Emptiness

[wushi]

I have recently encountered a student who always has a full tea cup . Simply interacting with him has reminded me of the need to constantly search, not only for a kind of intellectual honesty, but more importantly for that fundamental emptiness. Emptiness is a surprisingly complicated idea. I have encountered it in two different philosophies

Comments

Counterparts, parallels, unified concepts

[anonymous]

Then there is the Christian concept of Kenosis (related to gnosis) by which a person becomes completely "empty" and receptive to the will of God.

So there we have another emptiness.

Couple this with the concept of "Divine nothingness" to describe the incomprehensibility of YHWH, and you have the potential for a very similar concept of emptiness wrought from the Abrahamic religions.

Re: Counterparts, parallels, unified concepts

[wushi]

In Christian mysticism, and actually Abrahamic mysticism in general, the basic concept of emptiness becomes complicated because some mystics like the idea of emptiness, and some mystics like the idea of fullness. These two opposite words are used to refer to the same truth, and even to a related truth to the concept of emptiness in eastern mysticism, but I didn't want to complicate the issue quite the much.

Indeed, when I was writing this, I was going to put in a third section about mysticism for the religions of the Book, but as that is less within my area of knowledge, I left it to others.