Thanks for your letter.

“A question: Did the Buddha take the Hindu teachings to a new level?”

Before Buddha was a Buddhist, he would have been a Hindu. No doubt he would have known the Sanskrit word sunyata, which means emptiness. Emptiness was a subject of some of the Vedic writings (such as the Rhibu Gita).

In his later years, Buddha pronounced his more subtle teachings (particularly, the Prajnaparamita: the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra). It is in the Heart Sutra where the famous six words appear; form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Nagarjuna (c. 2nd C. AD) spelled out the implications of that six-word formula; the “two truths” are form (all forms are impermanent) and emptiness (the ground “behind” all forms).

In other words, everything has two natures. Form is what temporarily appears; emptiness is always its “true nature”.

While form is appearing, it does indeed “exist”: but form comes and goes as emptiness. By contrast, form does not always exist. So only a nihilist would say that form has never actually had any existence at all. Nagarjuna admits to the existence of form; he is not a nihilist.

What comes and goes—all forms—are compared to a dream because we (a form) dream, in our sleep, about forms (persons or things). And our sleeping dream comes and goes. In that sense, everything in our life is like a dream.

When we awake from a sleeping dream, everything disappears for the dreamer. When we die, as a human being, everything disappears for the human being. All that has been and will be is that condition of emptiness which replaces what had been form.