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Buddhism: Its Essence and Developmentby Edward Conze, Pages 131-135
Emptiness
Two things, the Sutra tells us, are most needful to the Bodhisattva, and to his practice of wisdom : "Never to
abandon all beings and to see into the truth that all things are empty. "We must now make an effort to understand this
all-important idea ofEmptiness.Here again the sanskrit root helps. It shows how easily the word empty could become a synonym forNot-Self.
What we call emptiness in English is sunyata in sanskrit. The sanskrit word sunya is derived from the root SVI, to
swell. Sunya means literally: relating to the swollen. In the remote past, our ancestors, with a fine instinct for the
dialectical nature of reality, frequently used the same verbal root to denote the two opposite aspects of a
situation. They were as distinctly aware of the unity of opposites, as of their opposition. Thus the root SVI,
Greek KY, seems to have expressed the idea that something which looks swollen from the outside is 'hollow'
inside. This is easily shown by the facts of comparative philology. You have the meaning swollen in such wordsas Latin cumulus (pile, heap) and caulis (stalk). You have the meaning hollow, from the same root, in Greek
koilos, Latin cavus. Thus our personality is swollen in so far as constituted by the five skandhas, but it is also
hollow inside, because devoid of a central self. Furthermore swollen may mean 'filled with something foreign.'
When a woman is swollen in pregnancy - and here again the Greeks use the same root kyo - she is full of a
foreign body, of something not herself. Similarly in this view, the personality contains nothing that really
belongs to it . It is swollen with foreign matter. Like the child the foreign body must be expelled.It is a great pity that these connotations of the word sunyata are lost when we speak ofemptiness. The door is
opened to innumerable misunderstandings. Particularly to the uninitiated, this emptiness will appear as a merenothingness, just as Nirvana did.
Although in Buddhist art emptiness is usually symbolized by an empty circle, one must not regard the Buddhist
emptiness as a mere nought, or a blank. It is a term for the absence of self, or for self-effacement. In Buddhist
thought some ideas belong together which we do not usually associate. I set them out here in a diagram:
Wisdom--Abhidharma--Dharmas--Own Being
l
Not Selfl
Empty
lPerfection of Wisdom--Emptiness
Bodhidharma, an Indian or Persian, who went to China about 500 A.D. expressed the meaning of the term con -
cisely when he said : "Allthings are empty, and there is nothing desirable or to be sought after. "
Used as technical terms, the words empty and emptiness express in Buddhist tradition the complete negation of
this world by the exercise of wisdom. The central idea is the complete denial and renunciation of, the complete
withdrawal and liberation from the world around us, in all its aspects and along its entire breadth.The Abhidharmists knew the term empty,but used it very sparingly . In the Pali Canon i t occurs only on a few
occasions. The New Wisdom School treats the term as the sesame which opens all doors, and Nagarjuna worked
out its epistemological implications. Emptiness here means the identity of yes and no. In this system of thought
the gentle art of undoing with one hand what one has done with the other is considered as the very quintessence of
fruitful living. The Buddhist sage is depicted as a kind of faithful Penelope, patiently waiting for the coming of
the Ulysses of enlightenment. He should really never commit himself to either yes or no on anything.But, if he once says yes, he must also say no. And when he says no, he must also say yes, to the same.
Emptiness is that which stands right in the middle between affirmation and negation, existence and non-existence,eternity and annihilation. The germ of this idea is found in an early saying, which the scriptures of all schools
have transmitted. The Buddha says to Katyayana that the world usually bases its views on two things, existence
and non-existence. It is, is one extreme; it is not is another. Between those two limits the world is imprisoned.
The holy men transcend this limitation. Avoiding both extremes, the Tathagata teaches a Dharma in the middle
between them, where alone the truth can be found. This Dharma is now called emptiness. The Absolute is
emptiness and all things also are empty. In their emptiness Nirvana and this world coincide, they are no longer
different but the same.
The Anatta doctrine openly disagrees with commonsense. The doctors of the Old Wisdom School had admitted
the conflict as irreducible by distinguishing two kinds of truth : Ultimate truth consists of statements about
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dharmas, conventionaltruth speaks ofpersons and things. The ultimate events of this school have very much the
same function as atoms, cells and similar entities, also normally ignored in daily life, to which the propositions of
modern science properly refer.
The New Wisdom School takes the concept ofUltimate Truth a step further. It is now found exclusively in
relation to the one ultimate reality, which is the Absolute in its emptiness. Ultimate truth means no longer
scientific but mysticaltruth. It is obvious that in this sense anything we may say is ultimately untrue. Emptiness
cannot be the object of a definite belief. We cannot get at it, and even if we could, we would not recognize it,since it has no distinctive marks. All doctrines, even the Four Holy Truths, are ultimately false, evidence of
ignorance. Theories cover up the Ineffable Light of the One, and they are only conventionally true, in the sensethat they conform to peoples' varying capacities for understanding spiritual experiences. In accordance with the
inclinations and gifts of beings the teaching can, and must, be varied indefinitely.
The doctrine of emptiness is frequently expressed by way of simile. The Old Wisdom School had already
compared this world around us to a mass of foam, a bubble, a mirage, a dream, a magical show. The similes had
the purpose of bringing home the insight that the world is relatively unimportant, worthless, deceptive and
unsubstantial. Poets in the West have often used the same similes with a similar intention :
But what are men who grasp at praise sublime
But bubbles on the rapid stream of time,
That rise and fall and swell and are no more
Born and forgot, ten thousand in an hour.
Or, the more famous :
The world is but a fleeting show For man's illusion given ;
The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow`
There's nothing true but Heaven.
When the New Wisdom School, in its turn, compares all Dharmas to a dream, an echo, a reflected image, a
mirage, or a magical show, it does so in a more technical sense. The Absolute alone is not dependent on anything
else; it is ultimately real. Any relative thing is functionally dependent on other things, and can exist, and be
conceived, only in and through its relations with other things. By itself it is nothing, it has no separate inward
reality. "Aborrowed sum is not one's own capital,"as Candrakirti puts it.
But if each and every thing is " devoid of an own being,"and does not really exist, like " the daughter of a barrenvirgin carved in stone,"how is it that we can see, hear and feel the things around us which are really just
emptiness? The similes of a dream, etc., are intended to answer that question. One sees a magical show, or a
mirage, one hears an echo, one dreams a dream, and yet we all know that the magical appearance is merelydeceptive, that there is no real water in the mirage, that the echo does not come from a man's voice and that an echo
is not someone speaking, and that the objects one loved, hated and feared in one's dream did not really exist.
Many misunderstandings of the Madhyamika conception of emptiness would have been avoided if full weight had
been given to the terms which are used as synonymous with it. One of the most frequent synonyms is Non-duali ty.
In the perfect gnosis, all dualities are abolished, the object does not differ from the subject, Nirvana is notdistinguished from the world, existence is no longer something apart from non-existence. Discrimination and
multiplicity are the hall-marks of ignorance. From another point of view emptiness is called Suchness,because one
takes reality such as it is, without superimposing any ideas upon it.
The statements which the Mahayana philosophers make about true knowledge cease to be paradoxical and absurd
when one realizes that they attempt to describe the Universe as it appears on the level of complete self-extinction,
or from the point of view of the Absolute. If it is a meaningful and rational undertaking to describe this world as it
appears to God, then the sutras of the Mahayana are full of meaning and rationality. Master Eckhart and Hegel
attempted a similar task. Their writings also suggest that God's mean ing is not always easily understood.