If you spend time at a Zen Center you will soon hear or see the Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom Sutra which contains the famous line:

“Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form”.

Emptiness in this case is the English language translation of the Sanskrit word Śūnyatā.

Most explanations of Śūnyatā are something like: the understanding that all phenomena lack inherent existence or a permanent, unchanging self.

Ok, but what does that really mean?

The way that I have come to currently understand Śūnyatā is to see that everything is a process.

So, rather than all things being like solid, separate nouns (a cat, a tree, a bus) everything (a cat, a tree, a bus) is a stack of processes interacting with each other. Just processes all the way up, down and across.

I think this is easy to see and accept with computer programs. For example, we know when we play Astroblaster that it is really just a bunch of functions running. But we seem to find this harder to see and accept about ourselves and other beings.

Seeing this can be very liberating though. When a friend gets angry - or indeed when we get angry - we can recognize it as just the anger processes running, set off by some other processes running, setting off some other processes to run.

We can also recognize that while some processes tend to repeat, some for long periods of time, all processes eventually change over time as they interact with other processes.

There is a lot more to say on this topic, and I’m sure my understanding of Śūnyatā will evolve as I do, but I hope this is a simple way to at least begin to grapple with a topic that is at the very heart of Zen.