All the apples are empty, and empty apples taste good 🍎

On emptiness, Nāgārjuna, and no thingness (The Art of Emptiness, Part 4)

Hello, and welcome back to Part 4 of The Art of Emptiness! We’ve arrived at the core of the series—we’re going to explore emptiness at last.

But first, a small request: If you know anyone who would enjoy these essays, please consider sharing or subscribing! That helps sustain my work.

Thank you 🙏
Rey

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For him to whom emptiness is clear,
Everything becomes clear.

— Nāgārjuna¹

Aeons ago, I introduced emptiness by saying that things are not as they appear. What exactly did that mean?

In Part 1 & Part 2, we explored the mind: how it fabricates all experience, including the experience of being a self. In Part 3 we explored the world, and its interdependent and impermanent nature.

Here, let’s examine the gap between mind and world. How can we perceive things as independent and permanent despite knowing they are not? To understand emptiness, we will clearly see how things are not as they appear.

I mean that. If this essay does its job, it won’t just be philosophical—it will be at least a little psychoactive. Things will quite literally appear differently. So before it kicks in, so to speak, let’s take a snapshot of how things appear now.

How do things appear?

Take a look around you. In your direct experience, you see a collection of things, right? Name a couple of things you see—desk, cup, floor—and notice the edges where they end and another thing begin. Note how each thing makes you feel: some appear pleasant, others unpleasant, and others neutral. Now note your reaction to each of them: do you have a desire to pull the pleasant things towards you and push the unpleasant things away?

This is how the world appears, prior to analysis: as a collection of separate things, each seemingly pleasant or unpleasant. But this exercise reveals something deeper: we don’t just see things—we tacitly assume that they exist in and of themselves. That assumption has a name in Buddhist thought: svabhava.

Svabhava refers to a thing’s inherent existence—the idea that it exists in and of itself, independent from everything else. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to translate svabhava as independent existence, separate existence, or, somewhat colloquially, as thingness.

It appears self-evident that things exist separately, right? We were just able to name a few. But do they?

Introducing Nāgārjuna

First, a warning: if you don’t want to let go of your view of reality, then you might want to stop reading now. We’re about to explore Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), a book which can be profoundly liberating—but it’s going to be a bit destabilizing at first.

Nāgārjuna (~150 – 250 CE) was a Buddhist monk and widely considered to be the second greatest philosopher after the Buddha himself. But Nāgārjuna is not an ordinary philosopher. He doesn’t write from ego, but from compassion. He sees reality clearly, and that clarity brings him peace. He wants to guide us towards that seeing.

Part of what makes the MMK destabilizing is that it dismantles our existing views without offering up anything else in their place. In it, Nāgārjuna analyzes objects one by one, showing that they cannot exist as they appear—as possessing svabhava—and must therefore be empty of svabhava. But he’s not going to describe how they ultimately are, perhaps because there’s no way to conceptually describe how things ultimately are.

Even though the MMK is a philosophically rigorous text, Nāgārjuna actually has a pretty good sense of humor. In each chapter, Nāgārjuna imagines himself debating someone who argues that things do exist independently. Each time, Nāgārjuna uses a method we would now call reductio ad absurdum to show the absurd consequences of this claim. That is, if things really existed independently, they would be static, imperceptible, and unusable.

Can things exist independently?

The objects which Nāgārjuna chooses to analyze can be a little esoteric, so let’s imagine he and his opponent are debating the existence of something more concrete: an apple.

His opponent might taunt him by saying:

Oh Nāgārjuna, you really think apples don’t exist? I’m holding one in my hand—do you really see nothing? Here, take a bite—but I guess a nonexistent apple tastes like nothing to you.

Nāgārjuna, without missing a beat, might respond as follows:

I’m not arguing that the apple is nonexistent. I’m arguing that the apple is empty, by which I mean that it cannot exist independently. Let’s consider the consequences:

• A truly independent apple would have to exist independent of conditions. If so, then the apple you are holding didn’t grow on a tree—it has just existed for no reason, forever.

• Furthermore, an independent apple can’t have any parts, as those would be dependencies. So it must be one solid substance. When I look at your apple, I see seeds, stem, flesh, and skin. Tell me, which one of these is the real apple?

• Finally, an independent apple must appear the same, independent of the observer. A full person and a hungry person must regard it as equally appetizing. A human and a dog must perceive it in the exact same way, so the dog must see it as red despite only seeing in shades of gray. How incredible!

Nāgārjuna’s opponent looks exasperated. He grabs the apple and takes a victory lap:

And the apple’s taste? A taste occurs when a taster and a tasted thing come into contact. All three—taste, taster, and tasted—depend on each other. But if the apple really existed independently, as you claim, then I and it would be completely independent of each other. We could never come in contact. I could never taste it. He takes a bite. Looks like the apple and I can make contact just fine. So your argument is backwards. Independently existing apples are impossible to eat. The only apples which we can eat are empty ones.

At this point, Nāgārjuna’s (imagined) opponent concedes, and Nāgārjuna moves on to the next object of refutation. Case closed.

But since Nāgārjuna is not here, let me ask you: does this argument convince you? When I first read the MMK, it did not. I’m not that attached to apples, and I’ve never constructed elaborate theories about their independence or inseparability. Reading this seemed to change nothing for me.

What a human sees vs. what a dog sees. Do things appear the same, regardless of the observer?

But as time went on, I became less and less sure that I was seeing things as they were. I saw myself continuously overrate how much pleasure my objects of desire would bring me. I watched my closest friends and I perceive the same objects—cilantro, the dress, films, politicians—wildly differently, and our reactions differ accordingly. Things continued to surprise me by changing, decaying, or revealing unexpected sides to themselves. I appeared to be seeing things as I wanted to see them, not as they were.

Perception started to seem like a game that was rigged from the start. Exasperated, like Nāgārjuna’s opponent, I had to concede. Alright, Nāgārjuna. I give up. What are you seeing that I don’t?

To which I can almost hear him replying: Wrong question. What am I not seeing, that you do?

Refining the view

Dependent arising and no thingness

Do you remember the teaching of dependent arising, from the previous essay? It was so central to the Buddha’s teaching that he once said that Whoever sees dependent arising sees the Dhamma.²

Put simply, dependent arising means that things arise and pass in dependence on other things. Nāgārjuna takes this to its inevitable conclusion: If all things arise dependently, but to be a ‘thing’ is to exist independently … then isn’t there a contradiction in our view of reality? Aren’t all things empty of thingness? Aren’t there, in fact, no things at all?

Nāgārjuna isn’t speculating. He has seen what he’s describing, and now he’s showing why it must be so. Here’s how he describes it in the MMK’s dedication:

Whatever is dependently arisen is
Unceasing, unborn,
Unannihilated, not permanent,
Not coming, not going,
Without distinction, without identity,
And free from conceptual construction.³

This is, to put it mildly, not how we ordinarily perceive the world. People appear to be born and die. Days seem to come and go. How can he say they don’t?

Because things come and go. Things are born and die. But when Nāgārjuna sees without conceptual overlay, he sees no things—and without things, the scaffolding of duality collapses. No birth, no death. No coming, no going.

This isn’t nihilism. If it were, he would have stopped at unborn and not permanent. But he includes both poles—birth and non-birth, permanence and impermanence—and cuts through each. Not nothingness, not thingness—just no thingness.

Duality and ignorance

From the first, not a thing is.

— Hui-neng⁴

Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

— Sengcan⁵

To approach the depth of Nāgārjuna’s vision, we need to consider the nature of duality and nonduality.

To dualize means to separate into two, and we see reality dually when we see it with separation. In How do things appear?, we saw reality from a dualistic perspective. We saw manifold things, each separate from each other.

To see reality nondually is to see it without separation. This is the view from Nāgārjuna’s dedication and Hui-neng’s “not a thing.” We can’t describe this perspective using concepts, since to form a concept is already to separate the world into things. Here, words fail us. So all that can really be said about the nondual perspective is what is not there.

Why don’t we see reality nondually by default? Let’s revisit avijja (ignorance) from Part 1. Through ignorance, we see the world in terms of solid, separate things rather than empty appearances. In doing so, we impose separation, making the smallest distinction and setting heaven and earth apart.

First we separate self from world. We create a duality between subject and object, seeing ourselves as a subject standing apart from the world rather than a part of it. We search for permanent security in an impermanent cosmos—a search which can never be resolved. To dismantle this ignorance, the Buddha taught that all persons are without self to cure us of this case of mistaken identity.

But to make matters worse, we separate the objects of the world from each other. We take these things to be inherently separate, when in fact they are not. And they’re not things either—just freeze frames of flowing processes. As long as we see distinctions, pushing and pulling at experience, we are never at peace. In order to cure our ignorance and pacify our objectification, Nāgārjuna taught that all things are empty of separate existence.

The Middle Way

With time, we begin to see how duality forms the scaffolding beneath all experience. Every concept separates the world into two: subject/object, good/evil, alive/dead, pure/impure, us/them, now/then, here/there, this/that. Duality and thingness work hand in hand, since to make a thing of anything is to divide experience into what is the thing and what is not. There are apples, and there are things which are not apples.

M.C. Escher’s Day and Night demonstrates how we habitually divide the world into dualities—and how those apparently separate dualities actually deeply depend on each other.

The irony is that the more we dualize, the more we become emotionally polarized. If I set good infinitely apart from evil, I become obsessed with goodness and terrified of evil. The more I yearn for then, the more now seems to drag. Or maybe I cling to here and refuse there. In each case, they’ve been set infinitely apart.

This reveals a surprising connection between craving and duality. Craving doesn’t just influence what we do—it shapes what we see. The more I desire one pole of a duality, the more I perceive it as separate from its opposite. The inverse is true as well: the more separation I perceive, the more I am thrown off balance by desire. Craving and dualizing co-arise. This realization is liberating, since we see how we can weaken one in order to weaken the other.

Once we see how perception is scaffolded by duality, fueled by craving, and hardened by our belief in thingness, we can reach for tools to deconstruct that scaffolding and put out the fire. Seeing the emptiness of a thing, even conceptually, begins to dismantle the rigidity of separate existence. Nonconceptual experience of nonduality makes that realization embodied and unshakeable. And both loosen our perceptual rigidity, which cools the flames of craving.

Yet one more tool can help guide our investigation and hold the rest in balance: the Middle Way. Fittingly, Nāgārjuna’s school, Madhyamaka, is commonly translated as the “Middle Way” school, and the philosopher Jay Garfield translates the MMK as The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.

The Middle Way was a central teaching of the Buddha, and in its strictest sense, it refers to a lifestyle free from the extremes of too much pleasure (hedonism) and too much pain (masochism). But the Buddha also used the Middle Way to caution his followers against adopting the extreme views of existence or nonexistence. Nagarjuna agrees:

To say “it is” is to grasp for permanence.
To say “it is not” is to adopt the view of nihilism.
Therefore a wise person
Does not say “exists” or “does not exist.”⁶

I believe that Nāgārjuna wanted to apply the Middle Way in its broadest sense: as a way to navigate between all fixed views. Why? Because views, too, arise in dependence on each other. I can only argue with you about Coke if you believe Pepsi is better. Being interdependent, views are therefore empty.

Clinging tightly to a view is no different from clinging to a thing: just another way to make yourself suffer. Situations change, and woe to the one whose views fail to change in response to them. This is why Nāgārjuna writes that:

Emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.
For whomever emptiness is a view,
That one will accomplish nothing.⁷

Emptiness is empty

Take a deep breath. This stuff is extremely subtle, and I don’t expect anyone to grasp all of it on a first pass. You’re doing great—and you can always return to this essay whenever you’re ready to deepen your understanding.

I want to end this section by clarifying the most common mistake people make with respect to emptiness, which usually looks like this:

Okay, I can accept that things are illusory. The mind projects solidity onto flowing phenomena, and those things are actually empty. But I want some of that emptiness! Surely emptiness is actually a thing.

Think of Nāgārjuna like an optometrist. He identifies a flaw in our vision and prescribes corrective lenses. The flaw is the appearance of solid, separate things. Emptiness is the lens that helps us see more clearly. If we naturally saw emptiness, there would be no need to teach it. The teaching itself depends on ignorance—so emptiness, too, is empty.

In positing the world as kinetic rather than static, it’s fitting that emptiness, too, should be kinetic. It’s a verb, not a noun—not a place of arrival, but a point of departure. Emptiness is an open question which we continually ask rather than conclusively resolve.

This essay hasn’t made you a disciple of emptiness, eager to bludgeon your opponents with its brilliance. It’s made you an artist of emptiness, always ready to clear the canvas and start again.

Becoming an artist of emptiness

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

— T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Welcome back. After all our exploring, let’s return to where we started.

Take a look around you once again. How do things appear now?

When I look around again, the gap between myself and the world seems smaller. I am not looking at the world—we’re co-arising and co-creating each other. The desk, the water, the plant, and I are each playing our respective roles for the time being. I’m not driven mad by hatred for what’s here or craving for what’s not.

If a loved one were to walk in, I’d see them as empty, but not hollow. I’d see them without objectification. Not a thing. Not separate.

Maybe you’ve already glimpsed something like these lines from the Diamond Sutra:

This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:
Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.⁸

Like a dewdrop, a bubble, and an illusion, this world does not exist as it appears, but it does appear. There are no things, but there is appearance. There is not nothing. For reasons that are mysterious to me, this breath, this room, this moment—is happening.

We can’t have our apples and eat them too. The apples we have are fleeting and illusory—empty—but empty apples are the only apples we could ever have, and empty apples taste good.

I’m not going to cling to it and hope it lasts forever. I’m going to take a bite.

How about you?

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Resources

If you’ve made it this far, I think the MMK is a must-read. It’s one of the handful of books that fundamentally changed my mind, and probably changed my life.

You have many options. For a poetic, intuitive translation, you could start with Stephen Batchelor’s Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime.

For a more rigorous philosophical translation, Jay Garfield’s The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way is the gold standard.

We’re already through 2⁄3 of the series! Thank you for reading this far. If you enjoyed this essay, feel free to comment, share, or reach out to me directly.

I look forward to seeing you soon for Part 5!

1. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK) 24:14

2. MN 28

3. MMK: Dedicatory Verse

4. Translation is from Rob Burbea’s Seeing that Frees

5. Faith in Mind

6. MMK 15:10

7. MMK 13:8

8. Translation by Alex Johnson