The Drowned Buddha: Buddhism, Ecology, and Mythopoeic Science in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy

This article examines how Buddhism is mobilized in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy as both a critique of scientific hyperrationality and a resource for ecological ethics. Drawing on the Dalai Lama’s “secular ethics” and the seventeenth Karmapa’s “path of environmental Buddhism,” Robinson invokes Buddhist concepts of emptiness (śūnyatā), interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda), and compassion (karuṇā) to resist what Lisa Sideris terms “mythopoeic science,” the sacralization of scientific narratives as redemptive cosmologies. However, his engagement with Buddhism remains selective: traditions are taken up insofar as they reinforce his vision of a reconfigured science, while those less compatible with Western rationalism are set aside. The result is a portrayal of Buddhism that simultaneously critiques scientism and reinscribes American exceptionalism, whiteness, and technocratic authority. Situating Robinson within the broader history of Buddhist modernism and its American reception, the article argues that his trilogy illuminates both the possibilities and limitations of Buddhism’s role in shaping ecological thought in the United States.