Something or Nothing

Are there things?

Dear Reader

Recently, a popular buddhist teacher in a popular buddhist magazine offered the following advice concerning the illusory nature of the world, “It doesn’t mean that things don’t exist. What it means is that the way things appear is not in harmony with the way things actually are.”

This statement opens up a real chestnut. Are there in fact “things?” Merriam-Webster gives the following definitions for “thing” used in the sense described above:

A separate and distinct individual quality, fact, idea, or usually entity

The concrete entity as distinguished from its appearances

The three gates of liberation are usually listed as emptiness, signless, and absence of aspiration.

If there are things, they would have individual qualities, which makes them separate and distinct from other things. But how can there be things, when the way things are is that they are signless? If they are signless, how can they be found? And if they cannot be found, how can it be said that things are something rather than nothing?

Worse, our teacher implies there is something behind things, which is termed “emptiness.” But since emptiness is a synonym for signlessness, why imply there is something rather than nothing? Further, why describe the inability to find something rather than nothing an approach to nihilism?

When we examine an illusory elephant, the designated thing “elephant” does not exist in the appearance of an elephant, nor does the elephant exist elsewhere. To bring appearance and reality into harmony, one has to accept there is no thing, there is just an appearance which is not a thing at all, there is no elephant in the elephant. The elephant in the appearance utterly does not exist, it cannot function as an elephant at all.

Thus, the real question isn’t why there is something rather than nothing, as Heidegger famously queried. The question that should be asked “is there something, anything, at all?”