Though forms—whether material or immaterial—are empty of reality and do not exist in the way they appear, unenlightened beings take them to be real. For even an enlightened being who recognizes that forms are empty, avails himself in the day-to-day world of the functionality of forms, though he knows they are ultimately nonexistent Thus, in this way, such things can be said to ‘exists’ as a conventional ‘truth’.

Emptiness, the underlying condition of all forms and phenomena, is the ultimate truth. The unenlightened person is limited to the conventional truth—which is not actually the real truth, but an illusion in the same way that a person can truthfully claim to have seen a mirage. The enlightened person accesses simultaneously the ultimate truth along with the conventional ‘truth’.

However, for those who are familiar with the teachings of “no production” or “no creation” or “no origination,” forms and phenomena are empty of reality, or existence, having not ever actually having been created or produced at all, at any time.

From this standpoint, the distinctions between conventional and ultimate truth are moot. In total emptiness, no “truths” exists, not any of the named things exist. Emptiness is absolute.

And of complete emptiness, all that can be said is that it is empty; even to say that it ‘exists’ (or doesn’t exist) is to say too much.

We suppose that existence is a reality, and then operate out of that assumption.

Form is emptiness. Negating form, emptiness is empty of existence.

When it is seen that all things are empty of true existence, the seer and the seen are regarded as illusions – illusions which themselves are empty of existence.

Emptiness is an absence of what we think of as “reality”; it is a negation of an “existence”. It is not a thing which supplants an existence of reality with an existence of another thing.

Recognizing the emptiness of all phenomena, simultaneously, is to recognize that emptiness itself must also be empty. It is not a “cause” of the emptiness of phenomena, since it is not apart from that emptiness of phenomena.

A consequence of recognizing emptiness is to recognize that what appears to us as “real”, is actually as real as any illusion would be.