As quoted in Chapter 5, Peirce (EP1:55) argued that
The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation.
This resonates with the Buddhist insight represented (for instance) in the Gandhavyuha Sutra (Cleary 1984, 1445):
We see all sentient beings, afflicted by birth, old age, death, grief, lament, suffering, and sorrow, as illusory, born of the illusion of untrue ideas.
According to Nishiari Bokusan in his commentary on Dogen’s ‘Genjokoan’, ‘A human being is only the causes and conditions of karma that consists of ignorance and attachment’ (Weitsman et al. 2011, 75).
The Buddhist principle of ‘emptiness’ (sunyata) is the denial of svabhava or ‘self-existence’.
From the point of view of Mahayana Buddhism, this is the greatest of all delusions, the belief that something exists. Upon close analysis, nothing exists by itself. Any given entity can only be defined in terms of other entities in time, space, or mind. And these in turn can only be defined in terms of other entities, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, nothing exists by itself, and nothing exists as itself. There is no such thing as a self.
— Red Pine (2004, 68)
Red Pine goes on to explain that the second greatest of all delusions is the belief that nothing exists. This is why Thich Nhat Hanh’s term ‘interbeing’ is, for English-speaking people unaccustomed to Buddhist thinking, a better translation of sunyata than ‘emptiness’: ‘interbeing’ does not carry the notion of void or empty space but does suggest the relative nature of existence.
We are not separate. We are inextricably interrelated. The rose is the garbage, and the non-prostitute is the prostitute. The rich man is the very poor woman, and the Buddhist is the non-Buddhist. The non-Buddhist cannot help but be a Buddhist, because we inter-are. The emancipation of the prostitute will come as she sees into the nature of interbeing. She will know that she is bearing the fruit of the whole world. And if we look into ourselves and see her, we bear her pain, and the pain of the whole world.
— Thich Nhat Hanh (1988, 38)
To bear fruit is to bear pain. To see that fruit and pain are one is to see that both are ‘empty’ – that is, each is made of relations to the other, not of some separate substance.
The difference between svabhava and sunyata corresponds, in physics, to the difference between the Newtonian conception of absolute time and space and the relational conception which was ‘posited by Leibniz and realized by Einstein’ (Smolin 1997, 220).
What is at stake in the conflict between the absolute and relational views of space and time … goes to the roots of the whole of the scientific conception of the universe. Does the world consist of a large number of independently autonomous atoms, the properties of each owing nothing to the others? Or, instead, is the world a vast, interconnected system of relations, in which even the properties of a single elementary particle or the identity of a point in space requires and reflects the whole rest of the universe? The two views of space and time underlie and imply two very different views of what it means to speak of a property, of identity, or of individuality. Consequently, the transition from a cosmology based on an absolute notion of space and time to one based on a relational notion—a transition we are now in the midst of—must have profound implications for our understanding of the place of complexity and life in the universe.
— Smolin (1997, 221)