The Buddhist Philosophy of Emptiness

Catalog description

The concept of a “thing”—an entity that exists in and of itself, separate from all other things—is nothing but a useful fiction. In the real world, there are no self-existing “things” that exist prior to our naming of them, just as there are no constellations in the night sky before we draw imaginary lines between the visible stars. This, in a nutshell, is the startling proposition advanced by the Buddhist doctrine of śunyatā, or “emptiness” as the Sanskrit term is usually translated. Often misconstrued by critics as a form of nihilism (“nothing exists”), idealism (“all that exists are mental phenomena”), or skepticism (“we can never know what really exists”), the emptiness doctrine is better interpreted as a radical critique of language and all of the conceptual categories that we habitually use to talk about and make sense of the world. The premise of this course is that the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness is worth learning, because it empowers all who understand it to be smarter, freer, and more effective in the ways they employ language to think for themselves and communicate with others. It is, in fact, a mode of critical thinking that has universal applicability whether one embraces any beliefs or practices of the Buddhist religion that gave rise to it. Indeed, the doctrine of emptiness was first developed by Buddhist thinkers in ancient India to demonstrate the ultimate arbitrariness of all Buddhist conceptual categories, including “emptiness” itself! The course has two main aims. The first, pursued mainly in fall, is to impart a clear, accurate understanding of the “emptiness” doctrine as it evolved in the context of Buddhist intellectual history. We will read and discuss a number of Buddhist texts—primary sources in English translation from the original Sanskrit or Chinese—that advocate the philosophy of emptiness, as well as some secondary scholarship on the…