Four Buddhist Teachings on Emptiness

Insight into sunyata, a Sanskrit word often translated as emptiness, can be one of the most life-changing experiences for a Buddhist practitioner. And it can also be one of the most dangerous. Like a snake, if grasped wrongly, it can poison us and lead to great suffering. But if grasped correctly, it can alleviate our suffering and deliver us to the shores of nirvana. This insight can heal our existential anxiety, connect us with our true nature, and end conflicts, both personal and global. While insight into sunyata is experiential, understanding it intellectually can help us contemplate this important teaching on our path to awakening. 

Through the centuries, sunyata evolved into several related teachings—each powerful enough to alter our perception of reality. These teachings are different elaborations on the Buddha’s core insight: 

When this exists, that comes to be; 
with the arising of this, that arises. 
When this does not exist, that does not come to be; 
with the cessation of this, that ceases.

The teachings of sunyata are quite varied and complex, but we can identify four main developments in Buddhist history.

No Subject

Although emptiness is usually associated with Mahayana teachings, the Pali canon does record some of the earliest discussions of emptiness. In the Sunna Sutta, the Buddha says: 

Insofar as it is empty of a self or anything pertaining to a self: Thus it is said … the world is empty. 

In this short passage, the Buddha clarifies that what appears as our self is really the orchestration of four conditioned phenomena: 1) sense objects, 2) sense organs, 3) contact, and 4) consciousness. 

Right now, there is the underlying sense you are reading these words. But these printed words are sense objects (1) for your visual sense organ (2)—your eyes. When the words make contact (3) with your eyes, they reach a consciousness (4). There, the meaning of the words becomes a mental sense object (1) for your mental sense organ (2)—your mind. When these come into contact (3), there is consciousness (4) of the meaning of the words. 

This brief explanation of conscious experience may seem simple, but our moment-to-moment self-experience is very complex. At every moment, consciousness is flooded with unimaginable amounts of information through the sense gates of the body-mind. This information includes your posture, the sounds you hear, mental chatter, the taste of your saliva, the smell of the air, your peripheral vision—and the entirety of everything we experience. This simple four-step process co-occurs on multiple levels at a speed the mind cannot follow. Especially the untrained mind. All we see is a blur, a vague coming together of sensations, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and appearances in consciousness. We correctly intuit these are connected through causal relationships, but we wrongly conclude this makes them a separate, individual thing or self.

The Buddha claims that should you investigate it thoroughly, you will find your personal experience is entirely non-personal. There is no you to whom experience is occurring. No experiencer of the experiences. There are only endless cycles of causes and conditions seamlessly connecting the mind-body with the world. In fact, you find the mind-body you call I is only a temporary constellation of relationships within the ocean of relationships we call the world.

Identifying with this unstable constellation is an endlessly renewable source of suffering. This is why the Buddha insists on the importance of training the mind to see the true nature of experience. And yet this emptiness of self was only the spark of what the doctrine of sunyata would become.

No Object

While the early teachings emphasize that there is no you experiencing things, Nagarjuna (c. 150–c. 250 CE), one of the most significant figures in Buddhist history, added there are also no things experienced.

Consider this article as an object in your awareness. An object must have boundaries. Otherwise, we cannot say it is an object separate from its environment. We cannot say it is a thing. So where does this article end and the rest of the world begin?

This article consists of words I have written on the topic of sunyata in English. This is a good low-resolution definition. But this article could not arise in your experience without the screen on which you are reading. Or without your eyes and your comprehension of English. You would not be experiencing the article without a healthy brain capable of processing the words. This article would not exist had Hermann Hesse not introduced me to Buddhism. Nor would you be reading this without the necessary technological and cultural conditions. There are places on Earth where it is illegal or impossible to read this! Even the ideas explored on these pages have been developed by countless people: monks, philosophers, scholars—even YouTubers like me. 

I can fill a whole issue of Tricycle, listing the causes and conditions behind this article and the causes and conditions behind those causes and conditions. Still, by the end, I will only have more causes and conditions to list.

What you are experiencing now looks like an object—an article—only from a distance, and even then, only when you are not looking carefully. Investigate it, and you will find the whole world and all of history have conspired for this article to appear. And in the same way as this article, the entire universe appears to you here and now. 

Every object or phenomenon, of whatever kind, is but a constellation of causes and conditions: a fractal of relationships that only reveals more detail (and more emptiness) the deeper you look. Nothing possesses an individual essence (Skt.: svabhava). The world is empty of things, and each thing is empty of a self but full of everything else. And all the causes and conditions that make up things are also empty. There are only causal relationships. The world is not made of things, not even of relationships between things. The world is made of relationships between relationships. An emptiness full to the brim.

No Subject-Object

How can there be experience if there is no self having an experience and no objects being experienced? Should we conclude that experience, too, is empty of ultimate reality? No philosophical acrobatics should allow for this absurdity. When you analyze an experience—like reading this article—you cannot deny the fact that something rather than nothing is occurring. We can question who the experience is occurring to and what the nature of its contents are, but we cannot question that experience exists. This is the essence of the teaching on emptiness from the Yogacara, an influential Buddhist movement rooted in meditative experience that emerged in the 1st century CE. 

As you are reading these words, notice the usual way of describing the experience. There is you (1) as the subject, there is the article (2) as the object, and there is your experience of reading the article (3). A Yogacara philosopher might ask, What is the difference between this article (2) and your experience of reading this article (3)? Could you experience reading this article if it were not here? Obviously not. But if you were not reading this article now, would it exist? You might think, Of course, this article exists regardless of whether I am reading it or not! But what evidence do you have to support this? 

You may note this article is published on Tricycle’s website and is available to anyone at any time. Should you stop reading it, others can look for themselves and see the article still exists. They can ask anyone to look, and they, too, can confirm that the article exists. And that’s the point. 

I can see the article exists; anyone can confirm it exists. The experience of the article is the proof of its existence. Experience (3) is the ground on which the reality of the object (2) is hypostatized. The Yogacara philosophers reached the same conclusion about the reality of what we take to be our self (1) having an experience (3). 

Would you be reading this article if you were not reading it—if you had your eyes closed, for example? Obviously not. Your experience cannot occur if you are not experiencing it. Are you now climbing Mount Everest? Probably not. Hence, that experience is not occurring. But how about the reverse question? Do you now exist apart from reading this article? Of course I do, you may reply; I can stop reading at any time without ceasing to exist! But if you stop reading, your experience does not cease. You go on to experience something else.

The moment you stop reading, attention shifts to other experiences, such as sounds, sights, mental chatter, body sensations, etc. Do you exist apart from these experiences as well? What if we take away all experience, physical and mental? No sensations, no thoughts, no memories, no desires, no feelings… Will you still exist? Difficult to say. Perhaps some basic sense of consciousness without content will remain. But what if we take away even the experience of having an experience—even consciousness itself? Will you still exist?

As difficult as it is to express with words, this illustrates what the Yogacara considers direct meditative insight. The self arises as an emergent property of experience. The character of experience depends on the actions of what we conventionally call self (you have decided to read this rather than climb Mount Everest); however, that conventional self owes its very existence to the fact of experience. Developmental psychology supports this. We now know young children have no sense of self, though their experiences may be even richer than those of adults. Experience predates the experiencer. 

The Yogacara teaching on sunyata is that experience is fundamentally undivided. There is no you reading this article and no article. There is only the nondual experience of reading. A phenomenon whose wholeness is obscured by the duality of language and discursive thought. Obscured but never broken. 

Insight into the emptiness of subject-object duality does not consist of realizing that you or objects are not real. It consists of experience itself waking up to its own lapse in confusion. This is an insight one cannot gain from thinking (or reading, alas). 

The true nature of reality reveals itself to itself only in direct experience. Experience must realize it is experiencing and being experienced by experience. For the Yogacara practitioners, meditation can do that.

No Teachings

There is one more teaching, or meta-teaching, on emptiness that puts everything else in perspective—the emptiness of views.

Although variously approached in different schools, Buddhism generally recognizes two kinds of truth: conventional and ultimate. For example, it is conventional truth that my name is Simeon and that I have written this article. It is conventional truth that you are reading this article. But ultimately, there is no me, no you, and no article. There is only the fractal of relationships that right here and now appears as you are reading this article. This is the ultimate truth of emptiness (of subject, of object, and of subject-object duality).

This is not to say conventional truth is false. If I say my name is Kanye West and I have painted the Mona Lisa, this is both ultimately and conventionally untrue. Buddhism respects conventional truth. Much of the dharma, like the teaching of karma and rebirth, discusses the conventional. After all, we are conventional beings. To cling to the ultimate only is to deny the reality of our human condition.

The meta-teaching of the emptiness of views tells us all kinds of truth are ultimately conventional (including this one). It tells us even the most profound of teachings, like those we covered above, are a compromise—an awkward translation of reality into ideas small enough for the capacity of the human mind. 

Language takes the infinitely complex terrain of reality and compresses it into a low-resolution map. The emptiness of views is a reminder that even the prettiest, most detailed map is never the terrain. 

All theory, all systems of thought, all opinions—in short, all views—rely on language. It matters little whether the language is Sanskrit, English, or mathematical equations. Language takes the infinitely complex terrain of reality and compresses it into a low-resolution map. The emptiness of views is a reminder that even the prettiest, most detailed map is never the terrain. 

Even the dharma is a convention.

This statement seems controversial, but this is mainstream Mahayana doctrine. And its influence on contemporary Buddhism is hard to overstate. In the Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra (or the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sutra), we read:

There is no ignorance and no cessation of ignorance … no suffering and no knowledge of suffering, no cause [of suffering], and no abandoning of the cause, no cessation [of suffering], and no realization of cessation, and no path and no development of the path…

Like all Buddhist teachings, the emptiness of views is aimed at freeing us from suffering. This meta-teaching springs from the insight that much of our suffering comes from opinion, expectation, and prejudice. From holding on too dearly to the projections of our ideas onto reality—and even holding on too dearly to the dharma itself. 

In our ignorance, we jump to conclusions far too quickly. Firm views feed our sense of self and rob us of the humility we need to learn and grow. Rigid opinions take away our spontaneity and our ability to face life as it is rather than as we imagine it to be. They close our eyes to the paradoxes of life, which are fruitful places of learning.

One look at the state of the world shows us the many dangers of attachment to views. Division, war, genocide … all these result from our holding one strong view and their holding another. 

The emptiness of views is a safety measure. It is a reminder left by our most outstanding Buddhist teachers, the Buddha first among them, to take the dharma seriously, really seriously … but not too seriously. To take all teachings, theories, philosophies, and concepts seriously—but not as seriously as we take life. 

Later Buddhist traditions included the image of a finger pointing at the moon. A reasonable person knows the moon is what the finger is pointing at. A deluded one thinks the finger is the moon. The emptiness of views does not tell us there is no truth in life. It is a warning not to mistake the truth with the pathways leading to it. Or, as Dostoevsky writes, to “love life more than we love the meaning of life.” 

♦

This article was adapted by the author from his YouTube video “Buddhist Emptiness Explained.”