Is the Universe a Hologram? A Buddhist Answer
A physicist’s hologram, Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth, and the Ceremony in the Air
I read a piece in New Scientist today about Sabrina Pasterski, a young physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada[1]. Her work on the idea that the universe might be a kind of hologram has reporters asking whether she’s the next Einstein. I’m no physicist. The closest I get to holography is the shiny sticker on my credit card. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her picture of the universe, because it rhymes with something our tradition has been teaching for more than fourteen hundred years.
Here’s what I want to show. First, her physics suggests that two completely different descriptions of the world can both be true without either one being the “real” one underneath, which is very close to Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth. Second, it gives us a fresh way into ichinen sanzen, the three thousand realms in a single moment of life, as long as we read it the way Zhiyi insisted. And third, the place where everything comes together in her physics is the sky, which is exactly where the Lotus Sutra stages its most important teaching.
Pasterski has said nobody will be another Einstein, because science is collective and cumulative. Nobody will be another Buddha either: the Dharma keeps evolving the same way, collective, collaborative and crowd-sourced.
What Is the Holographic Universe?
A hologram is a flat surface that holds a three-dimensional image, like that sticker on your credit card. Physicists borrowed the word after a strange discovery about black holes: how much information a black hole can hold depends on the size of its surface, not the size of what’s inside. That led to the holographic principle, the idea that everything inside a region of space might be fully described by information on its edge.
Physicists have made this work mathematically, but only in a curved toy universe that doesn’t look like ours. Pasterski’s project, which she calls celestial holography, is an attempt to make it work for the kind of space we actually live in. And her “edge” is the sky. She’s said she means “celestial” literally, as in looking up at the night sky.
More precisely, her sky is a sphere at the far edge of space, in every direction at once, where light and other signals come in from and go out to. She proposes that everything coming into our world and everything going out of it could be described completely as a picture on that sphere, a picture with only two dimensions and no gravity in it at all. It isn’t finished, and nobody should call it proven. But the shape of the idea is enough for us.
The Threefold Truth: Two True Pictures, Neither One Underneath
Here’s the part that caught me. In her physics, a world with gravity and three dimensions of space, and a flat picture with no gravity and fewer dimensions, are proposed to be the same reality. Physicists call this a duality. Each description is complete. Neither is a rough sketch of the other.
The popular way of hearing “the universe is a hologram” goes wrong right here. It imagines the flat surface as the real thing and our world as a shadow projected from it. That’s an old spiritual habit, the idea that behind appearances there’s a truer world doing the real work. It’s exactly the habit Zhiyi spent his life taking apart.
Zhiyi, the sixth-century founder of the Tiantai school, taught that every single thing can be seen in three ways at once, which he called the Threefold Truth. Everything is empty, meaning nothing has a fixed nature of its own. Everything is provisional, meaning it really does show up and function in our lives. And everything is the middle, meaning it’s both of those at once, completely, without contradiction.
Pasterski’s physics gives each of these a fresh face. Emptiness: not even the number of dimensions the world has is fixed; it depends on how you describe it. Provisional: the world isn’t a mirage; the coffee cup on the table and the stars overhead are exactly how reality shows up from here. Middle: our world is fully real and fully without a fixed nature at the same time, which is why it can also be told as a flat picture without losing anything. For Zhiyi, the middle is never a deeper layer hiding behind the other two. If we make the flat picture the “real” one, we’ve built a hidden foundation, and Tiantai never lets the middle become a foundation. Read as two equal pictures of one reality, her physics rhymes with Zhiyi beautifully.
Ichinen Sanzen: The Whole Universe in One Moment
Zhiyi’s most famous teaching is ichinen sanzen, usually translated as “three thousand realms in a single thought-moment.” The three thousand is his shorthand for everything: every state of life we can be in, each containing all the others, every aspect of how things exist, and every environment they exist in. All of it is present in one moment of our lives.
It’s tempting to map this straight onto the hologram, with the single moment as the sky and the whole universe painted on it. But Zhiyi saw that move coming. In his great meditation manual, the Mohe Zhiguan, he refuses to say the mind creates the three thousand realms, and refuses to say it holds them the way a box holds its contents. The mind simply is the three thousand, and the three thousand simply are the mind.
That’s the same test we just applied to the physics. If the sky creates the world, or contains it, Zhiyi would object. If they’re one reality seen two ways, he’d nod. And there’s something about skies worth noticing. Pasterski’s sphere is a mathematical one at the far edge of everything, but it has a twin we all know: the sky over our own heads. Every star we see there is light that has already reached us. The sky we look at is a picture of everything arriving, gathered at the exact spot where we stand. That’s a lovely way of thinking about our single moment of life. It isn’t the factory where the universe gets manufactured. It’s the place where the whole universe arrives.
The Ceremony in the Air: Why the Lotus Sutra Happens in the Sky
This is where it gets fun for those of us who practice with the Lotus Sutra, because its heart takes place in the sky. In chapter 11 a jeweled tower rises out of the earth and hangs in the air, with Many Treasures Buddha (Prabhutaratna), an ancient Buddha, seated inside to bear witness.
Before the tower opens, Shakyamuni sends a ray of light from between his brows and summons Buddhas from all ten directions, the eight points of the compass plus above and below. Then he lifts the whole assembly into the air. A few chapters later, countless bodhisattvas well up from the space beneath the earth.
Above, all around, and below. The whole sphere of directions converging on one place where the teaching is received. That’s the sky we just looked at, staged as drama centuries before anyone wrote down the physics.
The sutra’s authors didn’t know any physics, of course. They reached the whole sphere through story and the physicists reached it through mathematics, but both put the whole of reality at the place where it’s received. And the sutra doesn’t leave us up there. The assembly eventually comes back down to Eagle Peak, and Nichiren finishes the move: the Gohonzon depicts the Ceremony in the Air, so wherever we chant, the ceremony is right here. The sky comes down to us.
What a Physicist’s Sky Teaches Us
So here’s what a physicist’s hologram taught me this morning. Two complete pictures of the world can both be true without either one hiding underneath the other, which is Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth. The whole universe can show up in one place without being manufactured there, which is ichinen sanzen read the way Zhiyi meant it. And the place where everything arrives is the sky, which is where the Lotus Sutra lifts us all.
Every time we sit down and chant, the whole sky arrives. Every direction converges on this one moment, this one breath, this one voice. Nothing has to be fetched from anywhere else. It shows up right here, where it’s received.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, Namu Myoho Renge Kyo...
A note on how these essays are written: they’re a collaboration between me and Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. I bring the idea, and we talk it through. Claude gathers the research and flags how sure it is of each source. We fact-check each other and push back on each other’s assumptions. Claude drafts the first version, and we revise it together, often several times, until the essay says what I want it to say, in my own voice.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2594010-does-sabrina-pasterskis-holographic-theory-make-her-the-next-einstein/
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