Trading cosmologies today: Emptiness (空), dependent origination (缘起), and non-duality (不二) in contemporary philosophy of dark matter

This paper takes inspiration from the Silk Road crossroads of Dunhuang and proposes an “opportunistic trade”of concepts between distant intellectual traditions, in particular Mahāyāna Buddhism and contemporary dark matter cosmology. Dark matter presents philosophy of science with a tension: it is fundamental to the standard model of cosmology, yet directly unobservable, known only through its gravitational manifestations accessed by an extensive infrastructure of telescopes and computational models. The paper argues that the Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrines of emptiness (空) and dependent origination (緣起), which entered sinified Buddhism through Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka (Middle Way, 中觀宗) and Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitāhrdaya, 般若波羅蜜多心經), allow us to characterize dark matter as a scientific postulate that gathers a stabilized pattern of manifestations without reifying any substrate beneath. After that, the paper presents the thesis of New Confucian philosopher Xiong Shili (熊十力) on non-duality of reality and function (體用不二), which emerges from his critical and syncretic re-reading of Mahāyāna Buddhism, in order to mobilise the Buddhist concept of 不二 to dissolve the residual philosophical anxiety about dark matter’s ontological standing. The paper advertises a philosophical stance towards dark matter that is (a) comfortable with ambiguity, (b) resistant to premature ontological commitment, and (c) attuned to the mediated character of contemporary cosmological knowledge. The motivation behind this operation is to demonstrate that philosophical positions originating in or inspired by Mahāyāna Buddhism constitute a conceptual toolkit of equal theoretical importance for the philosophy of cosmology alongside the pathways grounded in the Western canon.