No Buddhist word has been worse understood in the West. Emptiness was taken for the void, for nothingness, and for the view that nothing matters. What Nāgārjuna meant, the Greek skeptic who traveled to India and came home with something like it, what Wittgenstein shares with both, and why Nāgārjuna warned that the teaching is a snake. 沒有哪一個佛教的詞，在西方被誤解得比它更嚴重。空，被當成了虛空、虛無，以及「什麼都不要緊」的看法。龍樹的意思是什麼？那位到過印度、帶著很像它的東西回家的希臘懷疑論者；維根斯坦與兩者共有的是什麼；以及龍樹為什麼警告說，這個教法是一條蛇。
D8 Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學Emptiness and Mind · 空與心Advanced · 高級about 30 min
空
suññatā Pāli śūnyatā Sanskritemptiness
The verdict · 判定
Closest in method: Pyrrhonism, which also used argument to release people from views and compared its arguments to a purge that expels itself. Closest in content: the later Wittgenstein, who denied that words name essences. The likeness to the skeptic ends at what is left when the views are gone. He is left with suspended judgment and custom. Nāgārjuna is left with dependent origination, which he says emptiness makes possible, and with a path.
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all.每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
1 · What the Dharma says · 佛法怎麼說
Empty of what? 空掉了什麼？
The word is always short for a longer phrase, and the first question to ask is what a thing is said to be empty of. In the early discourses the answer is self. Ānanda asked the Buddha what the saying “the world is empty” refers to, and was told: “they say that ‘the world is empty’ because it’s empty of self or what belongs to self.” The eye, what it sees, the seeing, and the feeling that arises from it are all empty in this sense. To a questioner who asked how to look on the world so that death would not find him, the Buddha replied: “Look upon the world as empty, ever mindful. Having uprooted the theory of self, you may thus cross over death.” At this stage emptiness is another name for not-self, applied to everything that could be taken as a self.
About five centuries later the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures widened the claim, and the philosopher Nāgārjuna supplied the argument. Persons are empty of self, and every thing whatever is empty of own-nature, an existence it would have by itself, apart from causes, parts, and the mind that picks it out. The Heart Sutra states the result in its best-known line: “Form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.” The line does not say that form is unreal. It says that form and its emptiness are the same fact. A cup is a cup because clay, a potter, a shape, and a use have come together, and when we look for a cup-in-itself apart from these, we find nothing. That finding nothing is the emptiness of the cup, and the cup goes on holding tea.
Nāgārjuna insisted on two further points. The first is that emptiness is what makes the world work. “Because there is the meaning of emptiness, all things are possible. Without the meaning of emptiness, nothing would be possible.” A thing with a fixed nature of its own could not arise, change, or cease, and no one could become wise who was not wise already. The second is that emptiness is itself empty and is no ground or absolute to be held. “The great sages taught emptiness in order to free us from all views. Those who go on to hold a view of emptiness, the Buddhas cannot help.” The commentary compares such a person to a patient whose medicine has become a disease. He gave a warning in the image the Buddha had used: “Emptiness wrongly seen destroys the dull, like a snake wrongly grasped or a spell wrongly cast.”
A skeptic, a therapist, and the view it is mistaken for 一位懷疑論者、一位治療者，以及它被誤認成的那種看法
The same method · 同樣的方法
Pyrrho and the Skeptics 皮浪與懷疑派c. 300 BCE – 200 CE
Pyrrho of Elis went east with Alexander’s army, and his ancient biographer reports that he “forgathered with the Indian Gymnosophists.” He came home teaching that “no single thing is in itself any more this than that.” The school that took his name worked by setting against every argument an opposing argument of equal weight, until the mind, unable to decide, let go. The end, they said, is “suspension of judgement, which brings with it tranquillity like its shadow.” They knew that their own arguments fell under the rule, and compared them to “a purge which drives the substance out and then in its turn is itself eliminated.” The resemblance to Nāgārjuna is close: argument used as medicine, the refusal of every view, calm as the result, and a method that cancels itself. Whether Pyrrho learned any of it in India cannot be shown. The two differ in what they leave standing. The skeptic suspends judgment on everything, including whether suffering has a cause, and lives by appearances and local custom. Nāgārjuna denies own-nature and affirms dependent origination, the two truths, and the path.
Wittgenstein ended his first book by saying of his own propositions that anyone who understands him “finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. He must so to speak throw away the ladder.” In his later work he attacked the assumption that a word must stand for one thing common to all its uses. “Don’t say: ‘They must have something in common, or they would not be called “games”’ but look and see whether there is anything common to all.” What we find is a network of overlapping likenesses, and the meaning of a word is its use in the language. This is an argument against own-nature conducted on words. Nāgārjuna’s claim that things exist as designations, in dependence on how they are picked out, is its near neighbor, and several philosophers have read each through the other. Wittgenstein confined his work to dissolving the puzzles of philosophers and held that it leaves everything as it is. Emptiness is taught to dissolve clinging in anyone, and it is expected to leave a person changed.
When Europeans first read about emptiness in the nineteenth century, they took it for a doctrine of nothingness, and Buddhism was described in learned journals as a cult of annihilation. Nietzsche inherited this picture. He gave the name nihilism to the condition in which the highest values lose their value and nothing seems worth willing, and he called Buddhism a passive form of it, a weary religion for the end of a civilization. He was describing a real danger and attaching it to the wrong teaching. Nihilism says that because nothing has a fixed foundation, nothing matters. Nāgārjuna says that because nothing has a fixed foundation, everything is possible, and he treats the nihilist reading as the snake seized by the tail. The lesson of this card is negative. A listener who hears “emptiness” will very likely hear Nietzsche’s nihilism, and it has to be ruled out before anything else is said.
Who is closest, and where the likeness ends 誰最接近，相似到哪裡為止
On method and purpose the Pyrrhonists are closest. They and the Mādhyamikas are the two schools in the history of philosophy that used rigorous argument for the sake of release from views, and that understood their own arguments as instruments to be dropped. On the conclusion the later Wittgenstein is closest. His rejection of essences behind our words is the nearest Western statement of what it is for things to lack own-nature and to exist by designation.
The likeness to the skeptic ends at the positive side. Sextus Empiricus would have suspended judgment on dependent origination as on every other doctrine. For him tranquility comes from having no beliefs about how things are. For Nāgārjuna it comes from seeing how they are, namely dependent, and he distinguished emptiness sharply from the mere absence of a position. He also kept a conventional truth, in which the Buddha’s teaching, moral cause and effect, and the path all hold, and he said that without relying on it the ultimate cannot be taught. The likeness to Wittgenstein ends at the scope. Wittgenstein applied his insight to language and to the puzzles of philosophers. Nāgārjuna applied it to the self and to everything one could cling to. None of the three Western figures connects the insight with compassion, which the Mahāyāna treats as its other half.
Cause and effect hold. The path is possible因果成立。道是可能的
Follow appearances and custom跟著現象與習俗走
Go on as before, unconfused照舊生活，只是不再困惑
Nothing matters什麼都不要緊
Turn toward the unchanging轉向不變的東西
What is it for?它是為了什麼？
To end clinging, and so suffering止息執取，從而止息苦
Tranquility寧靜
Peace from philosophical puzzles不再被哲學難題困擾
No purpose is offered沒有提出目的
Knowledge and the good of the soul知識，與靈魂的善
5 · The step the Dharma takes further · 佛法多走的一步
Emptiness is good news, and it has a partner 空是好消息；而且它有一個伴
The first further step is the reversal described above. Every Western reader expects a doctrine called emptiness to subtract something from the world. Nāgārjuna’s argument is that it gives the world back. A self that existed by its own nature could not be improved, harmed, or freed. A suffering that existed by its own nature could not end. Because both are empty, the four noble truths describe something that can happen. The tradition draws a practical conclusion that surprises newcomers. The person who understands emptiness takes cause and effect more seriously, since he has seen that what he does is among the conditions from which everything else arises. A teacher who says that after realizing emptiness nothing matters has, by the tradition’s own test, grasped the snake by the tail.
The second step is that emptiness is never taught alone. The scripture that says form is emptiness opens with a bodhisattva, a being committed to the welfare of others, who “saw that the five aggregates are all empty and crossed over all suffering and distress.” The Mahāyāna holds that wisdom without compassion is a cold liberation, and that compassion without wisdom is exhausting and partial, because it still divides the world into me, the helper, and them, the helped. If no one has a fixed and separate nature, the line between my suffering and another’s is drawn by habit and has no deeper standing, which is the argument of the lesson on compassion on this shelf. Pyrrho reached calm and Wittgenstein reached clarity. The bodhisattva path asks that the same insight be turned outward. That is the feature of emptiness for which the West has no parallel.
The English word “emptiness” works against the teacher. It suggests a void, a hollow feeling, or the conviction that nothing is worthwhile, and a listener who is depressed will hear a description of his own state. One rule prevents most of the damage: never say “empty” without saying of what. Things are empty of independent existence. The sentence has an object, and the object tells the listener that something remains, namely the thing as dependent. Then give an example that can be held in the hand. A paper cup depends on trees, water, a factory, a designer, and a person who wants coffee. Ask where the cup would be if all of those were taken away. Finish with the consequence, which is the point: because it is like this, it can change.
