Emptiness (śūnyatā)

Emptiness (Sanskrit śūnyatā) is the Mahāyāna teaching that nothing has intrinsic existence (svabhāva): no thing exists in and of itself, independent of causes, parts and the mind that conceives it. A table is empty in this sense not because it is absent, but because it is nothing over and above its wood, its making and its use; and the same analysis applies to the wood, and to every part of it.

Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school, identified emptiness with dependent origination: whatever arises in dependence on other things is empty, and only what is empty can arise at all. Emptiness is therefore not a nothingness behind things, nor a hidden substance, but the way things are. It is itself empty: the Madhyamaka warns against grasping emptiness as one more view, and calls those who do so incurable.

The teaching is prepared by the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) sūtras, whose best-known short texts, the Heart and Diamond Sūtras, say that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Later traditions disagree about how to understand it: as a pure negation, as in the Madhyamaka of Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa; as the emptiness of the subject–object duality, in Yogācāra; or as an emptiness that is full of the qualities of buddhahood, in some teachings on buddha-nature.