Sunyata | October 19, 2004

Sunyata is Sanskrit and means “emptiness” or “openness”. In early Buddhism as found in the Pali Nikayas, emptiness referred primarily to worldly experience; the changing flux of existence was said to be empty of lasting value and self-established being. Later some Buddhists stressed the emptiness of all experiences. They claimed not only were conventional notions and sense objects empty of ultimate reality, but also empty were such religious concepts as Buddha or Nirvana and the explanations of the Buddhist scholars. In the continued effort to probe the depth of emptying oneself there was the recognition that there were different levels of knowing, some more free, others more entangled with illusion. At the deepest level of freedom there was no longer attachment to a discriminating mentality, which meant that any notion or act was empty of inherent good or bad.