What Do You Mean by Empty?

Often in non-duality we hear the terms emptiness or empty fullness. They are frequently used as though their meaning were self-evident, yet they remain among the most misunderstood words. To some, emptiness suggests a vast cosmic void. To others it points towards a hidden reality lying behind appearances. Yet neither of these interpretations reflects the historical development of the term. To understand what is meant by emptiness, it is worth tracing how the idea evolved over more than two thousand years.

The Sanskrit word śūnya originally carried no profound philosophical significance. It simply meant empty, hollow, vacant or lacking contents. An empty bowl was śūnya. An unoccupied room was śūnya. The abstract noun śūnyatā simply meant “emptiness”. Before Buddhism, it was an ordinary descriptive word rather than a metaphysical concept.

References: Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899); Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 1998).

The earliest philosophical use of the term appears in the teachings of the historical Buddha during the fifth century BCE. What is often overlooked, however, is that the Buddha did not initially teach that all things are empty of inherent existence. Rather, he taught that experience is empty of a permanent self or anything belonging to a self.

When asked why the world is said to be empty, the Buddha replied that it is empty because no independent self can be found within experience. Bodies appear. Thoughts appear. Feelings appear. Perceptions appear. Yet nowhere can an independent owner of these experiences be discovered. Emptiness originally referred not to the absence of the world but to the absence of an enduring self within it.

References: Suñña Sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 35.85); Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom Publications, 2000).

Over the following centuries this investigation deepened. Early Buddhist teachings examined not only the person but the five aggregates—body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. Each was found to be without a permanent essence. The Buddha compared them to foam upon the water, bubbles, mirages and magical illusions. The point was never that they did not appear. Quite obviously they appeared. Rather, they could not be found to possess an independent and enduring core.

References: Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.95); Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

A profound development occurred around the second century CE with the Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna, founder of the Madhyamaka school. He extended the Buddha’s insight beyond the person to every conceivable phenomenon. If no permanent self could be found, why should any object possess an independent essence?

Nāgārjuna argued that nothing possesses svabhāva—an intrinsic, self-existing nature. Everything exists only through conditions and relationships. His famous statement, “Dependent origination is what we call emptiness,” makes clear that emptiness was never intended to replace the world with another ultimate reality. Rather, it described the absence of independent existence within appearances themselves.

Nāgārjuna’s insight extended even further. If nothing possesses an intrinsic, independently existing nature, then consciousness itself cannot be exempt. Just as bodies, thoughts and objects are empty of inherent existence, so too is consciousness—or what many contemporary non-dual teachings would call awareness. It, too, is empty of svabhāva—intrinsic existence.

References: Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā; Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Oxford University Press, 1995); David J. Kalupahana, Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (SUNY Press, 1986).

Nāgārjuna’s work gave rise to the doctrine of the Two Truths. Conventionally, we speak of people, trees, mountains and rivers. Ultimately, none of these can be found to possess an independent essence.

Yet this formulation carried a subtle danger. Readers could easily imagine two separate realities: an ordinary world of appearances and a deeper reality called emptiness hidden behind it. Rather than reifying conventional appearances as independently existing things, they simply reified emptiness instead. Emptiness became another subtle object, another ultimate principle or hidden reality possessing a privileged status over the world of appearances. The tendency to objectify had not disappeared; it had merely shifted from form to emptiness.

Once emptiness is conceived as a reality existing apart from appearances, the world itself can begin to seem insubstantial, secondary or ultimately unreal. This opens the door to a nihilistic interpretation in which the richness of lived experience is quietly dismissed in favour of an imagined void. Yet this was never Nāgārjuna’s intention. Emptiness was not proposed as another reality standing behind appearances, but as a way of pointing to the absence of independent existence within appearances themselves.

It was precisely this danger that the Chinese Tiantai master Zhiyi addressed during the sixth century CE.

Zhiyi developed the doctrine of the Threefold Truth. The first truth is emptiness. The second is provisional or conventional appearance. The third is the Middle.

The Middle is often misunderstood as a compromise between the first two. It is nothing of the sort. Nor is it a third reality standing between emptiness and appearance. Rather, it makes explicit that emptiness and appearance cannot honestly be separated into two realities, yet neither can they simply be collapsed into one conceptual identity. To say they are two introduces dualism. To say they are one turns them into another concept. The Middle refuses both positions.

Appearance is empty. Emptiness appears as appearance. Neither statement establishes an ultimate metaphysical relationship between them. They are simply different ways of pointing towards the same inexplicable immediacy.

The genius of Zhiyi’s formulation was that it prevented emptiness becoming another hidden absolute. It brought the teaching back to what is immediately present rather than allowing thought to construct another subtle object called emptiness.

References: Zhiyi, Mohe Zhiguan (Great Calming and Contemplation); Paul L. Swanson, Foundations of T’ien-T’ai Philosophy (Asian Humanities Press, 1989); Brook Ziporyn, Emptiness and Omnipresence (Indiana University Press, 2016).

This understanding finds perhaps its most elegant expression in the Heart Sutra:

“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”

This does not mean that form disappears into emptiness, nor that emptiness somehow produces form. Rather, it points beyond both assumptions. Form cannot be found as an independently existing thing, and emptiness cannot be found apart from form.

References: Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya (The Heart Sutra); Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books (1958); Red Pine, The Heart Sutra (Counterpoint, 2004).

Perhaps this historical journey leaves us with a more fundamental question than the one with which we began. What do we actually mean when we say that something is empty?

The historical development of the term has consistently pointed away from the assumption that independently existing entities can ultimately be found. Whether the investigation is directed towards the apparent person, the objects of experience or even consciousness itself, the conclusion remains remarkably consistent. Careful examination fails to reveal any independently existing thing possessing its own inherent nature. Yet it cannot honestly be concluded that nothing appears. Quite the opposite. Colours, sounds, sensations, thoughts, memories, bodies and worlds continue to appear exactly as they always have. What is absent is not appearance itself, but the separate entities that thought habitually assumes those appearances to be.

Seen in this light, emptiness has never been pointing towards a cosmic void, a hidden reality or another metaphysical principle waiting to be discovered behind experience. Rather, it has functioned as a way of describing the absence of independently existing things within the immediacy of what appears. The term therefore does not describe another reality; it invites us to question the assumptions we ordinarily make about the one that is already present.

Ironically, once this is understood, the word emptiness may itself become unnecessary. It has served its purpose. The investigation was never intended to establish emptiness as another ultimate truth, but to dissolve the tendency to objectify experience into independently existing things. Once that tendency relaxes, there is no need to replace the world with a subtler object called emptiness. There is simply what appears, free of the conceptual divisions that thought habitually imposes.

From this perspective, emptiness is not the conclusion of the investigation but the disappearance of the need for one. Nothing has been uncovered behind appearance, and nothing has been removed from it. What remains is simply this inexplicable immediacy, which cannot honestly be known as either something or nothing, yet which has never required another reality standing behind it in order to be complete.

With love,

Freyja

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