even emptiness is empty

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Oh dear.

Just when you had it figured out – the riddle about form and emptiness – just when you had Emptiness nailed, labeled and pigeon-holed, along comes another neti-neti.  It turns out Emptiness is also empty.  How so?

It has no independent existence.  It’s not a place, a form, a state, a fundamental arrival zone.  It has no reality apart from the presence of the absence it connotes.

If it had a form or location – if it could be experienced – it would have to have a subject experiencing it.  What would that subject be?

So forget Emptiness as some kind of ultimate Reality.  There is only, only, only this timeless unfolding, interweaving, interrelating Everythingness.

But before mind kicks in and gives Everythingness the Emptiness treatment, don’t forget that it, too, is …

well,

empty.

~

2 thoughts on “even emptiness is empty

  1. Yes, precisely. In one view, emptiness-form could be seen as transcendence-immanence, or unmanifest-manifest, or nirvana-samsara, or noumenon-phenomena, absolute-relative, subject-object, thus on an unequal footing – this is metaphysical doctrine. But this doctrine also states that reality is One. Real intuition or contemplation alone can give the glue, sorry, the clue.
    Is a smile something different from the face in which it appears? The smile is expression, and it cannot appear witout a face, its ‘background’. The face, though, can show many expressions… (beginning of an objection). Equaly, the unmanifest (Absolute, etc.) “projects” a manyfold variety of “expressions” (forms), but it is always present along with them. One more step: If we remove time from the equation, every thing ‘appears’, IS,
    ——— as you say, everythingness (a whole), IN THE NOW. Now ‘everythingness’ is, just as ’emptiness’, a label. So at the end (in the now) we are left with no-thing, no-time, nada.

    Not even thoughts.

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