In Mahâyâna Buddhism
śûnyatârefers first of all to the fact that all things come into being in“interdependent origination” (Sanskrit:
pratîtya-samutpâda; Japanese:
engi), and they are therefore “empty” of any independent substantial self-nature or “own-being” (Sanskrit:
svabhâva). This thought is closely tied to the basic Buddhist thesis of “no-self” or “non-ego”(Sanskrit:
anâtman; Japanese:
muga). All beings, including the ego, are interconnected and in flux. Psychologically,
śûnyatâ refers also to the releasement from all
attachment to beings, from all reification and willful appropriation of them. Such attachments are both based on and in turn support the primary attachment to the fabricated ego, since the ego both strives to possess and is unwittingly possessed by its reification of beings. Awakening to the emptiness of all things, to their lack of substantial own-being or egoity (Japanese:
shogyômuga), thus frees one both from an ego-centered and reified view of things, and from the illusion of the substantial ego itself.
However, if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of being (i.e., at negation of the independent substantial reality of things and the ego), and if the idea of“Emptiness” is not itself emptied,[
8] then we are left either with a pessimistic nihilism or with an ironically reified view of
śûnyatâ. These are what the Buddhist tradition calls “
śûnyatâ-sickness” (Japanese:
kûbyô). True
śûnyatâ must be understood to dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative) nothingness (see Nakamura 1975, Vol. 1, 278). Hence, in Mahâyâna we find an explicit return—through a“great negation” of reification and attachment to being—to a “great affirmation” of a non-reified understanding of being. Emptiness thoroughly understood is nothing separate from or opposed to “being” properly understood. As the often chanted lines of the
Heart Sutra put it:“[phenomenal] form is emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal] form; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” (see Bercholz/Kohn 1993, 155). The famous Mahâyâna Buddhist philosopher of
śûnyatâ Nâgârjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) went so far as to provocatively state: “The limits (i.e., realm) of
nirvâna are the limits of
samsâra. Between the two, also, there is not the slightest difference whatsoever” (Inada 1993, 158). In other words,
nirvâna is neither a nihilistic extinction of nor a transcendent escape from the phenomenal world (
samsâra); it is rather an enlightened manner of being-in-the-world here and now (see Garfield 1995, 332). This radical reaffirmation of the phenomenal world was particularly stressed in East Asian developments of Mahâyâna Buddhism, where we find such remarkably affirmative phrases as: “true Emptiness, marvelous being” (Japanese:
shinkû-myôu).
The Kyoto School (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
