Emptiness; a Simple Explanation of a Complex Idea
Like all Buddhist stories, Emptiness starts with the Buddha. Emptiness is simply his idea of no-self applied to all things.
In that idea, ‘self’ is not limited to the person. It applies the same atman logic to all phenomena so that no phenomena exists on its own and independent of–not relying on–anything else. Yes, this is really just his concepts of dependent arising and impermanence that underpins his insistence that there is no self in the person’s existence –one doesn’t exist in the ‘aggregates’ which is just the Buddhist way of grouping the various physical and mental categories, that include intention, feelings and so on that makes up a human.
Using the same reasoning, no object has an element of attractiveness, horror, and the long list of characteristics we project onto cars, icecreams, holidays and on and on. This analysis mentally inspects objects and asks If its parts combine to form that entity, how can it incorporate a soul or essence when not one of its parts is a soul? That analysis shows its emptiness – it is the description that it has no such essence.
The Buddha’s insight that all things arise dependently, simply means that all things are dependent on a range of things: but to be an object, a whole, the thing depends on its parts. But, here’s the catch, each part is itself a whole all the way down to an atom and even that depends on parts, and down to quantum fields that rely on undiscovered energy and so on.
You might see writings that say emptiness is a Mahayana development that expands on much more restrained utterances from the Buddha, but is that really the case?
The Pali Canon’s emptiness teachings are substantial
The Buddha explicitly uses this analytical approach throughout the Nikāyas. In the Suñña Sutta (SN 35.85), he declares “the world is empty” (suñño loko) because it’s empty of self or anything belonging to self. The Kaccānagotta Sutta connects emptiness directly to dependent origination—things neither inherently exist nor don’t exist, but arise dependently.
The aggregates analysis appears constantly. The Buddha repeatedly examines form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness, showing each is empty of self, impermanent, and dependently arisen. The Phena Sutta’s similes (foam, bubbles, etc.) vividly illustrate this lack of essence.
What, if anything, Mahāyāna developed:
Mahāyāna didn’t invent emptiness, rather, it took the teachings of Buddha and made them uncomfortably explicit:
- Systematic elaboration: Once there was wider understanding of the Buddha’s foundational message warning against reification, (treating something fluid, or conceptual as if it were a fixed, bounded, objective thing) and the suffering that it causes, emptiness became the defining insight in Mahayana texts like the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras
- Emphasis and centrality: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā exhaustively applies emptiness analysis to everything, including causation itself, nirvana, and even emptiness itself
- Philosophical precision: The two truths doctrine (conventional vs. ultimate) became more explicitly articulated even though the Buddha had implied the dichotomy when the Buddha qualified everyday speech as necessary but non-binding (conventional, sammuti, vohāra), he immediately presupposes its contrast: a binding, non-conventional mode of cognition or reality. Straight logical negation demands this. To call language merely instrumental is to posit something else as non-instrumental by the same breath.
- Doctrinal development does not equal invention: This is not “later development”—it’s contained in the statement itself. The dichotomy arises the moment the qualification is uttered, whether named or not. Formal doctrine merely gives it a label later. So the claim that Two Truths does not come from the Buddha is to claim that the doctrine (which is not his branding) is not a logical expression of what he said. Likewise with emptiness and bodhisattvas, these ideas don’t come from Mahayana.
Scholarship often frames Nāgārjuna as developing the Buddha’s emptiness, when in fact he develops nothing new. What he is doing is systematically exposing the consequences of the Buddha’s own stance, not inventing new insight. Nagarjuna is the tough cop after the good guy has delivered it nicely.
1. The Buddha – “nice presentation”
Shows how experience can be navigated and disturbances removed; uses ordinary language instrumentally, without asserting what it points to, leaving the emptiness of phenomena implicit and approachable.
2. Nāgasena – no whole, just parts
Analytically disassembles entities (using the example of the chariot) to reveal that what we call “things” are only parts–there is no whole, making explicit one way that phenomena lack inherent essence. Unfortunately, he grants that the whole exists before his deconstruction fails to find it.
3. Nāgārjuna – “in-your-face” universalisation
Systematically applies the Buddha’s insight regarding all phenomena and all ways of looking. He constructs from the ground up so that the whole is a designation from the start, showing that nothing can exist independently of the designation we give; emptiness is universal, inescapable, and applies even to dhammas, causes, nirvāṇa and emptiness itself.