Emptiness is the rejection of the belief that things have an ‘inherent existence’. It is this belief that leads to desire, to wanting and not wanting. Craving and clinging causes dukkha.
Nothing exists independently from the mind; everything is fabricated. The Buddha taught that all phenomena are empty of essence, of inherent existence.
The Buddha declared the illusory nature of any and all awareness, any consciousness of anything: “whatever is perceived, is empty”. If everything is fabricated, so is the mind - therefore, consciousness is fabrication. Fabrication itself is empty too. Ultimately, it turns out we cannot say that things are fabricated nor that they are not fabricated. What we come to understand is that the way things truly are is beautifully beyond the capacities of our conception.
And yet, we believe in the ‘independent arising’ (existence independent from perception) of all things and experiences. Liberation, Nirvana, comes from the complete dissolution of this ‘error in our sense and understanding of things’; this ‘fundamental delusion’ (avidya).
Impermanence is only a piece of the whole puzzle. To say something is empty is to say something much deeper and more radical, harder to fathom, than that things are inconstant, or even that, inspected more closely, phenomena are seen to be arising and passing with breathtaking rapidity and that we construct a solidity of continuity where in reality there is none.
Seeing the emptiness of all things =/= existential meaninglessness, nor a rejection of conventional reality, nor nihilism. Rather, seeing that something is empty means seeing that it is beyond the categories of ‘existing’ and ‘not existing’. “The teacher has proclaimed that all phenomena are primordially peace, free from arising, and that their real nature transcends every pain.” This is neither nihilism nor reification.
If I find that my practice is somehow making me less compassionate, less generous, less caring about ethics, then something is wrong in my understanding or at the very least out of balance in my approach, and I need to modify how I am practising.
Common initial reactions to ‘emptiness’:
Disbelief
It is clear that our lives, at least at times, involve suffering (dukkha in Pali) - pain, disease, discontent of all sorts. This is the First Noble Truth. Beginning to inquire into how this dukkha comes about, we can see that there are many causes. We recognize unhelpful habit patterns - of action, speech, and thought, of reactivity, and of contraction of the heart; we notice tendencies to feed emotional states that are not nourishing, and often to somewhat neglect to nurture those that are; we see that we chase after things that will not bring lasting fulfillment. All this and more we can understand. Looking more deeply though, the Buddha pointed out that all this dukkha has craving and clinging as a cause. This, we could say, is the short version of the Second Noble Truth.
To crave is to be in a state of dukkha.
[All things] are simply posited by conception. The world is fabricated through conception… completely conceptualized.
- Upalipariprccha Sutra.
As our understanding of voidness deepens through our own practice, we still very much respect the functioning of conventional reality. But we’ve undermined, in a way that takes the suffering out of experience, the beliefs that reify things.
Imagine that you enter a room that is dark except for a lamp in one corner. There you see your friend, huddled next to the lamp in a state of great anxiety and staring transfixed at the wall opposite. “A wolf! A wolf!”, he is whimpering in fear. Turning to look at the wall, you see a large silhouette of a wolf but very quickly realize that it is just the shadow of your friend’s hands, cast by the lamplight on the wall. In his fear he is completely unaware of his hands or how he is holding them, or the fact that the wolf shape is merely their shadow. […] The illustration […] implies our involvement somehow in fabricating the illusion and the appearances of things. In this scenario, although your friend may have been trying to “be with” the wolf, “accept” its presence, even remind himself of the impermanence of all things, at the deepest and most significant level ‘insight’ and ‘wisdom’ here must mean seeing that the wolf is a fabrication that he himself has been fabricating.