Emptiness is not nirvana
Is realizing emptiness the same as the attainment of nirvana? The simple answer to this question is no. When the Buddha in the Pali Nikayas and Agamas talks about his awakening, emptiness is never mentioned. It is the same with the Lalitavistara Sutra. This is not to suggest that emptiness plays absolutely no role in working towards nirvana. But nirvana is positive liberation even though it is sometimes explained in negative terms, whereas emptiness has several different uses depending upon the context.
Interpreting emptiness or shunyata, for example, as absolute is certainly not without its problems. This becomes an issue in the later evolution of postmortem Buddhism in which we see the leveling down of nirvana so that it almost becomes a kind of samsara. This makes it possible for emptiness to enter through the backdoor as the new nirvana.
Reflecting the older use of emptiness which serves as a special form of negation, Asanga describes it this way:
"Whatever and in whatever place something is not, one rightly observes that place to be empty of that thing."
This early form is not unlike the Latin vacuus which denotes a vacancy of the object qualified, for example, an empty village. I expected to find villagers. But I can see there are none. In another direction, according to Asanga anyone who asserts that emptiness is the negation of all has wrongly conceptualized emptiness. On the same score, emptiness can be easily confused with abstraction which implies the mental separation of one thing from another. When I say the all is empty, I am really separating myself from the all which confronts me. But this is not the proper notion of emptiness.
As a matter of consistency, even emptiness has to be negated insofar as it operates metaphorically (aupacârika) being, itself, just another discursive thought. In this respect, emptiness is a tool for overcoming dependent origination. It helps us to realize absolute truth or nirvana which transcends dependent origination (nirvana is the logical counterpart of dependent origination).
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