Buddhism & Emptiness:
Form is emptiness, & emptiness is form

Nāgārjuna is considered by many to be the "First Patriarch" of Buddhism - - one of the most important contributors to the Buddhist tradition as the founder of the Madhyamaka (Middle Path) school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Of particular importance is his work on śūnyatā, or "emptiness."

"Emptiness" refers to the concept that everything is “empty” of independent substance - - in other words, things (including events and people) are interdependent.

This approach invites us to go beyond the illusions of our perceptions. We now see the world as a web of relationships, instead of objects and beings that exist independently of anything else. We see processes, instead of things that don’t change.

I love the phrase “What if Self was Real?”... Not as an invitation to prove that the self is indeed real, but as a poetic turn of phrase that invites us to look at it in a different way. A phrase that implies that it can, at the same time, be real and unreal. That "real" and "unreal" are concepts, and prisms through which we can hope to perceive part of reality but cannot reduce it to.

"What if God were just a slob like the rest of us" -- these are (approximately) words from a song by Joan Osborne.
Moving from literal logic to the realm of imagination and possibilities, fantasy that opens up doors beyond the neatly defined categories that impoverish what is larger-than-life.
"What if God was real"? Totally unreal, you can say on the one hand, "just" projections. And on the other hand, what could be more real than the amazing amount of stuff that's been done in God's name?

So, I love "What if the Self was real?" as a koan.
In my understanding of Buddhist thought, one wouldn't conclude that the self is unreal any more than it is real. Because stating "real" or "unreal" as categories means seeing dualities. "Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form". Emptiness is not a truer concept than form. There's that twilight zone where one shifts from a sense of "real" and "unreal", and that is part of the richness of the experience of the self.

See: - Avalokiteshvara on the Shore: A meditation on the Heart Sutra - Twenty Mahayana Verses.

emptiness

heart sutra

mahayana verses

nirvana

zen

koans

See also:

- Turn insight into action

- Growth is a creative process