The establishment of the doctrine of the void is fraught with hazards. Chief among these is the danger of reifying or hypostatizing the void itself. Tamura Yoshirō[ (1921-1989) a well-regarded scholar of Japanese Buddhism] notes: “It will not do to think of having gone from the provisional to the emptiness of things as if one had somehow now reached some entity called ‘the void.’ ” For this reason, it was sometimes maintained in the Mahayana that “emptiness itself is emptied” (“kū kū”). Thus, to regard phenomena as empty is itself an activity that needs to be relativized and seen as dependent. In [Chih-i’s] Mo-ho chih-kuan this is accomplished by a reaffirmation of the reality of provisional phenomena (ke). This was the second stage of the santai. Chih-i called it “jukū-nyūke, leaving the empty and entering into the provisional.” The term is diametrically opposite to juke-nyūkū but the intention is not to establish two mutually negating propositions; rather, it is to hold that both propositions describe reality and both are necessary in order to describe reality accurately.

The recognition of the perfectly balanced codependence of the void (kū) and the provisional (ke) was Tendai’s third stage, that of the middle (chū). The middle is not a position midway between the other two but the holding of both in a state of dynamic and equalized tension. Each way of looking at things is valid but only because the other is also true; each side gives existence and function to the other. The classic Mahayana account of the bodhisattva figure makes the same point in more narrative, less philosophical, language. According to it, the bodhisattva recognizes the phenomenal world as empty, without abiding entities, and therefore worthy of being forsaken for nirvana; nevertheless, in order to rescue others, he returns to the world of samsara. Moreover, since “enlightenment is nowhere other than in the worldly passions” (“bonnō soku bodai”), even for the bodhisattva himself there is no other world in which to be, or to be saved.