From Anarcheologos
As I have been diving back into Buddhism, I am struck by how much my understanding of the idea of sunyata, the Sanskrit word usually translated as “emptiness,” has changed over the years, particularly in relation to meditation. In the past I have interpreted the concept not so much as a nihilistic “void,” which seems to have been the tendency of many early western commentators, but rather as a point of equilibrium, a perfect balance between sleeping and waking, unencumbered by the contingent, physical world.
Nowadays, though, I pay more attention to words and I recently stumbled across a bit of etymology that added layers of meaning to sunyata. In digging for the roots of the word, I discovered that it ultimately comes from the Proto Indo-European (PIE) root *svi– meaning “hollow.”
This is interesting because the connotation of “hollow” is a bit different from “empty” and “void.” In modern English, “empty” seems to be a general word for something being missing or lacking. A cup can be empty, but so can a room or a head or a million other things. And “void” seems to be used as an intensifier to indicate a sort of extreme form of absence, generally resulting from an action. One “voids” a sale because a mistake was made, for example.
A better translation of sunyata might be “hollowness.” If something is “hollow” it implies that there is…
