Where not anything has ever arisen, there is emptiness. What we presume is not emptiness is fabrication. Either we comprehend the ultimate condition of emptiness or else what we comprehend is simply fabrication.

“Dependent co-arising” is the form of “emptiness is form”. While all forms are considered to have a beginning and an ending, not anything we regard as a form is self-standing, or self-created; a form may be considered to be a cause of something; or else an effect of some other thing. In fact all that we consider to be forms are actually a creation or conception, of one form in particular, the human “mind”. The point is that all forms are dependent for their presumed existence: all things, it can be said, are dependent on some other thing (or things) for their “arising”—your self included.

So all forms, dependently-arising as they are, have no “self-nature”; are not independently existing phenomena. In other words, each thing is empty of reality as a fixed entity throughout the passage of time: all things are transitory, mutable, dependent upon extraneous causes or conditions. In short, “form is empty” of reality.

That emptiness of reality is what form actually is. Emptiness itself does not “exist” (nor non-exist), we might say, “ in a vacuum”. It is what form is when we recognize that no forms can have self-nature. But if there were no appearances of forms, the emptiness of reality in forms would be meaningless. Thus, you might say, emptiness is “necessarily” the being of forms which (co-dependently) appear. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Not anything could be less complicated than emptiness. However, we cannot “see” emptiness. What we think we do see, though, are real appearances of (dependently co-arising) forms; and that which thinks it sees them is itself one: you.

Our idea of, our conception of, space is itself a form. Time is a related form. These are conditional (and, in us, conditioned) and mutable perceptions, differing circumstantially. And appearing to occur in time and space is our supposition of “cause and effect”. Dependent co-arising is, itself, a conception based on a cause of the dependent arising, which presumably results in the effect of dependent arising: one thing “co” operates on the other thing.

But what one needs to bear in mind is that the “one thing” is as empty of reality as is the “other thing”: both cause and effect are unreal conceptions in the (unreal) mind.

The cause-and-effect relationship (so-called) is particularly important for the spiritual seeker to understand. It has to do with ideas that practice leads to enlightenment.

The idea of cause and effect, or course, is the basis of our entire concept that birth leads to death. Where there has been “no arising”, in the first place there can be no “passing away”.