Śūnyatā · शून्यता · emptiness

Not nothingness, and the door insists on the distinction because it is the single most-abused rhyme in comparative mysticism. Śūnyatā means emptiness of independent existence: nothing carries its own being inside itself, everything is what it is by relation, cause and context — including emptiness, which is itself empty and must not be turned into a new absolute. The seduction is obvious. Ayin, the divine Nothing, sits above Keter; Ein Sof refuses every attribute; the Kabbalist says that all creation is bittul, nullity, before it. But the two nothings face opposite directions. Ayin is a fullness so complete that language reads it as absence — the Nothing is a Someone the words cannot hold. Śūnyatā is the finding that no independent thing was ever there to be full. One empties the words; the other empties the furniture. Say they are the same and you have flattered both traditions and understood neither.