Emptiness means absence or nothingness. If you take a lunchbox filled with food emptiness would be the last word that you would use to describe that box. It is not empty as it is filled with food. Now, after you eat the food in that lunchbox what would that box be? Empty. The lunchbox would be seen as a container that is empty of its content. This is commonsense knowledge. However, if you go beyond this commonsense knowledge and take another look at that container empty of its content you would realise that the container is empty in another sense as well. Let’s assume that the container is plastic. What happens to plastic over time? It discolours. It gets crack marks. It eventually reaches a point where you or whoever who is in possession of the box determines that it is time to throw it away. Is the story different from that of a box made of steel? No. It may not get crack marks, but it sure discolours and becomes rusty. Now, once you throw it away, it starts disintegrating. The time that a metal box takes to completely disintegrate may be significantly different from the time taken by a plastic box, but what matters is both disintegrate. When they disintegrate the separated particles will become part of something such as the soil, water, or air (in the form of vapour). After becoming part of these broader realities will they remain to be in that state till the eternity? Not likely. The particles that became part of the soil may soon find themselves to be part of a fertiliser, a clay pot, or a nutrient absorbed by a plant. Those that became part of water may find themselves in a bottle sold at a supermarket, in a liquid chemical, or in a cup of water offered to a Buddha statue and then later thrown away. Those that became part of the air may find themselves locked up in an air balloon, transformed from the status of one type of air to another type of air (for the same of the argument, from O2 to CO2), or breathed in by an alligator and then entangled in its nasal mucus. In this manner, they continue to change without a limit. In the context of this story of eternal flux, the lunchbox was but a mere moment. There was nothing permanently “lunchboxy” about the lunchboxes concerned. In this sense, the lunchboxes were empty not only of food, but also of their taken-for-granted “lunchboxy-ness.” Had there been a permanent sense of “lunchboxy-ness” that “lunchboxy-ness” should be present in the nutrient that the plant absorbed, the glass of water offered to the Buddha, and what got entangled in the alligator’s nasal mucus. Just as the lunchbox was empty of its own being everything that is in existence, including buildings, artworks, human beings, celestial objects, animals, are empty of their own-being. Because they are empty of their own-being, there is nothing about them that could be possessed.
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Nandaka MaduRANGA Kalugampitiya is a faculty member (Department of English) of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. He earned his MA and PhD from Ohio University, USA.
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