'Arrival': Foreseeing Her Daughter's Death
Why did she still choose to give birth?
This is a real choice,
not just a thought experiment from a philosophy class.
It is the dilemma Louise faces
after learning the alien language in the film 'Arrival'—
a life-defining choice.
A viewer left a comment for me recently,
saying that after watching our channel's series on consciousness and language,
she rewatched 'Arrival'.
She said,
this time,
she felt a deep shiver in her soul.
I relate to that feeling deeply.
Because this film touches on a core question
we have been discussing repeatedly:
Is language merely a tool for communication,
or is it consciousness itself?
Hello,
everyone.
I am Wang Lijie.
Today, I want to use a Buddhist perspective
to deconstruct the film 'Arrival'
and the original novella it was based on,
Ted Chiang's 'Story of Your Life'.
You will discover
that the themes in this story
were taught by the Buddha 2,500 years ago.
The only difference is that the Buddha didn't use mathematical formulas,
but a philosophical framework called 'Dependent Origination'.
First, a brief recap of 'Arrival's' plot.
Twelve alien ships land simultaneously across Earth.
Linguist Louise is recruited by the military to decode the alien language.
These aliens,
called Heptapods in the film,
use a very unique writing system.
It isn't written word-by-word from left to right.
Instead, they draw a complete circular symbol in a single stroke.
The entire meaning is presented all at once.
As Louise learns this language,
her consciousness undergoes a fundamental shift.
She begins to see the future.
She sees that she will have a daughter,
and that this daughter will die at a young age
from a rare disease.
She also sees her husband eventually leaving her, unable to cope.
Yet, she still chooses to walk this path.
Now,
at this point,
most reviews would say
this is a movie about choice and acceptance.
That's true,
but I want to tell you,
if you stop there,
you're only seeing the surface level.
Let me take you deeper.
Ted Chiang mentioned in his notes
that the inspiration for this story wasn't aliens
or linguistics,
but a principle of physics:
Fermat's Principle of Least Time.
This principle states that
when light travels from one point to another,
it always chooses the path that takes the shortest time.
For example, light refracts when passing from air into water.
The angle of refraction is exactly what minimizes the travel time.
From a human perspective,
this looks like causality.
Light hits the water,
then refracts according to physical laws.
Cause first,
effect second.
But Ted Chiang found a fascinating fact:
This same path
can be described in a completely different way,
known as the variational principle.
The variational principle implies that
it's as if the light already knows its destination before starting,
and then chooses the optimal path.
It's not just making it up as it goes.
It sees the whole picture from the very beginning.
The effect comes first,
then the cause.
This is teleology,
a way of understanding the world completely opposite to causalism.
Humans are used to causality—
causes lead to effects,
and time is an arrow.
But Heptapods are used to teleology,
where cause and effect exist simultaneously.
Time is a circle.
Think about it.
This is actually a very subversive idea.
Physics tells us
that causality and teleology are mathematically equivalent.
For the same phenomenon,
both descriptions are valid,
both are precise,
and neither is just an approximation.
In other words,
the universe doesn't care which way you choose to understand it.
Causality versus purpose
isn't a matter of right or wrong;
it's about which coordinate system you're observing from.
A detail from the original novella, not in the movie, really moved me.
Ted Chiang uses two alternating narrative lines.
One is Louise's interactions with the Heptapods;
the other is her speaking to her unborn daughter.
Throughout the story,
she uses the future tense to recall a life that hasn't happened yet.
This writing style is the literary realization of the Heptapod language.
Reading it, you get a strange sensation,
as if time has been folded within the words.
At this point,
I'd like you to pause for three seconds
and recall a core concept from our previous videos
discussing Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein said,
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Language also participates in shaping consciousness.
If a language lacks a distinction between past and future,
then a consciousness using that language
would not experience linear time.
This is exactly what happens to Louise.
She didn't gain a superpower to see the future;
she adopted a new language,
and her structure of consciousness changed.
This process
is known technically as linguistic relativity,
or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
In simpler terms,
the language you speak
determines the world you live in.
Now,
let me translate this into Buddhist philosophy.
In Yogācāra Buddhism, there is a core concept called "Lakshana-naman."
"Name" and "Form."
Yogācāra teaches
that the world we experience is not the world itself,
but a projection constructed by consciousness through names and forms.
The moment you name something,
you simultaneously decide how you can understand it,
how you feel it, and how you interact with it.
Names and forms are not labels attached to things;
they are your world.
What did the Heptapod language in Arrival do?
It broke the deepest name-form in human language:
the linear structure of time.
Once that linearity is broken,
past and future are no longer two different things;
they become different aspects of the same thing.
Like a sphere,
what you see at the North Pole is different from the South Pole,
but it has always been the same ball.
This is what Buddhism calls "Dependent Origination."
It doesn't mean things happen in a sequential chain of cause and effect.
Dependent Origination means
all phenomena are mutually conditional
and manifest simultaneously.
The Avatamsaka Sutra contains a famous metaphor called Indra's Net.
At every node of this net hangs a jewel.
Each jewel reflects all the others.
There is no first jewel,
nor is there a last one.
The world that the Heptapods see
is Indra's Net.
By learning the Heptapod language,
Louise sees this net for the first time.
But the most moving part of the story
isn't what she sees,
but what she does after seeing it.
She chooses to step into it.
She sees her daughter's brief life,
the collapse of her marriage,
and all the pain.
And then she says,
"I still choose to experience it all."
What is this?
In January 2017,
right after seeing the film,
I wrote an article about Arrival on my WeChat account.
It can still be found today.
I asked a question in that article:
"If you could see your whole life,
what would you change?"
My answer then was,
"The question itself might be wrong."
Because if you truly saw the whole picture,
you would understand why every moment happens.
You wouldn't want to change a thing.
Today, I want to take this answer a step further.
In Buddhism,
what is a Bodhisattva?
A Bodhisattva is not someone ignorant of suffering.
A Bodhisattva sees all suffering
and yet chooses to enter Samsara to help all beings.
Is this just "walking into the lion's den"?
No.
It’s not a matter of courage.
It’s a shift in perspective.
When you look from within linear time,
suffering is something to be avoided and escaped.
But from the perspective of Dependent Origination,
suffering is not a problem to be solved.
Pain is part of the texture of life.
It isn't the opposite of joy;
they are the front and back of the same fabric.
Louise's choice
is not endurance,
nor sacrifice,
and certainly not resignation.
Her choice is:
"I see it all,
I understand it all,
and so I embrace it all."
This is similar to Stoic acceptance we discussed before,
but there is a subtle difference.
Stoicism says,
"Accept what you cannot control."
But Buddhism says,
there is no independent "you" controlling anything at all.
What Louise experiences in that moment
is not a strong self choosing to accept fate.
Rather, the very concept of "self"
becomes transparent under that holistic view.
She isn't making a choice;
she is becoming the choice itself.
This is the fundamental difference between Arrival and most sci-fi.
Most sci-fi approaches the future as:
"I know the future,
so I must change it."
Arrival's attitude toward the future is:
"I know the future,
so I can finally live fully in every present moment."
My old article also mentioned an interesting story.
When Captain Cook first reached Australia,
he pointed to a kangaroo and asked the locals,
"What is this?"
The locals replied with a sound like "Kangaroo."
Later, this pronunciation became the English word "kangaroo."
But in the local language, that pronunciation actually...
...meant:
"I don't understand what you're saying."
The biggest chasm between two civilizations
is not different answers,
but questions that don't even align.
This perfectly echoes the theme of "Arrival."
The Heptapods arrive on Earth,
and twelve countries each try to decipher their message,
nearly starting a war due to a misunderstanding.
It is like this between human civilizations,
between humans and aliens,
and even between one individual and another.
You think you are talking about the same thing,
but your linguistic boundaries define completely different worlds.
Yogacara Buddhism calls this phenomenon "Parikalpita."
It's using your own cognitive framework or language model to fit someone else's world,
and then believing that is the truth.
In "Arrival," the military tried using game theory to understand the Heptapods' intent,
which almost destroyed everything.
What was Louise's approach?
She let go of the human linguistic framework,
allowing her consciousness to be reshaped by another language.
In spiritual practice, there's a name for this:
"Transforming consciousness into wisdom."
It's not about learning new knowledge,
but about the container of knowledge itself changing shape.
Think about it.
The process of learning our mother tongue as children
is actually a process of being programmed.
Chinese carves the world in one way;
English carves it in another.
The Heptapod language carves it in a way humans never imagined.
What Louise did
was essentially volunteer for a conscious reprogramming.
What did this require?
It required her to first set aside her original cognitive operating system.
This is the same as the "Beginner's Mind" in Zen.
You must empty the cup first
before new water can be poured in.
Ted Chiang spent five years researching linguistics to write this story.
At a science fiction writing workshop in 1989,
he became obsessed with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
This hypothesis states that
language is not just a tool for thought,
but that language itself shapes thought.
This is almost exactly what we emphasized
when we discussed Wittgenstein earlier.
Arriving at the same destination through different academic portals.
And Buddhism,
twenty-five hundred years ago,
was already at that destination.
When the Buddha said "all phenomena are mind-made,"
he wasn't talking about idealism;
he wasn't saying the world is something you imagined.
He was saying that
the world you experience
is always shaped by the structure of your consciousness.
Change the structure of your consciousness,
and you live in a different world.
Louise’s story
is the most vivid sci-fi footnote to that statement.
What's interesting is
a sub-plot in the film many people missed.
The Heptapods didn't come to Earth to invade,
nor to observe.
They came because they will need human help three thousand years from now.
Giving their language to humanity
was an act of sowing seeds.
What does this mean?
It means that in the Heptapods' worldview,
needing help in 3,000 years and giving a gift today
are the same event.
This isn't predicting the future and planning ahead.
It's in a world without the arrow of time,
where all causes and conditions ripen simultaneously.
See?
Isn't this just another name for "Dependent Origination"?
There's no question of who helps whom first.
Helping itself is part of the natural texture of existence.
The reason why the movie Arrival leaves
so many people feeling unsettled long after watching it,
isn't because its sci-fi setting is cool,
but because it touches on a question everyone holds deep down
but never dares to face
seriously:
"If you knew in advance how much pain this life would hold,
would you still be willing to live it?"
There is no standard answer to this question,
but I think Arrival gives a response very close to the Buddhist spirit.
The answer isn't about choosing or not choosing;
the answer is,
when you truly see the whole,
the binary opposition of choice itself disappears.
You are simply living—
fully,
completely,
living.
Everything else
is a gift.
This is probably why that viewer said,
"My soul trembled slightly."
That trembling wasn't fear,
nor was it being moved;
it was recognition.
In that movie, she recognized something she had already vaguely touched.
Have you ever had a similar experience?
After watching a movie or reading a book,
suddenly feeling that thing you've been searching for
has been expressed by someone else
in a completely different way.
Please tell me,
what was that moment for you?
I am Wang Lijie.
I'll see you next time.