Student – Lama la, I am interested in exploring tong-pa-nyid — emptiness — as it is considered one of the most central teachings in Buddhism. However, I find the concept genuinely difficult to grasp. How can things be “empty” when they appear so vividly and solidly before us? And practically speaking, how can we apply an understanding of emptiness in daily life? Thank you.
Master – You are not alone in your confusion — and much of it arises from the word itself. Emptiness can sound like nothingness, which is precisely what it does not mean. A more precise term might be: empty of inherent existence.
What does that mean? Let us take a table as an example. You see a table before you. But where is its essence — its fixed “table-ness”? If you remove one leg, the table seems to persist, albeit imperfectly. Remove another leg, then the top. At some point the table is simply gone — but where was it? Was it in the top or perhaps in one of the legs? On reflection, there was never a fixed, self-existing “table” anywhere.
Even the concept of “table” is merely a culturally conditioned projection. To an indigenous person in the Amazon, it might be understood as a raft. To a cat, it is an elevated surface on which to sleep. The “table” existed nowhere except in minds shaped by particular habits of perception.
And yet — this is crucial — the table is not nothing. You can still set plates upon it, gather a family around it, rest your elbows on it. It exists perfectly well at the conventional level. What it lacks is a fixed, independent essence residing in it from its own side — some fixed “table-ness” that would exist regardless of parts, conditions, or the mind perceiving it. That absence is its emptiness.
We can turn the same inquiry on ourselves. Imagine removing one organ, one limb at a time. Gradually, the thing we call me disappears — but where was it housed? In the heart? The left leg? The liver? At what point did the “self” depart, and in which part did it go with? The exercise reveals that what we took to be a solid, unified self was, like the table, a label applied to a changing, interdependent collection of processes that is empty of inherent existence.
And yet, just as the table still functions conventionally, so do we. We still laugh, grieve, make choices, and bear responsibility for our actions. Emptiness does not erase us — it simply reveals that the rigid, isolated self we imagined ourselves to be was never quite as solid as we thought. And in that recognition, something begins to soften.
How can we apply emptiness in daily life? Look around you. Consider a relationship you are in and examine your viewpoint. You may begin to see that, like the table, the person you are drawn to is a convergence of parts and conditions, onto which you have projected a concept that is shaped by your childhood experiences and cultural conditioning. What you experience as their “beauty” or “appeal” does not arise from them alone, but from the meeting of those conditions with your own habits of perception. In that sense, to someone in love, even a short, narcissistic hippopotamus can appear sexy.
What does this insight offer us? It reveals that the opinions we take to be permanent and real are in fact fluid and mind-dependent, shifting and dissolving as the constituent parts and our perception change. Recognising this, we become less rigid: more open to seeing things from different angles, and less inclined to cling to our own version of events as though it were the only true one.
We begin to notice that our viewpoints are not windows onto reality, but constructions shaped by education, culture, and life experience.
A simple but powerful practice is to regularly remind ourselves that our opinions are just that — our opinions. Others hold different views, shaped by entirely different streams of experience and conditioning.
From this recognition, empathy arises naturally: not as a moral obligation, nor even as a reason to agree with another’s standpoint, but as a way of stepping into another’s position — appreciating that their reality, like ours, has been assembled from particular causes and conditions. Seen from within their experience, we can begin to understand how they came to hold the views they do.
This insight illuminates the roots of conflict. All wars and enduring hostilities arise, at some level, from the failure to see that things are composed of shifting, contingent parts — and from the habit of labelling whole peoples, nations, or ways of life as inherently evil or threatening. At present, many Israelis see Palestinians as bad, while many Palestinians hold the same view of Israelis. Each side, in effect, has put on dark glasses and now sees everything through a single, fixed colour.
Someone with even a partial understanding of emptiness immediately perceives the flaw in this way of thinking. Even a single human being cannot be inherently bad — their character is itself a product of causes, conditions, circumstances, and experience, none of which are fixed. How then could an entire people be essentially and permanently evil — as though millions of individuals share one central brain, thinking and acting in unison? The idea, examined even briefly, makes no sense at all.
Emptiness, understood and applied, is not an abstract philosophical position. It is a direct antidote to the rigidity, clinging, and projection that cause suffering. In the simplest practical terms, we might begin here: try to see things from others’ positions, and remind yourself that your opinions are just that — your opinions.
