The Magic of Emptiness

Why nothing is solid and anything is possible

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a barn that had been converted into a Buddhist temple. As I sipped my tea, contemplating colorful images of deities and mandalas amid the wafting incense smoke, outside the barn roosters crowed, rescued horses snorted, and sunlit fields gave way to redwood forest.

I was attending a retreat on the Heart Sutra, perhaps the most well-known scripture of Mahayana Buddhism, the “great vehicle” path followed by millions of practitioners around the world. Chanted daily in temples across Asia, the Heart Sutra is focused on the Buddhist teaching of emptiness, or shunyata.

But emptiness, in Buddhism, doesn't mean anything like the existential ennui expressed by modern Western philosophers, smoking cigarettes in cafes and pondering the meaninglessness of existence.

Instead, the doctrine of emptiness states that things are 'empty' of inherent existence or self-nature; that nothing is fixed, permanent, or separate from everything else.

As I hope to show in this essay, emptiness opens a world of possibility. It opens the door to imagination and the sacred, and a way of engaging in the world that is nothing short of magic.

The Truth of Emptiness

The cafe table I'm sitting at, as I write this, is empty of inherent table-ness. Once, it was a redwood tree and iron ore, embedded in a geology and an ecosystem that developed over millions of years. It wouldn't have become a table without the intervention of some specific causes and conditions—namely, human industry and craftsmanship.

As Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh might have said, this table is made of clouds, rain, soil, sunlight, not to mention generations of human love, work, suffering, and death. In 10 or 20 years, it may be firewood or pulp. Impermanence, another core tenet of Buddhist philosophy, is part of emptiness, too.

Similarly, if I took away the table's legs, would it still be a table? No, it would be a slab of wood, like a large charcuterie platter or cutting board. If I removed the top, it would be an unrecognizable chunk of scrap metal.

If you looked at its surface under an electron microscope, you might see that although it appears solid, it's 99% nothing. Similarly, although it appears static, its constituent particles are always moving. If you looked closely enough at its edges, you'd see there is no separation between the table and the floor or the air in the space around it.

If you came from a culture that didn't use tables, you might think of it as a seat, or an altar. The Tibetans would say that it has no table-ness apart from ming and tokpa, words and concepts.

As the naturalist John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

So, the doctrine of emptiness says that the table is empty of inherent table-ness. This is the "form is emptiness" part of the Heart Sutra.

According to Anam Thubten’s commentary on the Heart Sutra, “Form is emptiness” doesn't mean that things don't exist. It just means that they aren't the way we habitually perceive them. It's a teaching that's meant to loosen our grasp on the way we think things are.

Pure Perception

As the retreat progressed, one idea began to fascinate me: the relationship between emptiness and sacredness.

Because things are empty of inherent existence, they are fluid and malleable. This very fluidity is what makes them capable of being perceived as sacred.

In Vajrayana Buddhism, emptiness is the basis for tantric practices like deity yoga and pure perception, which rely on visualization to transform our perception from ordinary to sacred.

Because this body is empty, you can visualize yourself as Tara, the radiant mother of Buddhas, or the thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva of compassion, and that imaginal form is no less real than the physical body you ordinarily see in the mirror. (And yes, even the deities of Vajrayana Buddhism are empty of inherent existence—but then, so are you).

This is the "emptiness is form" part of the Heart Sutra.

There's a scene in The Matrix where Neo goes to visit the Oracle. In the Oracle's house, there are children with extraordinary abilities (perhaps like the kids in The Telepathy Tapes). Neo watches one of them bend a spoon, Uri Geller style, using only his mind. The child explains, "there is no spoon." This cinematic moment captures perfectly the Buddhist understanding that solid reality is an illusion created by our perceptual habits.

In ages past, Buddhist siddhas like Padmasambhava left their handprints in the stone of cave walls, as demonstrations of the emptiness of physical form. Although as modern Westerners, we might be skeptical of these claims, it bears considering:

If we could truly see the physical reality around us as "as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night," (as some Buddhist scriptures insist) what couldn't we do? Could we move through the world the way a lucid dreamer moves through the dream world? Could we put our hands through solid stone? Could we fly? Could we end global hunger and solve the climate crisis?

Emptiness teaches us that if nothing is "real," anything is possible.

Emptiness is magic.

Vajrayana Buddhism teaches a practice known as "pure perception," in which the practitioner imagines all people as dakas and dakinis (male and female wisdom beings) the external environment as a mandala palace or Pure Land, and hears all sound as mantra. Because of emptiness, this isn't just a fantasy, it's actually seeing things as they are, transforming ordinary perception into the sacred perception of a Buddha.

You don't need to be a Buddhist or a Vajrayana practitioner to engage with this practice. What would it be like if, just for one day, you walked through the world with a gentle intention to see everyone you meet, everything you see in the world around you, and every sound you hear as sacred?

William Blake famously wrote that "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

In Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence, he wrote of seeing "a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower." This is not mere sentimentality. It is a Western articulation of pure perception.

Imagination and Soul-Making

One of the foremost modern, Western advocates of imagination was James Hillman. Though his writings are studiously ignored by contemporary psychologists, Hillman, starting in the 1970s, mounted a heroic critique of mainstream Western psychology, including the Jungian establishment from which he emerged. Hillman, first and foremost, was an advocate of soul, which he described as "a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself."

Hillman wrote, "By 'soul' I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical."

Hillman advocated for imagination as crucial to what the poet John Keats described in one of his letters as "soul-making":

"Call the world, if you please, 'The Vale of Soul-Making.' Then you will find out the use of the world…. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?"

What Hillman called "soul" and its creation through imagination bears a striking resemblance to the Buddhist understanding of how we create meaning through our relationship with emptiness. Where traditional Western thought might see imagination as merely fantasy, both Hillman and Buddhist tantra treat it as a valid way of engaging with reality.

The Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea attempted to explicitly bridge this gap between the Buddhist teachings on emptiness and Hillman's philosophy of soul-making with the work he called Soulmaking Dharma. In his retreats and teachings, Burbea suggested that when we recognize the emptiness of all things, we can work with images and archetypes not as escapism but as expressions of a deeper reality.

"When we realize the emptiness of things," Burbea taught, "we discover that beauty is not merely a subjective projection but a way of participating in the nature of reality itself." This perspective opens the door to working with meditation images, dreams, and archetypal figures as ways of cultivating a sacred relationship with existence.

As in the Vajrayana, Burbea saw emptiness as the basis for imaginal engagement with the world of images and archetypes. This engagement becomes a portal to the sacred and a deeper, more meaningful engagement with life, without descending into either escapism or delusion, on the one hand, or naive realism on the other, as might be the case if imagination isn't rooted in the perception of emptiness.

A World of Infinite Possibility

Both Vajrayana and Soulmaking Dharma are considered, to some extent, "advanced" practices. Because they work with imagination, they entail the danger of falling into self-deception or delusion.

And yet, if we want to engage with reality in the deepest way possible in this lifetime, we have to start somewhere.

Perhaps we could start by loosening our grip on the everyday reality we perceive. Whether we come at it from a Buddhist perspective or the perspective of quantum physics (where solid matter dissolves into probability waves and empty space), things are not the way we ordinarily see them. Recognizing this, we can hold onto them a little less tightly.

Think of a situation in your life where you feel stuck. Then go for a walk outside. Everything you see in nature, or even in the man-made world, is moving. Nothing is as fixed, solid, or permanent as it seems. When you let go of your concepts about a situation, it can transform in an instant.

In letting go of our mind's habitual grasping, we open up the field of possibility. When we let go of our habitual concepts, we can see things as they are. Without our concepts, things are inherently pure, mere appearances within the field of consciousness, made of consciousness itself, and not separate from us or anything else. We can start to see the world as sacred, full of infinite possibility. We can open the door to magic.