rey's Reviews > The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

Emptiness, tell me about your nature. Maybe I’ve been getting you wrong…
(Adrianne Lenker, “Zombie Girl”)

Emptiness is not easy to grasp.

Like the snake mishandled by the ignorant, emptiness, when misapprehended, can cause more harm than good. So let me begin this review with the intention of explicating emptiness as best I can, to help rather than harm.

In saying that something is empty, what does it mean? Empty of inherent existence. We act as if things exist inherently when we assume that they are unchanging, independent.

Here's a statement that betrays a belief in inherent existence. A loved one has just died, and you are told that he or she is in a better place. Not really. The truth is that the molecules that made up him or her are now in the ground. And he or she, as we knew him or her, has ceased to exist.

So the first and most obvious candidate for emptiness of inherent existence is the self, since Buddhism already takes the belief that there is no self. But Nagarjuna doesn't stop there. Other candidates for emptiness include motion (since it depends on a mover), time (since it depends on a chronology of before and after), and most radically, emptiness itself.

To say that emptiness is empty may sound mystical at first, but it's actually the opposite. We may think that if we live in an empty world, there must be some other, non-empty world, perhaps Plato's world of forms, where everything is actually as it appears. The emptiness of emptiness just says that emptiness itself is not an inherent essence. It's not an unchanging property, but simply a dependent property of things. Emptiness is always emptiness of.

So, why should we care? Because emptiness provides a middle way between two extremes of thinking that cause suffering. The first extreme is reification, which holds that all things are inherently real. Think about the last time you felt that something was eternally real and unchanging. Maybe the borders of a country, maybe your mental state. These beliefs cause harm because they're untrue. Emptiness shows how nothing is as fixed as it appears, and there's great liberation in that.

But emptiness also provides solace against the opposite of reification, which is nihilism. To take a nihilistic point of view is to believe that nothing is ultimately real, that nothing matters. This is the most common misconception about emptiness, probably what Nagarjuna is referring to in his metaphor about the snake wrongly apprehended.

Emptiness is precisely the opposite of nihilism. Because it asserts that every single thing depends on its existence and on its meaning on everything else. The nihilist lives in a world of atomized individuals, things, and events that have no connection to everything else. The individual who views emptiness lives in the opposite world, in a rich mesh of interconnection and dependence.