Emptiness: Pali Canon relative to Mahayana
In both cases, Dependent Arising is the engine of emptiness.
The world—meaning the whole field of experience—is empty due to dependent arising. It’s a simple point but a decisive one, anything that exists only because it relies on conditions cannot be independent. It boils down to: anything dependent cannot be independent.
The Pali Canon is more functional. Emptiness is a mode of perception, an experience of absence, disenchantment with the world.
Mahāyāna is more structural. Emptiness becomes the nature of reality –”The world is empty of being what you think it is”.
In the Pali Canon, emptiness seems mostly to be taken as empty of mundane things where the Mahayana emptiness is generally the specific emptiness of independence. But that overlooks sutta cases throughout the Canon:
“The world is empty… empty of self and what belongs to self”
(suññaṃ attena vā attaniyena vā)
— SN 35.85, SN 22.95, etc.
Here, the lack of self is the connection that Mahayana draws on too. One of the most obvious refutations of self is the fact that it would have to be independent and therefore its impossibility is a conclusion common to both camps. Can something independent even interact with something dependent? Interaction—communication—depends on dependency.
Where the Nikāyas tend to apply dependent arising to psycho-causal processes (how dukkha arises), Nāgārjuna applies it extensively to time, causality, meaning, designation, and conceptual construction.
Suññatā as absence, not a hidden essence, is what we see in MN 121 and MN 122. Emptiness is never “what remains”, nor does emptiness leave something else, but in the Pali Canon it is always what is no longer operating (disturbance, appropriation, ownership) – it is functional, not ontological. Whereas in Mahayana it is described more as a kind of feature of the world, making it open to an attack for being ontological when it is not at all. In fact it is exactly opposite in that it is empty of being any thing at all. It is anti-reification.
But it is right at this point where the Budda and Nagarjuna resist being declarative because Mahayana’s emphasis on teaching a definite point leaves itself open to the accusation that it is adopting a vantage point outside the system they are defining. That outside position is impossible.
As an example, while Nagarjuna in the 2nd century says “no object exists before its name”, Chandrakirti, in the 7th century says “the base and its label co-arise”. They seem to be saying the same thing, but Nagarjuna is coyly avoiding trouble where Chandrakirti was attacking people who didn’t understand what was said coyly. Nagarjuna follows the lead of the Buddha in MN121 where he avoids a descriptive position after extinguishment.
Let’s try this tortured analogy to see if the point comes across. Imagine a magic candle that powers the world by being alight. We can describe the process as it heads to going out, but we cannot report or describe what happened. The possibility of such a standpoint vanished with its going out.
Thus the Buddha describes the process the mediator follows to extinguish the sense of self but makes no call on the aftermath, Nagarjuna lists the four logical pairs but does not say what to derive from their lack of logical success.
As the perfect bridge, the Dhammapada says:
sabbe dhammā anattā
“All dhammas are not-self.”
The real difference is not metaphysical, it is rhetorical: How much do you say explicitly vs. how much do you leave implicit? Both approaches risk misunderstanding—the Pali Canon risks seeming merely psychological, Mahāyāna risks seeming metaphysical—when in fact, they’re pointing to the same fundamental insight about dependence.