Empty of Inherent Existence, Not Empty of Everything

Sunyata, "emptiness," is the central concept of Mahayana philosophy, and it is persistently misread as a claim that nothing exists. What it asserts is narrower and stranger: that nothing possesses svabhava, an inherent, independent, self-standing nature. Everything arises in dependence on causes, conditions and parts; nothing is its own ground; therefore everything is "empty" of intrinsic existence, while remaining perfectly real at the everyday level.

The doctrine is the achievement of Nagarjuna (roughly the second century), whose Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way argue that emptiness and dependent arising are two names for one fact: "Whatever is dependently arisen, that we call emptiness." Crucially, Nagarjuna insists that emptiness is not a new absolute lurking behind appearances, emptiness is itself empty, not a thing to be grasped, and to reify it is a worse error than the one it cures. He frames this with the doctrine of two truths: a conventional truth in which things function normally, and an ultimate truth in which they are found to lack inherent existence, the two not contradicting but completing each other.