Documented: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, c. 150-250 CE, argues that all phenomena are empty of svabhava, own-being, because everything arises dependently. Crucially, the text applies emptiness to itself, emptiness is also empty, and states that emptiness wrongly grasped is like a snake grasped by the wrong end. The Heart Sutra compresses the teaching into the form-emptiness identity recited daily across Asia.
The perennial error, documented in the tradition's own commentaries: emptiness heard as nihilism, nothing exists, nothing matters. The texts insist on the opposite, emptiness is precisely why anything works, because things are not fixed, change, causation, and compassion are possible. Chandrakirti and the Dalai Lama's tradition repeat the correction across fourteen centuries.
The modern claim: quantum field theory's relational vacuum and dependence on measurement echo shunyata. Physicists note the resonance is metaphorical, emptiness is a thesis about concepts and essences, not particles, while Buddhists like the Dalai Lama engage the dialogue seriously and decline the identity. The meeting is documented; the merger is not.
If everything is empty, what is doing the grasping, and what is it holding?