Śūnyatā

That nothing has an independent nature of its own - everything is what it is only in relation to conditions, including emptiness itself.

Theme: Being and reality
Tradition: Buddhist
Term: शून्यता · śūnyatā
Term fixed: c. 150

In plain terms

Śūnyatā is usually translated as emptiness, and the translation causes most of the trouble. It does not mean that nothing exists. It means that nothing exists on its own terms.

Take anything at all and ask what makes it that thing. A chair is a chair because of its shape, its use, the bodies that sit in it, the language that names it, the parts it was made from. Remove all of that and there is no leftover chair-ness sitting underneath, waiting to be found. The thing is entirely constituted by what it depends on.

That is the claim, and it is meant to apply without exception - to objects, to persons, to the self, and, awkwardly and deliberately, to emptiness itself. Emptiness is not the one solid thing behind everything else. It is not a thing.

As a philosopher would put it

Śūnyatā is the absence of svabhāva: intrinsic, independent, self-established nature. It is the direct correlate of dependent origination - if a thing arises through conditions, it has no nature of its own, and if it had a nature of its own it could not arise through conditions. Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā argues this by exhaustion, taking motion, causation, the elements, the self, time and nirvāṇa in turn and showing that each dissolves under analysis into relations.

The position is defended against the charge of nihilism by the two truths. Conventionally things function, are distinguishable, and can be spoken about truly; ultimately none of them is found under analysis. Both are held at once, and taking the ultimate truth to cancel the conventional one is the error the tradition names most often.

Emptiness is itself empty. This is not a flourish but the load-bearing move: if śūnyatā were a real property that things possessed, it would be exactly the svabhāva the argument denies. Nāgārjuna says that anyone who takes emptiness as a view is incurable.

Where you meet it

On the evening of 8 November 2016 the Indian government withdrew the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation. About 86 per cent of the country's currency by value stopped being money that night.

Nothing happened to the paper. Every physical property of every note was exactly what it had been an hour earlier - the same fibre, the same ink, the same serial number. What changed was a web of relations: what the state would honour, what a shopkeeper would take, what a bank would exchange. The note's value had never been in the note.

Queues formed outside banks for weeks. People who had held the same object all along discovered that whether they were holding money depended on something entirely outside it. That is śūnyatā in a form nobody had to be persuaded of: not that the notes were unreal, but that their reality as money was borrowed the whole time.

What is actually disputed

Whether emptiness is a thesis or a therapy.

On one reading, Nāgārjuna is making a metaphysical claim: there really is no intrinsic nature, and that is how things stand. On another, he is advancing no position at all - the arguments are purely negative, dismantling whatever the opponent brings and asserting nothing that could be dismantled in turn. He says both sorts of thing, and the Indian and Tibetan commentarial traditions divide accordingly.

The sharpest form is the Tibetan dispute between Tsongkhapa and Gorampa over whether ultimate analysis leaves a describable truth or nothing sayable whatever. Yogācāra thinkers took a different route again, holding that emptiness is the absence of the subject-object split rather than the absence of nature. And Western readers from the nineteenth century onward have persistently read the whole thing as nihilism, a charge Nāgārjuna anticipates and answers directly - which has not stopped it recurring.

Commonly confused with

Nothingness c. 475 BC Emptiness is not the absence of things. It is the absence of independent existence *in* things, which continue to appear, function and matter.
Nihilism 1887 The tradition treats nihilism as a mistake about emptiness rather than a version of it, and says so at length. Conventional truth is retained.
Anātman c. 450 BC Anātman is this same claim applied to persons. Śūnyatā extends it to everything, including doctrines.
Māyā c. 800 Māyā in Advaita is appearance concealing a real ground, Brahman. Śūnyatā denies there is any such ground. The two look alike and argue against each other.

Defined against

Essence Śūnyatā is the denial that anything has one
Substance The independent bearer of properties is precisely what is not found

Philosophers

Nagarjuna Supplied the argument, around 150 CE

Works

Mulamadhyamakakarika Nāgārjuna, c. 150 - the argument set out in full

Schools

Madhyamaka Buddhism The school the concept defines
Yogacara Buddhism Accepts emptiness and reads it differently

Related concepts

Dependent origination c. 450 BC · Nothingness c. 475 BC · Anātman c. 450 BC · Māyā c. 800 · Relationality c. 150

The term is older than Nāgārjuna and appears across the early Perfection of Wisdom literature; what he supplied, around 150 CE, was the argument.