The Gelug Prasangika & Svatantrika Views of Emptiness

How to Prove That Something Exists?

What’s voidness (emptiness) all about? What is it talking about? It’s about how we establish or prove that something exists. How do we know that something exists? How do we prove it exists? What establishes its existence?

Most translations present voidness as being about how things exist: Do things have inherent existence? Is it this type of existence or that type of existence? That’s one way of discussing it. However, we can also look at it a bit more technically, which is revealed by the terminology, both in Sanskrit and Tibetan. The word that’s translated as existence, whether we have it in these expressions like true existence, inherent existence, and so on, is the same word (it’s a variation of the word grammatically) that means an affirmation or a proof of something; we prove something. It’s the Sanskrit word siddha, and in Tibetan, it’s “drubpa” (grub-pa). Basically, it’s how we establish something. 

How do we establish or prove that something exists? The lower tenet systems answer, “It has the ability to produce an effect, so we know that it exists. That establishes that it exists.” The Madhyamaka schools, Svatantrika and Prasangika, answer, “Because there is a conventionally accepted word or concept for something, we can establish that it conventionally exists as what the word or concept for it refers to.” We’ll get into the differences between these two schools shortly.

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