Sunyata · Skt: śūnyatā; Pāli: suññatā

Sunyata is the Buddhist word for emptiness, and what a thing is said to be empty of matters more than the word itself. In the early discourses the scope is the self. Asked by Ānanda in what respect the world is called empty, the Buddha answers in the Suñña Sutta (SN 35.85): “Insofar as it is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self”. He then works through experience piece by piece, so that “The eye is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self”, and the same holds for forms, for eye-consciousness and for the rest. Emptiness here is a way of looking, closely tied to not-self, rather than a claim that nothing is present.

Mahayana thought widens the scope. In Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, “Emptiness is of course always the emptiness of something, and the something Nāgārjuna has in mind here is svabhāva”. The sense criticised is svabhāva as substance, where “to exist with svabhāva means to be part of the basic furniture of the world, independent of anything else that also happens to exist”. That critique extends “equally to the world of subjects”, so every phenomenon lacks such a nature, not only the person.

Neither sense means that nothing exists. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that “the Mādhyamikas themselves are very clear that their position avoids both of the extreme views, the view that believes in the existence of svabhāva as well as its nihilistic opposite”, and that emptiness is “not some kind of primordial reality ante rem but a corrective to a mistaken view of how the world exists”. One usage states it of the self, the other of all things, and both are correctives rather than descriptions of a void.