Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductory Lectures on Buddhism.

In the preceding lectures, I began introducing the extremely important Buddhist idea of emptiness. In experience, we instinctively want to possess and control the world and other people, leaving us unable to escape the pain of gain and loss. Buddhism holds that this instinctive grasping comes from fundamental ignorance. All the Buddha’s teachings aim simply to help people understand and personally experience the truth to which he awakened.

Buddhism expresses this truth in different ways. In Part Two, “Observing the Self,” we introducedimpermanenceandnon-self, which can also be called emptiness, though their depth differs from the emptiness discussed in the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures. For example,analytical emptinessunderstandsimpermanenceby breaking things apart, like cutting wood until one reaches irreducibleminute particles of matter—an ultimately indivisible existence. By contrast,direct emptinessdoes not require any such foundation of being; existence is simply dreamlike and illusory.

Ordinary people naturally have doubts about emptiness, since it differs so greatly from ordinary cognition. From the Buddha’s time through Buddhism’s later transmission, the teaching has always faced questions, not only from outside Buddhism but also from those within it who held early-school interpretations of emptiness. Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, which we now introduce, is an important classic that clarifies emptiness by answering these doubts.

Many people find emptiness baffling, but this is not unique to our age. Chinese thinkers went through a long process before understanding it accurately. Before explaining the Middle Way, let me sketch the historical background.