Written by Jen Liu

“Imagine a simple rainbow-maker hung in a window: when a ray of sun hits the prism, the bright clear light explodes into a brilliant display of every color in the visible spectrum. Our minds work the same way. When shone through the prism of emptiness, what at first appears to be an absence of color actually reveals itself to contain the whole, more than any single color could.”

In everyday conversation, we use the word "empty" to describe things like coffee cups and gas tanks. In traditional Buddhism, though, the concept of "emptiness" (shunyata in Sanskrit) describes a quality of existence that, counter-intuitively, is one of abundance rather than lack.

Emptiness in Buddhism refers to the interdependent nature of all phenomena, which means that no object, person, or experience is a discrete entity with an intrinsic essence of its own. Because everything exists within a vast web of multifaceted meaning, no thing is truly just its own thing. So rather than describing an absence, you can think of emptiness as describing the presence of a powerful quality shared by all perceptible reality: a kind of full, lush, richness untouched by our limiting perceptions.

So a coffee cup can be empty in two ways. It can be empty in the colloquial sense of needing to be refilled, and it's also empty in the sense that it's impossible to say where the true essence of the coffee cup actually lies. Is it a coffee cup because of its shape, the materials it's made out of? Is it a coffee cup because you perceive it as one? Is it still a coffee cup if you use it to hold pens or toothbrushes?

Now if you extend that wide-open frame of mind to reality at large, the result is one of awakening. A break-up, while painful, doesn't have to be intrinsically and exclusively sad; it can also be heart-opening, hopeful, exhilarating. Your identity is not fixed in stone; instead, you are a vast, complex confluence of physical and mental formations that change moment to moment. When you live in contemplation of the truth of emptiness, everything you perceive can be full of unlimited meaning and potential — including yourself.

It can be tricky to try to switch gears and view emptiness as something expansive rather than reductive. But if it sounds too paradoxical, just imagine a simple rainbow-maker hung in a window: when a ray of sun hits the prism, the bright clear light explodes into a brilliant display of every color in the visible spectrum. Our minds work the same way. When shone through the prism of emptiness, what at first appears to be an absence of color actually reveals itself to contain the whole, more than any single color could.