Emptiness and nothingness negates the 8 fold path

How can moral guidelines exist if all is emptiness and nothing ?

Buddhist writers sometimes try and distinguish this from Nihilism and largely fail.

Form in emptiness, emptiness in form.

What logic is there in that modern language. It is clumsy and incomprehensible.

What does it even mean ?

The Eight fold path is also a mental construct, should it be devalued as thoughts are to be seen for the illusion they are ?

Lots of nonsense is what I see in Buddhism so far. I don't think that is just my perspective. Much comes across
as requiring belief and acceptance of nonsense. I held it is higher regard than it deserves at the moment anyway.

Also no joy... where is joy, I have had precious little joy yet from meditation. Stability and peace yes joy ? No.

 

I'd offer you tea, but clearly your cup's already full.

 

Thanks that explains it. Personally I think Buddhism can make it easier by dropping the 'emptiness' descriptor as it has no use in logical use of language and an unnecessary complication. 'No thing/s' is fine I worked that out.. 'Emptiness' still does not make sense in your description even though I understand the principle now.

The table/atoms makes no sense either, a very bad analogy. You don't see atoms in this reality at this scale of magnitude useful to humans. It is a table due to conditioning. If there was no conditioning and you saw an table for the first time you would not see atoms, you would see wood in a form that might be useful for ? Getting fruit higher up.

 

Thanks for trying. I have read this before.

Buddha said come and see, not believe or swallow everything you read on his teaching. Absorbing nonsense is a sure way
to confusion.

 

Maybe, but it is rather common for religions or indeed almost any human field to have some specific internal terminology. Which is natural because specific fields need more detailed classifications and better defined terminology in their subjects of interest than what is the case in general communication. Much like different languages can have different levels of detailed terminology for some phenomena, depending on needs and exposure. An Arctic culture might have 10 words for snow instead of one, for example, needing to be more specific than we do.

There is an obvious advantage in having a single, well defined word that describes an important concept for that specific group and is as such used often, instead of using a couple of descriptive sentences every time. Even if there was no "emptiness" people would have come with a similar alternative for that very reason.

If someone is interested in Madhyamaka in particular and Buddhism in general that person will soon grasp the meaning of emptiness in that tradition. If a person is not interested then what does it mater? People will always misinterpret things. Most in general population still think the fat East Asian monk (Budai) is actually Gautama Buddha, most of Buddha and Dalai Lama quotes on the internet are fake and so on. Not sure why should Buddhists waste time and care all that much, it is impossible to do with the general public and the more involved public does not have that problem.

Also to keep in mind is that we are using English translations of Sanskrit, Pali and Classical Chinese, which is not always a 1:1 and might always require additional descriptions to avoid misunderstanding, or leaving non-english terminology (which again requires additional description).

Also to keep in mind that the Eightfold path is not necessarily used in the same way with Mahayana authors focusing more on the Bodhisattva ideal.

That said, while what was answered hods true for the original Nagarjuna's usage of the term (which is the source of the most identifiable and influential usage of the term, being the centre of his philosophy, but of course he is not the only one nor did he invent the word in Buddhist and even wider Sramanic or even general Dharmic usage) and it was used as a direct opposite to substantialist ideas, there indeed are some substantialist ideas in some Buddhist groups and therefore some might even interpret Emptiness in that spirit and therefore differ from an anti-essentialist viewpoint.