What is emptiness and conditioned origination?
Emptiness is not nothingness, extinction, vacuum, or void. The word is used to described the reality that ‘nothing can exist by itself’. Everything exists as a composite of many components, a convergence of many ever-changing conditions, thus the phrase Conditioned Origination. There can be no self-existence, or self-nature. (Since God is perceived as the ‘be all and end all’, and therefore can exist by itself, Buddhists do not accept God as a reality).
