Wisdom is the capacity to envision and work with the “emptiness” of all things. Therefore, the sutras maintain that the bodhisattvas’ “home is deep thought on the meaning of emptiness.” “Emptiness” is a universal predicate in this Buddhist tradition, a claim about all claims, a view about all views, a position with respect to all positions you might hold. The bodhisattva dwells on the concept of emptiness, hoping eventually to embody its meaning at a more profound level than the conceptual.

What “emptiness” means is best explained in terms of what it is that things are empty of. All things are “empty,” the texts claim, insofar as they lack their “own-being.” “Own-being” is a technical term (svabhāva) for the quality of being self-generated, self-possessed. Tzu-hsing, the Chinese translation for svabhāva, literally means “self-nature,” the immortal self or immutable nature of a thing. Things in possession of their “own being” – things with “self-nature” – are not subject to conditions, influences, and change. They just are what they are without respect to other things or time. The central insight of “emptiness,” then, is that all things lack this characteristic – nothing generates itself, nothing stands on its own, and nothing just is what it is forever. If nothing controls its “own being” in this way then, in Buddhist terms, all things are “empty.” Claiming that all elements of existence are “empty” in this sense, Mahayana Buddhists took the word “emptiness” to name the character of reality overall.

What reasoning leads Buddhists to the conclusion of pervasive “emptiness”? Essentially the same line of reasoning and life experience that had generated the Buddhist tradition in the first place. Three early Buddhist principles are brought together to help define the Mahayana concept of emptiness: “impermanence,” “dependent arising,” and “no-self.” In the following passage from the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, wisdom is defined in terms of “emptiness,” and “emptiness” is defined by way of these three early Buddhist concepts: “When he thus surveys dependent arising, a bodhisattva certainly does not see anything that is being produced without a cause, nor does he review anything that is permanent. … He reviews nothing as a self, a being, a soul, a creature.” All things are “empty” insofar as they “arise dependent” on other things, insofar as they are “impermanent” and subject to change, and insofar as they therefore lack a permanent essence, an independent soul or “self.” Wisdom is the ability to see how all things are “empty” in this sense, and to transform one’s relationship to everything accordingly.