If there's one Buddhist teaching that turns everything we thought we knew about the nature of our lives and the world around us on its head, it is the teaching of emptiness.

This notion of "emptiness," as one might expect, was first introduced by the Buddha. The Suñña Sutta recounts a scene in which Ananda, the first cousin of Siddhartha Guatama and one of the Buddha's chief disciples, said to the Buddha: "It is said that 'the world is empty, the world is empty,' lord. In what respect is it said that 'the world is empty?'"

"Insofar as it is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self," said the Buddha. "Thus it is said, Ānanda, that 'the world is empty.'"

And the Buddha continued:

And what is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self? The eye is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Forms… Eye-consciousness… Eye-contact is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on eye-contact — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self.

The ear is empty.… The nose is empty.… The tongue is empty.… The body is empty.…

The intellect is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Ideas… Intellect-consciousness… Intellect-contact is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on intellect-contact — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self.

Thus it is said that 'the world is empty.'

Now, I know what you're probably thinking. "Of course there is a self. I'm right here!" But where exactly in your body does the self exist? Can you find it? Can you point to it? It's a fundamental practice in meditation, to search for the boundaries of your sense of self. Or, to put it in slightly different words, what is the boundary that separates you from the rest of the world?

Sit with this for a moment. Contemplate it. Think about it and look for the point at which you exist independent of the world around you. You'll find that boundary to be much more porous than it seems at a glance. That boundary doesn't really exist.

The Buddha's teaching of emptiness was built upon by an Indian philosopher named Nagarjuna, who lived sometime in the first or second century CE. In the dedication of his text, the Mulamādhyamakakārikā, he wrote:

I bow to buddhas Who teach contingency

Contingency. Open up a dictionary, and you'll see a definition that reads something like this: "occurring or existing only if (certain circumstances) are the case; dependent on."

"Contingency is emptiness," Nagarjuna continued.

Which, contingently configured Is the middle way Everything is contingent, Everything is empty.

Everything is empty. This sounds a little depressing, and it's often misinterpreted as a cynical, nihilistic statement. "Everything is empty, man, so nothing really matters." It sounds like something an angsty emo teenager might say. Emoism meets Buddhism. This misinterpretation, though, is born of a surface-level understanding of emptiness, or voidness, or nothingness, or śūnyatā in Sanskrit or suññatā in Pali. On the surface, it sounds like the most depressing, meaningless view of life one could possibly have.

Everything is empty?

What a bummer, dude.

To say that everything is contingent, though, has an entirely different feel to it. And everything is contingent. Everything that exists is dependent on an innumerable set of circumstances. Nothing exists in the absence of its environment. Even a scientist would agree with that. Everything that exists, everything that is, came into being through an unfathomably complex set of events, beginning with the Big Bang and extending to the here and now, to this very moment. "When emptiness is possible," Nagarjuna said, "everything is possible."

In his attempt to convey this teaching of emptiness, the Buddhist teacher, poet, and author Thích Nhất Hạnh coined a new word: Interbeing. In one of his many books, Awakening of the Heart: Essential Buddhist Sutras and Commentaries, he began an essay on emptiness with the following words:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. We can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

A sheet of paper, in other words, is inseparable from the universe. This might sound far out and hippy-dippy and metaphysical. Or it might sound like the most obvious thing in the world. But it's true. For a sheet of paper to exist, a tree needed to be felled. And for that tree to grow, there needed to be clouds and rain and sunshine. There needed to be soil and microorganisms and fungi and nutrients. And for those things to exist, the ecosystems of Earth needed to take form. And for the planet's ecosystems to take form, the Earth needed to take shape, as it did some 4.6 billion years ago. And the events that gave shape to planet Earth began with the birth of the universe itself.

I think you see where I'm going with this. On the surface, a sheet of paper is just a sheet of paper. But that sheet of paper is the product of a chain of events that began with the beginning of time itself. In the words of John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

It's one thing to see a sheet of paper with this view of contingency, or emptiness, but it's quite another to see ourselves in this way. This way of thinking, this view of ourselves, tends to short-circuit the mind. Malfunction. Error. Buffering. Cannot compute. But all the same circumstances apply. We — yourself and myself — aren't solitary entities existing only in our brains and bags of skin. We are the products of our environment, products of the universe. We are inseparable from the world and the cosmos and the endless stream of events that have culminated in our lives. This is what the Buddha meant when he said that the world is "empty of a self."

"We do not 'come into' this world," Alan Watts wrote in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. "We come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves,' the universe 'peoples.' Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe."

This way of seeing ourselves and our interbeing with the world around us is known in Buddhism as prajnaparamita. In Sanskrit, prajna means "wisdom." Paramita means "perfection." The perfection of wisdom. Far from being the depressing, cynical, nihilistic worldview it seems on the surface, the Buddhist teaching of emptiness, to my mind, infuses life with beauty. It connects us with the world that surrounds us. It reminds us that we are a part of the universe, indivisible from it.

This way of seeing the world is compatible with a scientific worldview as well. In his mini-series "Cosmos," which aired in the 1980s, the famed astronomer Carl Sagan said: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."

"There is an unmistakable resonance between the notion of emptiness and the new physics," the Dalai Lama wrote in The Universe in a Single Atom. "If on the quantum level, matter is revealed as less solid and definable than it appears, then it seems to me that science is coming closer to the Buddhist contemplative insights of emptiness and interdependence."

In the book, the Dalai Lama reflects on conversations he had with David Bohm (a theoretical physicist) and Anton Zeilinger (a quantum physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics in 2022), both of whom agreed that the Buddhist teaching of emptiness was compatible with insights gleaned from modern quantum physics.

In another book, The Quantum and the Lotus, the astrophysicist Trịnh Xuân Thuận and Matthieu Ricard (a Nepalese-French writer and Buddhist monk), argue that the work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two pioneering researchers in the field of quantum mechanics, align with Buddhist concepts of emptiness and interbeing.

"The main difference between the pursuit of knowledge in science versus the same pursuit in Buddhism is their ultimate goals," Thuận and Ricard write. "In Buddhism, knowledge is acquired essentially for therapeutic purposes. The objective is to free ourselves from the suffering that is caused by our undue attachment to the apparent reality of the external world and by our servitude to our individual egos, which we imagine reside at the center of our being."

"While the insights of science can help us change our world," Thuận and Ricard continue, "only human thought and concern can enlighten us about the path we should follow in life. As a complement to science, therefore, we must also cultivate a 'science of the mind,' or what we can call spirituality. This spirituality is not a luxury but a necessity."

Perhaps the "ultimate goals" of science and Buddhism aren't as different as Thuận and Ricard argue. Science may allow us to change the world, but it also allows us to see the ourselves and the world around us through a new lens, in much the same way that Buddhism does.

In 1949, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to a friend and rabbi who was struggling in vain to comfort his daughter over the death of her sister (the rabbi's youngest daughter, whom he described as a "a sinless, beautiful, 16‐year‐old child."). In the letter, Einstein wrote:

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

Buddhism, as the Buddha said, is a path to liberation. Perhaps the same can be said of science.