Emptiness is Nagarjuna's claim that all phenomena lack intrinsic existence, and that includes emptiness itself. For me it means form resists capture at its core.
How the word moved
It goes back to my December 2005 posts on Einstein and the Buddha, where I read the Buddha as using metaphysics freely without tying himself to any of it. In June 2019 "form is emptiness" became a way of cutting the formal sciences down to size. In April 2023 I took it out into the street in Empty World.
In my words
"When Nagarjuna, the most important Buddhist philosopher besides the Buddha himself, said that all phenomena are empty, he had to swallow the obvious consequence: ..."
from Empty World, 3 Apr 2023
Related
- Inherited from Nagarjuna - It's his Madhyamaka.
- Related Empty World - That's emptiness out in the street.
- Related Samsara - Samsara is the world of form that emptiness empties.
- Related Megamaya - Maya is another Indian concept I use as a tool.
Still open
If emptiness is right, my own structures should be read as provisional. My patterns and protocols rarely say so, and I'm not sure what it would look like if they did.