Conceptual inspiration for my work: the doctrine of emptiness

Personal context

I am generally interested in the history of ideas, including how religious traditions have emerged and develop over time. As my only formal study of religious texts has been of the King James Bible and the Pilgrim’s Progress, I have largely been free to simply pursue what most resonates with me. (For instance, within Christianity, I have been interested scholarship on the historical Jesus; the devising of the Gospels; the early church; the Christianisation of the Roman Empire; the Franciscans; the history of ‘heresies’ such as Manicheanism, Catharism + Waldensianism; the Diggers + Levellers; the European wars of religion and their aftermath.)

Philosophical & religious context

No change [in the development of Mahayana Buddhist thought, and the parting from the older Buddhist traditions of India & Tibet it entailed] was as profound and as far-reaching as the concept that we call emptiness. This was a concept that, in a negative way, challenged, or undermined, many of the rigid categories of traditional Buddhism (in lots of respects it seems to pull the rug right out from under traditional Buddhist practice); but also, in a more positive way…introduced a spirit of affirmation, and almost of infinite possibility, that wasn’t present in the earlier tradition.

-Prof. Malcolm Eckel, The Great Courses: Buddhism - Lecture 4, Emptiness [audio lecture] (emphasis mine)

Buddhism emerged in India around the first century C.E. in the context of older Hindu traditions. In the Hindu tradition, there is an eternal self, or atman, which was often understood as identical to Brahman (ultimate reality; the final cause, or ultimate reality, which underlies the diversity of all things). Gavin Flood, in Introduction to Hinduism (1993), writes that in the Upanishads, Brahman connotes ‘the essence, the smallest particle of the cosmos and the infinite universe’; the ‘essence of all things which cannot be seen, though it can be experienced’; the ‘self, soul within each person, each being’ (pp84-5). At least in a major strain of the Hindu tradition at the time, the atman was understood to be continuous with Brahman. As such, the self was conceived as ‘eternal, and permanent’ (Eckel).

The original Theravada Buddhist philosophy of ‘no-self’ was a direct rebuke to this older conceptual system. As Eckel says:

In traditional Buddhism, there is nothing permanent that endures from one moment to the next, so traditional Buddhists say that there is no self, there is no permanent identity that endures from one moment to the next; all that we see in reality is just a series of momentary phenomena, bound together to give some illusion of some kind of continuity…So the self according to traditional Buddhism was made up of a series of momentary phenomena, known as dhammas in Pali, or as dharmas in Sanskrit, which [in this context, denotes a] fundamental constituent of reality. So the self in traditional Buddhism is simply a flow of momentary phenomena (dharmas).

‘The Mahayana took a step further. They went beyond this traditional Buddhist idea of the self, to deny the reality, not just of an enduring self, but to deny the reality of the moments themselves. They said that these momentary phenomena, these dharmas, that make up the flow of life like the flickers in a candle flame, are empty of identity; empty of reality. That’s the way they expressed this insight; all dharmas are empty of reality. The word for ‘empty’ here is shunya, and from this comes the doctrine of emptiness. What is the nature of all things? It is their emptiness; the fact that even as momentary phenomena, they have nothing that you can hold onto that gives them any kind of identity.
By rejecting the idea that the personality or the flow of existence is made up of real moments, the Mahayana completely reoriented..the conceptual system of Buddhism. […] You could say that traditional Buddhism adopts a view that is a little bit like Heraclitus’s view of all of reality being made up of simply a flow of phenomena; Heraclitus said that you can’t step into the same river twice, because the river is constantly flowing. What does the Mahayana say? Not just that you can’t step into the same river twice; they say that you can’t step into the same river once, because in reality, there is no identity in the momentary flow of the river. You can’t step into the same river once; that’s the doctrine of emptiness.

Acknowledging that when discussed in isolation it can seem ‘rarefied and rather abstract’, Prof. Eckel suggests that to really get a feel for the significance of emptiness as an idea we need to look at the transformative impact it had on the Buddhist worldview as a whole. He continues:

Let me draw out some of the implications of this basic Mahayana concept.
First of all, the doctrine of emptiness results in a concept of non-duality. If everything is empty of any real identity, then there can’t be any real difference between any two things. As a result, Mahayana texts often equate emptiness with a doctrine of non-duality. What does this mean? If everything is empty, then there can’t be any difference - or duality - between nirvana and samsara ; and there can’t be any difference between us, and the Buddha. What that means…is that nirvana is right here, at this moment; right now, if we can only understand it correctly; and it also means that we are already Buddhas, if we understand the nature of ourselves as being no different from the nature of the Buddha. This is a pretty significant re-orientation of the ideals of traditional Buddhism. [In] traditional Buddhism, sure, there was no permanent reality in anything, everything was in a process of flow – but there way no way of confusing nirvana, which was [conceived of as] out there, at the end of this process of evolution, from the samara that began it. Now, this distinction is stripped away; nirvana is right here, right in the midst of that flow, if we can perceive it correctly.