What is ultimate is the emptiness which is revealed as their basis, for all things are empty, and yet, once this truth is realized, it is as individuals and societies that nothingness is expressed and revealed.
When he's growling about empty things, which is often, Mr. Cole sounds directionless and amateurish.
Hinduism, for example, asserts that the self is divine, while other traditions claim that God alone exists (Sufism), that God is immediately present to the soul (Christianity and Judaism), and that all things are empty (Mahayana Buddhism).
Consider further, though, that all things are empty.
For example, Buddhists often affirmed that metaphysically all things are empty of self-substantial being.
When Nāgārjuna argues that things are empty of svabhāva it is not this notion of essence he is concerned with.
Nevertheless to assert that all things are empty of any intrinsic reality, for Nāgārjuna, is not to undermine the existential status of things as simply nothing.
To claim that things are empty is to say that there is nothing more to them than there appears to be.
On the contrary, Nāgārjuna argues, to assert that the things are empty of any intrinsic reality is to explain the way things really are as causally conditioned phenomena (pratītyasamputpaṅhā).
Pre-Tiantai Emptiness theory gets into an infinite regress, chasing its tail around the problem of the transcendence of Emptiness: no statement can represent it, even "all things are Empty".
