The Whole/Part Approach

Emptiness, as an idea, is simply a matter of noticing that for whatever we might identify in any way—let's call it X—there is always something non-X that is necessarily involved in its being X, such that the removal of the non-X would also entail the removal of the X. This goes for every state, every substance, every feeling, every part, every whole, every set, and every set of sets that we think we are identifying. There are many ways Sunyata[emptiness] is approached in Mahayana literature. The most straightforward approach is to look at how any whole, X, is necessarily dependent on its parts, which considered in themselves are non-X (the whole/part approach). At the most basic level it is simply an extension of the basic idea, now applied to all possible elements of experience or thought without exception. What I called "myself" has been analyzed into its component parts, various natural conditional processes. There is no "myself"; what I called myself is really made of these conditional processes. The self is not real, but the momentary processes, the elements themselves, are real, are facts of the matter. Such and such a state arises as a result of such and such causes and conditions; we mistakenly identify with some subset of these real states, on the basis of a certain inattentiveness to them and to the effects of the states of desire that are among them, and attach the label "self" to it. That is the nonself idea in its simplest form.

But now we go on to note that each of these processes is also not a "self": not only is there no "myself": there is also no "themselves" of the processes that constitute me. Let's start with the simplest way: simply to analyze things into their component parts and to notice that we can never reach something that cannot be analyzed down further. The parts of a thing are something other than the whole that they form. Apples are not made of "appleness"; they are made of lots of different "non-appleness," and when all the non-apple is removed, there is no apple left. What "is" an apple? Anyone who has taken an introductory philosophy class, or been an even slightly dreamy eleven-year-old, knows that we can keep asking for more definitions no matter how many answers might be given to this question. An apple "is" juice and pulp and skin. But what are those? They "are" a cluster of molecules of a certain composition. But what is a molecule? It "is" a certain arrangement of atoms. But what is an atom? It "is" neutrons and protons and electrons and other particles in a certain energy configuration, with certain characteristic types of activity. But what is energy, what is activity, what is a particle? Each question is answered in terms of something else. When we get to the most ultimate possible term, there is nothing in terms of which the question can be answered. The words in the dictionary are defined by other words. When we ask what something is "made of," we need an answer that is something else. What is the universe made of? What is energy made of? What is space-time made of?

---Brook A. Ziporyn, in Emptiness and Omnipresence---