Corrected text: Emptiness

It is said in Zen that nothing is attained, nothing is received, that everything is empty.

So what is emptiness?

Emptiness means that everything is empty of independent existence.

Everything is relational, everything is conditional.

It is empty of independent existence. It doesn’t mean non-existence. It doesn’t mean nihilism.

It is rather a device to criticise all views, even a view of emptiness itself.

We have to be careful of this because there are some who do believe that there is a thing that is empty, a thing called emptiness, and sometimes they build a whole life around that vision of emptiness but it is not a thing at all.

Emptiness has been called a device or a weapon used to destroy naive beliefs.

The intricate fabric of being in Buddhism is not of being at all, but ceaseless becoming. There is change only. And a concept of emptiness freezes this fluid nature of reality. A ceaseless becoming can become a thought or a principle.

Another way of looking at emptiness is that it is interdependence. Interdependent, or conditional.

I know there are some people who do not like to call emptiness a weapon or a device. It is a holy principle for them. But in fact it is even said that it is better for a Zen practitioner to believe in God than to believe that emptiness is a thing.

The teaching of emptiness is that all things are empty of independent existence, therefore the correct view about emptiness is to have no view at all. The way to experience it is through zazen. No view, just practice.

This talk appears in the upcoming book, Digging in the Earth to Find the Blue Sky.

Roshi Robert E. Kennedy, S.J., is the founding teacher of Morning Star Zendo. He is a Jesuit priest, psychoanalyst and professor emeritus of theology. He is one of the few surviving masters who brought Zen to the West from Japan, and one of several practicing Catholics who are recognized by the Buddhist community as Zen teachers. He is active in interfaith work, teaching Zen to persons of all faiths and none and conducting retreats in the United States, Mexico, Ireland and England. Roshi Kennedy studied Zen with the Japanese master Yamada Roshi, with Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles and Bernie Glassman Roshi in New York in the Zen Peacemaker Order; in 1997 he received inka from Glassman Roshi. He is the author of Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit (Bloomsbury, 1995, 2020) and Zen Gifts to Christians (Continuum, 2004). Are We One, directed by Dónal Ó Céilleachair, traces the transmission of Zen through Roshi Kennedy’s life’s work (2024). Jesus and Buddha: Practicing Across Traditions, directed by John Ankele for Old Dog Documentaries Inc. (2012), features Roshi Kennedy, Christian/Buddhist scholar Paul Knitter and Eco-theologian/Dharma Teacher Hyun Kyung Chung.