Emptiness has its beginning and end in the most fundamental human experience. It is the third term where self-consciousness is necessarily dual. What lies between “I” and “me”? Emptiness. Human self-consciousness comes at a price, and this is it.
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In the “fasting of the heart/mind” passage of the Zhuangzi the whole point seems to be the rediscovery of this emptiness. See with qi (ch’i). Confucius tells his disciple Yan. What is qi? “[T]he vital essence [qi] is an emptiness waiting for [dai, depending on] the presence of beings. The Dao alone is what gathers in this emptiness. And it is this emptiness that is the fasting of the heart” (4:9; Ziporyn).
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When Yan gives this fasting a try he discovers what this emptiness really means. “Before I find what moves me into activity, it is myself that is full and real. But as soon as I find what moves me, it turns out that ‘myself’ has never begun to exist. Is this what you mean by being empty” (4:10; Ziporyn)? “Exactly”, replies Confucius.
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What moves him into activity is the emptiness that creates a space for him to fill. But then it is not “he” that is the real activator, but emptiness. His sense of being a concrete self, it turns out, is only imagined. Self there is, only now it is unfixed, fluid, transitory, and negotiable. Now, any self will do. “Sometimes he thinks he is a horse, sometimes he thinks he’s an ox. Such understanding is truly reliable, such de is deeply genuine” (7:1). When Zhuangzi says, “Just be empty, nothing more” (7:13), this is what he means—have no-fixed-self. In this way we can wander in all things.
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Still, emptiness “depends on” the presence of beings. Emptiness is not something out there that pre-exists things; it “exists” only because there are things. Or more specifically, because there is a human thing whose self-consciousness creates the occasion for emptiness to arise.
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As always, this is all about the human experience. It is not a metaphysical theory of the nature of Reality. This too is being empty.
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“Dao alone gathers in this emptiness.” The experience of Dao is the experience of this emptiness—an emptiness that is populated by all things, a vastness—“the vastest arrangement”.