Emptiness

With correct understanding of voidness, we also correctly understand the different levels of dependent arising.

The “heart” means the essence of the extensive teachings Buddha gave, incorporated into an abbreviated form in this sutra that synthesizes all the main points of voidness.

We need to know the basis, the conventional “me,” that does exist – then the false “me” that we are projecting on it, and then the negation and total absence of that impossible “me.”

A Gelug presentation of the topic of negations and affirmations, which are crucial in meditating on the negation phenomenon, voidness.

A look at how dependent arising eliminates the extreme of nihilism and the extreme of absolutism.

In “Four Hundred Verse Treatise,” Aryadeva deconstructs the various types of incorrect consideration that we all have, as espoused by the different non-Buddhist Indian schools of philosophy.

The understanding of voidness does not negate the existence of the conventional “me.” We do exist, but not in the manner of a false “me.” As something imputed on a body and mind, yet unfindable inside them, our conventional “me” is like an illusion.

The difference between the Gelug presentation of voidness and that shared in common by Kagyu, Nyingma and Sakya concern the type of voidness that is cognized non-conceptually and how to attain non-conceptual cognition of it.

The different views among the Indian Buddhist tenet systems concerning the difference between arhats’ and Buddhas’ understanding of the lack of an impossible “soul” of persons and phenomena.

The Indian Buddhist tenet systems differ in their views of the voidness or total absence of impossible ways that establish the existence of something and in their views of what establishes its conventional existence.