Sunya
| Translations of Śūnyatā |
|
|---|---|
| English | emptiness, voidness, openness, thusness, etc. |
| Pali | suññatā (Dev: सुञ्ञता) |
| Sanskrit | śūnyatā (Dev: शून्यता) |
| Bengali | শূন্যতা shunyôta |
| Burmese | thone nya ta, သုညတ |
| Chinese |
(Pinyin: Kōng) |
| Japanese |
空 (rōmaji: Kū) |
| Korean |
공성(空性) (RR: gong-seong) |
| Mongolian | qoγusun |
| Tibetan |
སྟོང་པོ་ཉིད་ (Wylie: stong-pa nyid THL: tongpa nyi) |
| Vietnamese | Không ̣(空) |
| Glossary of Buddhism | |
Śūnyatā (Sanskrit; Pali: suññatā), translated into English as emptiness and voidness, is a Buddhist concept which has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. In Theravada Buddhism, suññatā often refers to the not-self (Pāli: anattā, Sanskrit: anātman) nature of the five aggregates of experience and the six sense spheres. Suññatā is also often used to refer to a meditative state or experience. In Mahayana, Sunyata refers to the precept that "all things are empty of intrinsic existence and nature". In Tibetan Buddhism, Sunyata refers to "openness and understanding nonexistence".
Śūnyatā is a key term in Mahāyāna Buddhism, and also influenced some schools of Hindu philosophy.
"Śūnyatā" (Sanskrit) is usually translated as "devoidness," "emptiness," "hollow, hollowness," "voidness." It is the noun form of the adjective śūnya or śhūnya, plus -tā:
Over time, many different philosophical schools or tenet-systems (Sanskrit: siddhānta) have developed within Buddhism in an effort to explain the exact philosophical meaning of emptiness.
After the Buddha, emptiness was further developed by the Abhidharma schools, Nāgārjuna and the Mādhyamaka school, an early Mahāyāna school. Emptiness ("positively" interpreted) is also an important element of the Buddha nature literature, which played a formative role in the evolution of subsequent Mahāyāna doctrine and practice.
According to Bhikkhu Analayo: "in the Pāli discourses the adjective suñña occurs with a much higher frequency than the corresponding noun suññatā. This is not a matter of mere philological interest, but points to an emphasis in early Buddhism on qualifying phenomena as `being empty' rather than on an abstract state of empty-`ness'." One example of this usage is in the phena sutta, which states that on close inspection, each of the five aggregates are seen as being vain, void and unsubstantial, like a lump of foam [SN 22.95].
The Pali canon uses the term emptiness in three ways: "(1) as a meditative dwelling, (2) as an attribute of objects, and (3) as a type of awareness-release." The Suñña Sutta, part of the Pāli canon, relates that the monk Ānanda, Buddha's attendant asked,
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