Those new to Buddhism, especially Westerners, often get caught up in the wrong notion of emptiness. This is easy to do, I must admit, having done it myself especially as a Westerner. Such emptiness is best described by Asanga in the Bodhisattvabhumi who said that anyone asserting that emptiness is the negation of all (sarvbhvat) has wrongly conceptualized emptiness.

We learn from the Buddhist canon that the Buddha was not a pan-positivist (all is). However, we are comfortable with the negation of "all is" which Asanga warned us against. Then we discover later that the Buddha was also not a pan-negativist-he didn't accept the negation of "all is." We tend to forget this. The Buddha's great enlightenment transcended both the position of the pan-positivist and the pan-negativist.

Believe me, I have sympathy for the beginner who does not have a good grasp of emptiness. It is easy to misunderstand emptiness.

We can also wrongly misunderstand emptiness by falling into the habit of believing nirvana to be a kind of extinction or annihilation. We gloss over all of the positive epithets of nirvana that it is the beyond, the subtle, permanence, the exquisite, bliss, the wonderful, the marvelous, the pure, the island, the shelter, the harbor, a refuge and the ultimate.

Exploring the term empty, its use in the Pali canon, we find it used as an adjective, "the empty village." Here empty doesn't mean that there is no village, only that the object qualified, namely, the inhabitants of the village, are not there at this time. They are elsewhere. This is the same with an empty house in the empty village. There is nobody in the particular house at this time. When we read that a monk goes to an empty place to meditate, the place he goes to is not emptiness, but a place that is empty of distractions. We also learn from the Pali canon that the world is empty (suam lokam) in the sense of being empty of what belongs to the true self.

Turning now to the freedom of Mind (ceto-vimutti), it is empty. This means that Mind is empty of desire and delusions. Next, when a monk's Mind is freed he enters pure ultimate unsurpassable emptiness, this is a positive state devoid of all determination which means that emptiness, i.e., the state of the empty, is a pure dynamic field-not mere absence.

Needless to say, emptiness occupies an important place in Mahayana Buddhism which can be very confusing for the beginner because the term can be used in different ways. Here are some examples.

"The ambrosial teaching of emptiness aims at abolishing all conceptions (samkalpa). But if someone believes in that [emptiness] you [have declared] he is lost" (Lokttastava).

"Majushri said....if he contemplates emptiness as the defilement, he is said to be engaged in right practice" (The Inconceivable State of Buddhahood Sutra).

"The Buddha-essence is emptiness of traits of adventitious [defilements] with discriminations, but it is not emptiness of the supreme attributes of Buddhahood, which have the character of differentiations" (Uttaratantra).

Go here to read the rest:
Grasping emptiness with an empty mind