Chogyam Trungpa

Student: I don't understand what emptiness means.

Chogyam: When we talk of emptiness, it means the absence of solidity, the absence of fixed notions which cannot be changed, which have no relationship to us at all but which remain as they are, separate. Form, in this case, is more the solidity of experience. In other words, it is a certain kind of determination not to give away, not to open. We would like to keep everything intact purely for the purpose of security, of knowing where we are. You are afraid to change. That sort of solidness is form. So "form is empty" is the absence of that security; you see everything as penetrating and open. But that doesn't mean that everything has to be completely formless, or nothing. When we talk of nothingness, emptiness, or voidness, we are not talking in terms of negatives but in terms of nothingness being everything. It's another way of saying "everything" -- but it is much safer to say "nothing" at that particular level than "everything."