What is emptiness in Zen Buddhism, and why is it important for our practice and everday lives? Scroll below for an introduction to shunyata—emptiness—and join us live online May 30 for an exploration into the teaching and practice of emptiness. Guiding Teacher Zuisei Goddard will also offer daisan (face-to-face teaching) and a Q&A.

Banner photo by Alexandr Marynkin

A description of the teaching of emptiness, shunyata, is available below.

Join our live class for further teaching, an optional period of zazen and daisan, and a Q&A with Zuisei Goddard, Guiding Teacher of OMS.

Emptiness in Zen Buddhism

Emptiness vs. Nothingness:

What is Empty? The Flow of Interbeing

What are we, then? What is this emptiness if not defined by lack? The Chinese character for shunyata is also one of the characters for sky. Early Chinese Buddhists likened emptiness to the sky above, an infinite expanse. That expanse is within and without, it is all phenomena, all beings and all things. Look closely at anyone or anything and you will see the parts that make them up. But study those parts and they too will come apart into more pieces, until you see millions of the smallest fractions of molecules and atoms and those are mostly made of space. This applies to any of us too. We’re each mostly empty space.

Or, we could also say, we’re made of everything. As Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh says, a poet can look closely at a piece of paper and see the cloud, the rain, and the sunshine that helped grow the tree that made the paper. They can see everyone who had a hand in bringing that paper to life, and everyone and everything that supported them—their ancestors and their children, the food that nourished them, the air they breathed, the plants that photosynthesized the air, and so on. That living, breathing mosaic of life across space and time is contained in that one piece of paper, or in any other thing that we can lay our hands on.

As Carl Sagan famously said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” The entire universe is needed to make, not even a whole pie, but a single grain of flour.  

Nothing stands alone or is static, everything flows, changing from moment to moment, connected, and empty of a permanent, separate self. We are this infinite flow. We are the expanse brimming with possibility.

Buddhist teachers have seen emptiness as the core of the Buddhist path—an essential step on the way to liberation—for millennia. The traditional teaching of Dependent Origination or Dependent Arising (pratityasamutpada) appears throughout the early Buddhist texts and offers another way of understanding shunyata.

Dependent Origination explains how all phenomena—from a hurricane to a passing thought—come to be, how they change, and how they pass. It makes clear in detail how everything comes to be caused by another thing and needs the correct conditions to live or unfold. Everything arises from an infinite and always changing, interdependent network of these causes and conditions—nothing, absolutely nothing, exists by itself.

Often considered the widest known and most recited Buddhist sutra, the Heart Sutra (Mahā-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra) points to emptiness directly. The Mahayana teaching opens with the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara’s epiphany:

Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, doing deep Prajna Paramita,
clearly saw emptiness of all the five conditions,
thus completely relieving misfortune and pain.
Oh Shariputra, form is no other than emptiness,
emptiness no other than form.
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.

Avalokiteshvara continues to expound on shunyata for the totality of this sutra, imploring and exalting its understanding.

From the Buddhist monk and philosopher Nagarjuna’s study of emptiness (Śūnyatāvāda)¹ to the 13th century Zen Master Mugai Nyodai,² Buddhist teachers have taught emptiness and will continue to do so.

Poem by Zen Master Mugai Nyodai (1223-1298)

This way and that way I tried to keep the pail together, 
hoping the weak bamboo would never break. 
Suddenly the bottom fell out. 
No more water; 
no more moon in the water—
emptiness in my hand.