What Buddhism Taught Me About Nothingness

It’s no exaggeration to say that materialism is the dominant – albeit often implicit – philosophy of the modern West. Although the idea that reality consists merely of matter in motion has existed for millennia, it is only since the rise of modern science in the 17^th century that it has become our unofficial metaphysics.

Like a good number of contemporary Westerners, I find materialism unsatisfactory – intellectually, certainly, but also spiritually, if you will. It flattens and diminishes the world, frustrating the search for meaning in life. As a result, I’ve spent much of the last fifteen years of my life exploring alternatives, most of which have been drawn from within the Western philosophical tradition. 

The one great exception to my Westward orientation is Buddhism. This makes me far from unique: since at least the 1960s, Westerners searching for an alternative to modern materialism have found an appealing candidate in Buddhism, particularly its Mahāyāna branch. 

There are a great many reasons for Buddhism’s broad appeal, but undoubtedly one of them is the idea that nothingness is at the heart of reality. 

For most people raised in Western ways of thinking, whether philosophical or religious, the idea that reality could be defined by nothingness is an intoxicating, enticing, perhaps even dangerous thought. 

It’s an idea that runs against our most basic sensibilities – but what does it mean?

Being and nothingness

In the Western metaphysical tradition, which primarily derives from ancient Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology, the world is taken to be constituted by beings. The domain of beings includes pretty much anything you care to mention: people, thoughts, planets, plants, dogs, cats, hammers, teapots – you name it.

To that extent, Western metaphysics is not unique. What is particular to the Western metaphysical tradition, however, is a tendency to assume that underlying all beings – in other words, what makes beings real – is some other kind of fundamental Being. 

The most familiar candidate for this role is God. According to the principal monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – God is responsible for creating the world and sustaining beings in existence. He is, to put it another way, the foundation of reality.

In ancient Greece, to give another example, Plato held that for every conceivable type of being there existed a perfect and eternal counterpart known as its Form. So for shoes, there is the Form of shoes, for cats, there is the Form of cats, and so on. Plato argued that these Forms exist in a suprasensible realm, and yet underpin the existence of everything in our own – and so they are, like the Christian God, the foundation of reality. 

Lastly – to give a modern and subtly different example – the same logic of a fundamental Being applies to materialism. According to materialism, all beings are really composites of matter subject to certain laws of nature (quantum mechanics, for instance). Matter in motion is thus held to be the foundation of reality, in much the same way as God or the Forms.

In each of these metaphysical theories, there is little room for nothingness. To the extent that any of them have anything to say about the topic, it would be that nothingness is what there would be if there were no beings at all. Since there are beings, though, nothingness doesn’t have any real relevance.

Or does it? 

Śūnyatā

Image: Nāgārjuna, Tricycle: the Buddhist Review

In Buddhism, the concept of nothingness – or Śūnyatā – features heavily. This is largely thanks to the work of the Indian monk Nāgārjuna (c.150–250 CE), who was perhaps the most influential Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself.

Nāgārjuna and the strands of Buddhism indebted to him, agree only partly with the Western philosophies and religions mentioned above. Nāgārjuna shares the view that reality is made up of beings. 

Unlike the Western positions mentioned above, however, he wholly rejects the idea that there is any further kind of fundamental Being serving to underpin the existence of beings.

What does this mean, exactly? Famously, of course, Buddhism is a religion without a God. More than this, though, there is nothing like Plato’s Forms in Nāgārjuna’s metaphysics, and he would deny that even the laws of physics have the status of fundamental Being. In making this point I should stress that Nāgārjuna’s version of Buddhism doesn’t deny that the laws of physics accurately describe a certain slice of the world. It’s just that he says they can’t be ascribed the status of fundamental reality. Nothing can. Which is to say, there is only nothingness.

There are several arguments given for this position, but the principle one is that every being is what it is only because of the influence of other beings. This idea of fundamental relationality is known as the doctrine of dependent co-arising. It holds that all beings are impermanent, meaning they come to be and pass away and that they do so because other beings variously bring them into existence, shape them, delimit them, or perhaps destroy them. 

Because of this – so the argument goes – all beings lack independent existence, and no underlying essence can be found. They are empty of self, as Buddhists would say, and underpinning them is nothing at all.

Overcoming nihilism

To some ears, this might sound like a very nihilistic view, but Buddhists have pushed back against the accusation of nihilism ever since it was first made of them.

The modern Buddhist philosopher who has most persuasively argued this is Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990). Nishitani was a Japanese Zen Buddhist who also trained in Western philosophy, and sought to make the former intelligible to people educated in the latter. 

The great cause of Nishitani’s work was to argue that nihilism is about the denial or devaluation of the world – a tendency that he thinks the West is particularly prone to. By contrast, says Nishitani, the idea that reality is defined by Śūnyatā is not to deny or disavow the world. It’s just the way the world is – and if we accept that state of affairs, then we’ll be freed up to engage with the world sympathetically and empathetically. We won’t think of the world as a secondary tier of existence, but rather as a web of interrelated beings that we belong to.

Learning from Buddhism

Although I’m not a Buddhist (for reasons I’ll likely write about in the future), I find many of its central tenets fascinating – and the idea of Śūnyatā is one of them. 

As I indicated earlier, one of the reasons that materialism is so unsatisfactory is its reductionism. That is to say, it takes the rich plenitude of the world and declares that all of it is really only matter in motion, subject to the laws of nature. You might think you see a blossoming rose, but in fact, it’s just a constellation of fermions spinning in spacetime.  Here there truly is a devaluation of the world, of the kind Nishitani was worried about: we’re encouraged to think of the world as an illusion masking the real world of matter in motion.

It’s possible, however, to accept the scientific validity of modern physics while disputing the metaphysical framework of materialism. In other words, we can hold to the idea that the findings of modern physics are accurate while acknowledging that they derive from a very circumscribed point of view which doesn’t, in fact, lend credence to the idea that fundamental reality is constituted of matter in motion. 

Buddhism encourages us to embrace an alternative metaphysics that focuses back on the world itself, beneath which there is only nothingness or Śūnyatā. Buddhists like Nāgārjuna would say that, while there is no self-contained essence to a blossoming rose, nevertheless in its rising and falling the rose is part of a web of interdependent and impermanent beings, a web that itself constitutes reality. In comparison to materialism, that strikes me as rather less nihilistic.

This piece pairs nicely with our interview with Evan Thompson: Why I Am Not a Buddhist