Well then, emptiness means essentially transience, that's the first thing it means.
 Nothing to grasp, nothing permanent, nothing to hold on to.
 But it means this with special reference to ideas of reality, ideas of God, ideas of the
 self, the Brahman, anything you like.
 What it means is that reality escapes all concepts.
 If you say there is a God, that's a concept.
 If you say there is no God, that's a concept.
 And Nagarjuna is saying that always your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in
 a sieve, or wrap it up in a parcel.
 So he invented a method of teaching Buddhism which was an extension of the dialectic method
 that the Buddha himself first used, and this became the great way of studying, especially
 at the University of Nalanda, which has been re-established in modern times, but of course
 it was destroyed by the Muslims when they invaded India.
 The University of Nalanda, where the dialectic method of enlightenment was taught.
 The dialectic method is perfectly simple.
 It can be done with an individual student and a teacher, or with a group of students
 and a teacher, and you would be amazed how effective it is when it involves precious
 little more than discussion.
 Some of you no doubt have attended tea groups, blab labs, in which people are there and they
 don't know quite why they're there, and there's some sort of a so-called resource person to
 disturb them.
 And after a while they get the most incredible emotions, and somebody tries to dominate the
 discussion of the group, say, and then the group kind of goes into the question of why
 he's trying to dominate it, and so on and so forth.
 Well these were the original blab labs, and they have been repeated in modern times with
 the most startling effects.
 That is to say, the teacher gradually elicits from his participant students what are their
 basic premises of life.
 What is your metaphysic?
 In the sense, I'm not using metaphysic in a kind of a spiritual sense, but what are
 your basic assumptions?
 What real ideas do you operate on as to what is right and what is wrong, what is the good
 life and what is not?
 What arguments are you going to argue strongest?
 Where do you take your stand?
 The teacher soon finds this out for each individual concerned, and then he demolishes it.
 He absolutely takes away that person's compass.
 And so they start getting very frightened, and say to the teacher, all right, I see now,
 of course I can't depend on this, but what should I depend on?
 And unfortunately the teacher doesn't offer any alternative suggestions, but simply goes
 on to examine the question, why do you think you have to have something to depend on?
 Now this is kept up over quite a period, and the only thing that keeps the students from
 going insane is the presence of a teacher who seems to be perfectly happy, but is not
 proposing any ideas.
 He's only demolishing them.
 So we get finally, not quite finally, to the void, the shunya.
 And what then?
 When you get to the void, there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief.
 That's nirvana.
 Phew, as I gave a proper English translation of nirvana.
 Ah, great.
 So they are liberated, and yet they can't quite say why, or what it is that they found
 out.
 So they call it the void.
 But Nagarjuna went on to say, you mustn't cling to the void.
 You have to void the void.
 And so the void of non-void is the great state, as it were, of Nagarjuna's Buddhism.
 But you must remember that all that has been voided, all that has been denied, are those
 concepts in which one has hitherto attempted to pin down what is real.
 In Zen Buddhist texts they say, you cannot nail a peg into the sky.
 And so to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called a man not depending on
 anything.
 And when you're not hung on anything, you are the only thing that isn't hung on anything,
 which is the universe, which doesn't hang, you see.
 Where would it hang?
 It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping.
 There will never be the crash of it landing on concrete floor somewhere.
 But the reason for that is that it won't crash below because it doesn't hang above.
 And so there is a poem in Chinese which speaks of such a person as having above, not a tile
 to cover the head, below, not an inch of ground on which to stand.
 And you see, this which to people like us who are accustomed to rich imageries of the
 Divine, the loving Father in Heaven who has laid down the eternal laws, O Word of God
 incarnate, O wisdom from above, O truth unchanged, unchanging, O light of life and love, the
 wisdom which from the hallowed page, a lantern for our footsteps, shines out from age to
 age.
 See, so that's very nice.
 We feel we know where we are, and that it's all been written down, and that in Heaven
 the Lord God is resplendent with glory, with all the colors of the rainbow, with all the
 saints and angels around and everything like that.
 So we feel that it's positive, that we've got a real roaring, gutsy religion full of
 color and so on.
 But it doesn't work that way.
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