramasinghe

End of “Earth-centred philosophy”

I

N the long history of mankind the past 100 years stands out as ashining beacon of scientific and technological achievement. At thestart of this era our forebears—great-grand parents and grandparents—
were just getting accustomed to the benefits of the steam engine, theinternal combustion engine—the motor car—electric lights, the telephone and the telegraph. Now, a hundred years on, we live in a worldthat our grandparents could not have dreamed of - the bullet train, spacetravel, genetic engineering, television, supercomputers, iPads andiPhones, to name but a few. The world today is instantly and intimately
connected in ways that could not have been imagined even as recently asa few decades ago.
One hundred years ago, in astronomy, a new generation of telescopes
were beginning to reveal evidence in the form of faint nebulae thatpointed to the existence of very distant galaxies outside our Milky Way.
In biology the facts relating to the evolution of life throughout
geological time as well as the great antiquity of the Earth itself werebeginning to be grasped. Today with the help of modern techniques weare able to probe the frontiers of biology as well as astronomy. A flotillaof space telescopes are exploring ever more distant galaxies. DNA—ourgenetic heritage—has now been deciphered, but its interpretation is stillin progress. The merging of astronomy and biology into a new discipline of astrobiology is beginning to take shape.
In this article I shall point out that discoveries, particularly those that
imply a connection between life and the external cosmos, are consistent
with the tenets of Buddhism. Such a connection was denied for a longtime in Earth-centred Western philosophies. In 1600 AD Giodarno
Bruno was burnt to death for asserting that there were a multitude of
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inhabited planets circling distant stars. This type of resistance to accepting extraterrestrial life exists in some degree even today, albeit in a
subtle form.
An important aspect of Buddhism is that compared to other religions
it is relatively free of dogma. Buddhism is a philosophy that encourages
freedom of expression and initiative and exhorts one to discover truths
about the world for oneself. This is epitomised in the closing stanza of
the Parinibbana sutra, Sakyamuni Buddha’s last words to his disciple:“You should live as lamps unto yourselves.
Hold fast to the Lamp of Truth.
Take refuge only in Truth;
Look not to refuge to anyone beside yourself.”
There can be no better advice that would serve to launch any graduate
student of science upon a brilliant career of innovation. In this regard theBuddhism of Nichiren Daishonin and the original Buddhism of
Siddhartha Gautama are entirely equivalent, and I shall make no
distinction between the two. It is also noteworthy that precisely thissentiment of self-reliance has been reiterated by SGI President Daisaku
Ikeda for several decades.
Six centuries ago the long process of degrading the place of our home
planet in relation to the rest of the universe began. After a bitter struggle
against authority, the Earth came at last to be reduced to the status of an
ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star. From the dawn of the 20th
century every new discovery in astronomy has further diminished theposition and importance of our own planetary abode. Now we know ofcourse that the Earth is one of eight planets which form part of our solar
system—one that includes a vast number of smaller rocky bodies and agigantic shell of frozen comets, numbering some 100 billion, located at
an average distance of a tenth of a light year from the sun.
A few comets every year are perturbed from this gigantic reservoir ofcomets to plunge into the inner planetary system, and they become
comets of progressively shorter period, of which comet Halley, cometHale-Bopp are examples. The sun at the centre of our solar system isjust one of a few hundred billion similar stars that make up the Milky
Way; and the Milky Way itself is just one of hundreds of billions ofsimilar galaxies that make up the observable universe. Most astronomers
believe today that this entire system was created as a result of a gigantic
explosion—the Big Bang—that occurred 13.8 billion years ago. But
there is no reason to expect that the standard Big Bang model, no matterlife in the universe—concordance with buddhist thought203

how popular, will be the last word on this matter. At every stage in thehistory of cosmology one particular theory came to be accepted, andevery time it turned out to be wrong. There is no compelling reason forthinking that the present popular version of the Big Bang theory will not
be replaced or modified at a later date. Other theories, where theuniverse has no beginning nor end, are in currency at the present time,and one such model may well come to the fore at some later date.

Hierarchical World Systems in Buddhism
In ancient Buddhist texts hierarchical world systems are clearly defined.
The smallest world unit is called a minor world system, and a minor
world system could clearly be identified with the modern concept of aplanetary system. The next unit, comprised of a thousand minor world
systems, is said to make up the next stage which is called an intermediate world system. In the ancient text Visuddimagga it is stated that“as far as these suns and moons revolve shining and shedding their lightin space, so far extends the intermediate world system”. The “intermediate world system” in Buddhism thus lends itself immediately for
identification with a galaxy. A thousand intermediate world systems inturn comprise a so called major world system, which can be identified
with a cluster of galaxies. In Mahayana Buddhist teachings it is further
postulated that there are countless major world systems throughout a
Universe without a beginning or end.
Buddhist teachings also expound the idea of the evolution of world
systems. Each world system is supposed to go through 4 temporal stages
or Kalpas as they are called: formation, continuance, decline anddisintegration. Such a sequence is of course clearly discernible in thelife cycles of individual stars, planetary systems and even galaxies.
A point about ancient numbers is worth making. The number
thousand (or koti) which occurs frequently in these descriptions is open
to interpretation as to what it really meant. A hundred billion rather thana thousand would fit better with current astronomical estimates, but one
should remember that the translation of the ancient Sanskrit word koti
could involve some uncertainties. Some scholars would say that theword koti meant simply a very large number, a number that is way inexcess of everyday experience - perhaps even infinity.

Microorganisms from Space
The question of extraterrestrial life can be discussed properly only
against the backdrop of the immense vastness of the universe. In my204life in the universe—concordance with buddhist thought

view we have for too long regarded, without any proof, that life must be
special or centred on the Earth. Every textbook of biology starts byconfidently asserting, what is in fact a scientific myth for which there
was never any proof—the theory of the warm little pond of organics on
the Earth in which life is posited to have begun. As soon as biochemists
in the 1950s and 1960s had discovered that the complexity of even thesimplest bacterium is of an astronomical order, or even superastronomical order, attention should rightly have shifted away from a small-scaleterrestrial origin to a process that embraced far bigger cosmic systems,
even the entire universe. Today the primordial soup theory has little ornothing in its favour. Evidence from astronomy, geology and biology
itself disputes its validity. In astronomy, the detection of life-relevantmolecules has been made in galaxies that are so far away that the
Universe was less than one fifth of the present size when their light wasemitted.
Forty years ago, together with the late Sir Fred Hoyle, I first began toargue that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon, arising most probably, as aunique, albeit highly improbable cosmic event. The information needed
to put life together, even in its simplest and most primitive form, isspecific in kind and superastronomical in quantity. How was this highly
specific information acquired in the first place from a situation that was
initially thoroughly chaotic? From a very simple calculation, one could
infer that the minimal number of trials required to discover the crucial
arrangements for life, as for instance in the enzymes, through random
shufflings of the components, far exceeds anything that could happen in
all the oceans of the Earth, let alone in Darwin’s “warm little pond”.
Once started, however, life must spread inexorably and colonise every
habitable niche in the cosmos.
On this theory life is all-pervasive in the cosmos and is carried
everywhere in the form of clumps of cosmic dust that contain freezedried bacteria and viruses. In our own immediate neighbourhood weargue that life in the form of bacteria must have been brought to the
Earth by comets and meteorites. We argued also that a continuous inputof such bacterial and viral genes is imperatively needed in order toexplain what is known about how life evolved on the Earth frommicroorganisms to the complex and varied forms we see today.
Recent advances in microbiology, including the discovery that many
types of microbes can withstand the harshest imaginable conditions,
including exposure to huge doses of ionising radiation, all point to a
space origin of life. Microbes have been recovered from the guts ofinsects fossilised in amber for over 30 million years. In a very recent

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study the deepest and darkest frozen Lake Whilliam in Antarctica,
sealed away from the outside world for 15 million years, has yielded
DNA evidence of life, including complex life, under 4 kilometres of ice.
There is no Darwinian sense by which these extreme survival properties
could have arisen in isolation on the Earth. Only in an open cosmic
system, with the need for surviving space travel, could all these properties have evolved.		
This theory of cosmic life is in essence a modern rendering of anancient idea—panspermia—first discussed by the Greek philosopher
Anaxoragas in the 5th century BC. The theory embodies the conceptthat the seeds of life—microorganisms—are present everywhere andeternally in the Universe. I have already referred to evidence from
biology that favours this theory. Astronomical evidence for this point ofview has also become so compelling in the past decade, that continuing
to deny what now appears to be an obvious fact is fraught with danger.
We now believe that we have actually discovered the existence of
extraterrestrial life in interstellar space and in the dust from comets, inmeteoroids collected in the stratosphere in July 2013 and in a Sri
Lankan meteorite that fell in 2012.

Galaxy as One Gigantic Connected Biosphere
One of the most exciting areas of modern astronomy is the search forplanets that are similar to Earth orbiting distant stars. Many studies
directed at such a search are presently under way deploying orbiting
telescopes. In the year 2013 the grand total of alien Earth-like planets, inwhat is still a very small sampling of our galaxy, is already up to 900.
And extrapolating from this small sample to the entire galaxy it has been
estimated that there are no less than 100 billion such planets—averaging
one for every sun-like star. This means that the average separation
between two Earth-like planets is a mere 5 light years. This is a very
short distance in cosmic terms and clearly shows that exchanges ofbacteria and viruses between planets are not just possible, but are inevitable. The entire galaxy, our Milky Way system can thus be regarded as
one gigantic connected biosphere. It follows that life of all types known
on Earth, ranging from bacteria to plants, animals and even intelligent
life, must to a high degree of probability be all-pervasive. All this is ofcourse fully consistent with the teachings of Buddhism.
On the 12th of February 2001 the code for the entire human genome
was successfully deciphered. One immediate surprise was that there
were a far smaller number of genes coding for proteins than we had

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hitherto thought—less than 25,000. But it was in the sequences ofnucleotides in DNA that lay outside the genes that the tangled web of
human evolution is at last coming to be unravelled. A surprisingly large
fraction of our DNA, perhaps as high as 50%, is in the form of viralsequences. And a subset of this is in the form of what we now recognise
to be related to “retroviruses”, of a type in which the AIDS virus is an
example. Some years ago the late Sir Fred Hoyle and I were ridiculedfor suggesting that the AIDS virus may have had a space origin. From
what is now emerging it can be seen that this is most likely to be true.
Our ancestral line, that led through primates and anthropoids to Homosapiens over hundreds of millions of years, shows clearly the relics ofrepeated viral or retroviral attacks presumably similar to AIDS. At eachsuch viral attack the evolving line was almost completely culled, leaving
only a very small surviving immune breeding group to carry through aform of this virus tucked away in its genome.
Viral sequences added in this way, I believe, provide evolutionary
potential that could lead to new genotypes and new species at one end of
the scale, and to new traits and the capacity to express our genes innovel ways at the other. I have referred earlier to recent discoveries ofcometary microorganisms raining down from space into the stratosphere. The estimate of the total daily input of such material is close to
one tenth of a tonne, so it would be foolish to ignore its possible
biological implications. The implication for the evolution of life would
be profound. Without this continuing input of genes, life on Earth would
not have gone past the stage of microorganisms. It is becoming clearthat our very existence on this planet is contingent on this rain ofbacteria and viruses from space.

Pandemic Diseases from Universe
We have been extraordinarily slow to recognise all the facts that relate toour indubitable cosmic ancestry, but I am convinced that changes ofattitude are imminent. In the near future it will become clear thatmicroorganisms—bacteria and viruses—coming to the Earth fromoutside could also on occasion pose serious threats of pandemic disease
not only in humans but also in plants and animals. This is connectedwith an idea I explored as early as 1979 that most of the pandemics
throughout history were driven from space incidence of new viruses andbacteria. With all the data that is currently available across a wide rangeof disciplines I believe there is an urgent need for the possibility ofbacterial and viral ingress from space to be taken seriously. I cannot

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illustrate this better than by quoting from an article by Dr. Louis
Weinstein in the New England Journal of Medicine of 6 May 1976 inwhich he reviews all the available data relating to the influenza
pandemic of 1918/1919 that caused some 30 million deaths worldwide:“The influenza pandemic of 1918 occurred in three waves. The first
appeared in the winter and spring of 1917–1918…… This wave wascharacterised by high attack rates (50% of the world’s population wasaffected) but by very low fatality rates.… The lethal second wave, whichstarted at Ford Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1918,
involved almost the entire world over a very short time…… Its
epidemiological behaviour was most unusual. Although person-toperson spread occurred in local areas, the disease appeared on the same
day in widely separated parts of the world on the one hand, but, on theother, took days to weeks to spread relatively short distances. It was
detected in Boston and Bombay on the same day, but took three weeks
before it reached New York City, despite the fact that there wasconsiderable travel between the two cities. It was present for the firsttime at Joliet in the State of Illinois four weeks after it was detected in
Chicago, the distance between those areas being only 38 miles……”
With no air travel in 1918 a simultaneous first strike in Boston andBombay is strong evidence of a component of the virus falling in fromspace. From what I have presented today I maintain that we cannot
afford to ignore the evidence. Measures must be put in force to monitor
the stratosphere for incoming potential pathogens. In the event of athreat being discovered, preventative measures such as the production of
appropriate vaccines could be put in place. In this way it might bepossible to avert the worst consequences of any future pandemic causedby space-borne microbes that could threaten us. So much for the ingressof cometary microorganisms from space.

Physical Impact on Species & Civilizations
Another connection between comets and life is the direct physicalimpact of comets and asteroids on the Earth. The entire history of ourEarth has been punctuated by comet impacts from the very first
moments of its formation. By far the most fierce and unremitting
episode of such impacts occurred between 3.8 and 4 billion years ago,
and this period is called the Hadean epoch, or the epoch of Hell. It isremarkable that at the end of this epoch we find the very first evidenceof microbial life on our planet, strongly suggesting that this life was infact brought to Earth by impacting comets. We know now that comet208

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impacts also brought most of the water that went to form the Earth’s
oceans, thus making our planet a congenial hope for life.
At later epochs comet impacts died down to a mere trickle, but they
did not completely cease. One such impact event that happened 65
million years ago caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and over 85
percent of all terrestrial life. Although major impact events are rare,
being separated by tens of millions of years, the interaction of our planetwith fragments of comets with sizes ranging from tens to hundreds ofmetres must have happened frequently, continuing even into historicaltimes. Victor Clube and Bill Napier argued some years ago that a giant
comet broke up about 20,000 years ago into such fragments, causing
episodes of bunched collisions.
A collision with one such fragment that occurred in 1908 led to thewell-known Tunguska event in Russia. An object of about 100 metresacross entered the upper atmosphere of the Earth over Siberia in theearly hours of June 30, 1908. A great fireball was seen to pass low over
the town of Kirensk in Siberia and came down over a remote part of theSiberian taiga. The object did not reach the ground but exploded in theatmosphere at a height of about 8 kilometres. The brilliant fireball, said
to have outshone the Sun, was seen as far as 1000 km away from its
point of descent; and the sound of the explosion was heard at evengreater distances. The immense blast wave felled trees over a distance ofsome 40 or 50 km, and the heat from the fireball charred tree trunks for
distances of up to 15 km from the centre of impact. Estimates of thetotal energy of the impacting object range from 13–30 megatonnes of
TNT, equivalent to the explosive power 650–1500 Hiroshima bombs.
There is recent evidence to suggest that the collapse of the Indus
Valley Civilization and the end of the Old Egyptian Kingdom may havecoincided with clusters of Tunguska-like cometary bolide impacts. So
also do certain events that coincided with the final collapse of the
Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. According to Chinese records theperiod of Nichiren Daishonin in the 12th and 13th centuries, wasmarked by a broad peak in meteor activity. It is remarkable that thisgreatly revered monk and scholar who inaugurated a major reform ofJapanese Buddhism in the 13th century, who was condemned to death,
was spared from the executioner’s axe by the dramatic spectacle of abright, gigantic meteor that almost certainly crashed to the Earth.
Just as in the time of Nichiren Daishonin in the 13th century, there isa growing unease in our 21st century society that is leading people tosearch for new paradigms to carry them into the future. The unease is
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activity, including religion. The latter manifests itself in the large-scale
emptying of churches that are causing dismay to church leaders. Thereis also a wave of intolerance and racism in many Western countries, andthe spectre of terrorism and war looms large over the international
scene. Most of the world’s economies are in deep recession producing
rising inflation and unemployment, with unremitting levels of poverty
and starvation in store. The twentieth century’s goal of economic justiceand of fairness and compassion in the world is now only a distant
dream. It is here that Buddhism and Buddhist values can play a
profoundly important role by seeking to extend the bounds of humansympathy to encompass the whole of humanity, rather than this or thatclass, or clan or nation. SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s heroic lifelong
mission has been to foster the cause of world peace by the propagationof Buddhist values. What better philosophy can there be than one thatpreaches the unity of all life and universal love? This is the sentimentand the motive that has driven President Ikeda to do more than anyone
alive today in the cause of World Peace.

Reductionism Cannot Explain Consciousness
Let me next turn to the subject of consciousness in so far as it relates tocosmic life. What is consciousness and how does consciousness relate to
the external world? Contemporary science has not yet been able totackle such questions, except in a very superficial way. Modern techniques of neurophysiology and experimental psychology have hardly
touched upon the nature of the higher levels of consciousness thatundoubtedly exist in all of us. Some schools of post Jungian psychology
have actually begun to adopt Buddhist attitudes on these subjects asworking hypotheses from which tests and experiments could be devised.
The reductionist methodology of science has undoubtedly succeededin unravelling the chemical nature of life including the workings of theindividual cell, but there is scarcely any understanding of the true natureof consciousness and of the workings of the brain at its highest levels of
performance. The starting premise from which most scientists haveprobed the workings of the human brain excludes the existence of“mind” as a distinct entity. Recent research, starting from such a negative premise, is now leading to a contradiction whereby qualities ofconsciousness or mind are seen to emerge as entities distinct from thephysical structure of the brain. Using the language of computers, thephysical and chemical structure of the brain constitutes the hardware;consciousness and mind constitute the software for expressing personal-

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ity, emotions, creativity and a good deal more. Reductionist science has
thus far failed to come to grips with the nature of the software thatdrives the biological computer which is the brain.
Buddhism recognises the existence of a sequence of conscious states,
starting the lowest levels of consciousness associated with basic sensory
perceptions such as touch, smell and sight, to a transcendent
consciousness that is essentially universal in character. In Mahayana
Buddhist traditions the highest ninth state of cosmic consciousness iscalled the Amala Consciousness. Amala consciousness, which is supposedly present in all of us, can be seen, when it is awakened, as
merging with some all-pervasive quality of the Universe.
The Buddhist concept of human life is that each of us is a psycho
physical unit comprised in its most primitive state of three components;
the sperm and the ovum that go to make the zygote along with a packet
of consciousness derived from the cosmos. The union of all threecomponents is required in order to form a conscious human being.
Before leaving the subject of consciousness it is worth pointing outthat ideas connected with consciousness have also entered the stage ofthe physical sciences, particularly with the emergence of quantum
mechanics. Until the advent of quantum mechanics it was thought thatthe operation of making a measurement on the Universe is divided into
two distinct components: the subject that perceives and the object that isbeing perceived. This division has now become blurred. On the scale ofatoms the perceived universe is intimately connected with theconsciousness of the observer through the act of observing itself. Thishas given rise to the phenomenon known as the “collapse of the wave
function” which many eminent scientists including, Eugene Wigner,
explicitly identified as a quantum version of the mind-body problem. It
is indeed quite remarkable that all these concepts are fully in accord
with the Buddhist idea that consciousness is the ultimate source of all
knowledge.

“Universal Consciousness is the Font of All Knowledge”
Because the modern scientific viewpoint is derived from the applicationof the methods of empirical science one might wonder how the sameconclusions could have been reached 2500 years ago, long before theadvent of modern techniques—for example microscopes and telescopes.
The answer could lie in the powers of introspective meditation in whichhigher conscious states are involved, powers to which Indian sages havetestified for thousands of years. If we are indeed creatures of thelife in the universe—concordance with buddhist thought

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Cosmos, as the evidence tends to show, would it not be reasonable that
we have some innate knowledge of the nature of the cosmos itself
hidden deep within ourselves? A relationship between the microcosm oflife and the Universe at large must exist for the simple reason that the
one is derived from the other. When a modern well-educated scientist
makes an inspired connection between apparently disparate natural
phenomena, we are happy to say that intuition was involved. Thisintuitive process could not be fundamentally different from the mannerby which the Buddhas discover truth. The Universal aspiration to
Buddhahood or knowledge, embodied in Mahayana Buddhism, implies
that a form of cosmic consciousness is latent within each of us.
The idea that such a Universal consciousness is the font of all
knowledge, with its implication of the interconnectedness of the manydifferent attributes of the Universe, combined with an abiding respect
for all life on our planet, can be regarded as the central tenet of a holistic
Buddhist philosophy. The very survival of our social institutions and of
humanity itself could well be contingent upon the adoption of such aworld view.
We have seen in this article that life is a phenomenon that cannot be
confined to the Earth. Likewise consciousness and intelligence also
cannot logically be regarded as exclusively terrestrial. On other planets
orbiting other stars similar forms of intelligence must have arisen as anatural consequence of the evolution of cosmic life. It is also highly
likely in the author’s view that science and technologies of the kind wefind on Earth have also arisen in countless other places, and consequently also convergent patterns of social and religious development. We may
thus expect to find that only those extraterrestrial civilizations that
acquired Buddhist-type non belligerent philosophies would have thelongest persistence in the Universe. Those that did not will self-destruct
on relatively short timescales, as indeed our own conflict-riddled humansocieties are threatened at the moment. There would thus be a process of
cosmic natural selection favouring Buddhist-type social organisations
which would be endowed with the highest levels of longevity.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Daisaku Ikeda and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1998. Space and Eternal Life, Journeyman Press, London
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1982. Evolution from Space, J.M. Dent &Sons, London
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1993. Our Place in the Cosmos: The
Unfinished Revolution, J.M. Dent & Sons, London
Chandra Wickramasinghe, 2013. A Journey with Fred Hoyle, World Scientific
Publishing, Singapore
Chandra Wickramasinghe, 2014. The Quest for the Origin of Life, World Scientific
Publishing, Singapore
Takafumi Matsui, 2013. Sri Lankan Red Rain Phenomenon and the Origin of Life,
Kadokawa, Tokyo. Co-op by Chandra Wickramasinghe