Question
Hello, Master, I am asking myself the following question: Is Tathata Sunya? This amounts to asking whether the Tathagata was conditioned or not. I understand very well that Rupa and Sunya are inseparable, but I struggle with the concept of the emptiness of emptiness itself, according to which Sunyata is also Sunya. To me, this amounts to accepting that Nirvana, Tathata, and the Tathagata are Sunya, and thus that nothing at all is absolute. Yet Shakyamuni Buddha taught that Nirvana was unconditioned, so it should be absolute and transcend interdependence. Didn’t good old Nagarjuna go a bit overboard?
Thank you in advance.
Gassho!
Anonymous
Answer from Master Kosen
We find the same kind of dilemma in modern physics. That is why no one has managed to develop that famous unified theory: one in which the calculations agree for both the infinitely large and the infinitely small, in which the infinite and the limited are not incompatible or contradictory, in which matter and emptiness no longer differ in nature, in which gravity-mass and electromagnetism are interdependent. In Buddhism, we simply call this the Middle Way. And all these learned words used by Buddhists are only rather approximate attempts, it must be said, to define something they already grasped intuitively at the time.
Kosen