A Few Words on Emptiness
It seems that many Buddhists find emptiness difficult to understand. So I want to say a few words on what emptiness is about. There are two streams of transmission of the Dharma, the Buddhist teachings. The first stream of transmission is the record of his talks in the sutras. The second is transmission of enlightened mind from tacher to student. As time passed the second grew relatively weaker when compared to the first, as there were fewer enlightened people with each generation. As a result, there was a need to emphasize what had not needed emphasis before, that is, the qualities that enlightenement revealed. So there was more emphasis on emptiness, culminating in the commentatries of Nagarjuna.
So what is emptiness? Emptiness is the absence of something that you believed to be present. It is like receiving a package, opening it, and finding nothing inside. Buddhism discusses two type of emptiness, the emptiness of the self and the emptiness of dharmas. The emptiness of self is the absence of a unitary, persistent self in your mind and body, There are many intellectual and philosophical arguments against the existence of the self, but the sense of self I am speaking of here is more emotional and less intellectual. Because it is emotional, intellectual arguments do not have the power to completely remove it. For this reason, Buddhism recommends the practice of meditation. With regular meditation the mind becomes quieter and thoughts stand out more clealy. The sense of self is a very persistent thought. Generally you only notice things by contrast and when an emotion or thought is constantly there, it is difficuklt to see. It is only with the temporary cessation of thought that you can only see the sense of self. Most people identify their self with their mind. believe that this sense of self is their mind, and feeling this sense of self is seeing their mind. With meditattion you see that this is not so, that the sense of self is not the mind. It is just another thought in your mind. And this thought has no rational or observable basis. It is just something that you believed was so, without any evidence.
It is said that while an arhat perceives the emptiness of self, a bodhisattva also perceives the emptiness of dharmas. So the emptiness of dharmas is more adavanced and difficult to understand. The empiness of dharmas points out the difference between what you believe the world to be and what the world actually is. You add a layer of concepts on top of what we perceive because your concepts help you deal with the world. But then you forget that these are your concepts and not actually present in what you perceive. Concepts are useuseful tools for dealing with the world, but when you forget that they are your concepts, they become your master instead of your servants. As before, the practice of meditation allows you to see the difference between what you perceive and the concepts you place on them. You see the concepts are not present in our perception, they are what you add to them.
Finally, a few words on how emptiness is sometimes misunderstood. The first error is to think that emptiness is a thing. It's more accurate to say that emptiness is a property of things. When you look at the mind you fail to find it. And so it is said not seeing the mind is really seeing the mind. And so it is with all phenomena: when you look at thoughts, you fail to find thoughts, at the body, you fail to find the body. The second error is to think there is one single emptiness. Rather, each phenomena is empty. However, emptiness is experienced as if it is a single thing. It is like silence. Although each individual thing is silent, it is experienced as a single silence. Also, it is ane rror to confuse emptiness with sseeing that reality is beyond concept. Unable to find any concrete reality in phenomena, we can say nothing about them. But you cannot say the two statements are the same. It's more like the second is a consequence of the first.
So these are my thoughts on emptiness. I'm no scholar and I'm not enlightened, but I hope you find them useful.