Quantum entanglement and Buddhism share a secret — and it took physics until the twentieth century to stumble onto what the dharma has been pointing at for over two and a half millennia. If you’ve ever felt that separation isn’t quite as solid as it looks, you were onto something. So was Einstein. He just didn’t like where it led.
Spooky Action at a Distance
Einstein called it that — spooky action at a distance — and the phrase tells you everything about how unsettled it made him. According to ScienceDaily, quantum entanglement describes a phenomenon in which two particles, once connected, remain correlated regardless of the distance between them. Measure one and the other responds — instantly, without any signal travelling between them.
He took this problem with him to his grave. I think about that sometimes.
The particles don’t communicate across a gap. They behave as though the gap was never quite real in the first place.
Buddhism Has Been Here Before
The teaching of interdependence — pratītyasamutpāda — holds that nothing exists in isolation. Everything arises in relationship to everything else. Not as a poetic idea. As a precise description of the nature of reality. Look for a thing that exists entirely on its own, with no reference to anything else, and you won’t find it. The search itself will teach you something.
In the Karma Kagyu tradition we speak of all beings having been our mother in past lives. That’s not sentiment. It’s a recognition that the web of connection runs deeper than any single lifetime, deeper than any distance we can measure. The Net of Indra: each jewel reflecting every other jewel, endlessly, in every direction. Pull one thread and the whole net moves.
Karma operates the same way. An action sends ripples outward and inward simultaneously. The entanglement isn’t only spatial — it moves through time. Cause and effect as a kind of quantum correlation stretched across lifetimes, painting the way we perceive everything that happens to us.
Space Is Information
Some schools of Buddhist philosophy go further still and say that space itself is information. I find that framing quietly stunning. If every point in space contains the total field — if the universe is less a collection of separate objects and more a single deeply connected process — then spooky action at a distance isn’t spooky at all. It’s just what reality looks like when you see it clearly, without the filter of ordinary perception insisting that things must be separate to be real.
Einstein couldn’t rest with that. He kept reaching for hidden variables, some mechanism that would put the furniture back in recognisable places. The experiments disagreed with him at every turn. The dharma, I’d suggest, never had a problem with any of it — because the dharma never needed separation to be absolute in the first place. Awareness doesn’t require distance to function. It never did.
Am I onto something or out to lunch? Ten years on from writing the first version of this post, I’m more convinced than ever it’s the former.
I really find this poem just so beautifully puts into words how Entanglement feels. Who knew that the science could seem so romantic and almost fragile? I was moved to tears when I first read this, and my heart is still warmed today. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and consider checking out the sites Podcast and YouTube Channel where we visually and auditorially endeavour to convey the same written feeling we bring across in print.
Further Reading:
- 🔬 Quantum Entanglement — ScienceDaily
- ☸️ What Is Karma? — Quantum Awareness
- ✍️ Poem — Tyler Kent White
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