What are some of the differences between the Buddhist philosophies of svabhāva and śūnyatā?

Question

If any religious studies students are looking for answers to the above question, I'm more than happy to help.

Answer 1

It looks like this is more of the author making putting themselves out there as available for answering these sorts of questions, but I figured it would be worthwhile to answer the question here for anyone who might be curious. Granted, I’m not a religious studies scholar, but I am published in comparative philosophy, specifically Theravāda Buddhist philosophy.

From a Theravāda perspective, sabhāva (Pāli; Skt. svabhāva) and suññatā (Skt. śūnyatā) are not rival absolutes. In Abhidhamma and the relevant commentaries, sabhāva means roughly a dhamma’s “own characteristic,” which we might think of as the distinctive mark by which it is directly known. Examples include: hardness for earth element, heat for fire element, and so on. Suññatā, on the other hand, refers to the emptiness of self and of “what pertains to a self” across all five aggregates and the six sense spheres. In practice, it is closely tied to anattā. When you attend carefully to conditional arising and vanishing (paṭicca-samuppāda), nothing can be taken as “I” or “mine,” and all but the most subtle craving loses its footing.

It is also worth pointing out that Theravāda distinguishes between paramattha dhammas (ultimate realities) and paññatti (concepts/designations). Sabhāva talk belongs to the ultimate level, where each dhamma is said to have its own distinct characteristic that can be directly discerned in meditation. These dhammas are taken as ultimately real, although care must be taken here. They are not "real" in the sense of being permanent or self-subsisting, but instead in the sense of being the final units of analysis that arise and cease according to conditions. Suññatā, for its part, emphasizes that none of these dhammas can be regarded as “I” or “mine.” Properly understood, then, the frameworks of sabhāva and suññatā complement one another: one provides analytical clarity about what arises, while the other guards against the conceit of self in relation to what arises.

By contrast, Mahāyāna (especially Madhyamaka) tends to make śūnyatā the centerpiece and takes it much further than the Theravāda does. In Madhyamaka reasoning, to say that things are empty is to deny that any phenomenon, even an ultimate one, has svabhāva in the sense of an intrinsic nature. All dharmas are dependently arisen and thus empty of any self-grounding reality. This stands in tension with the Theravāda use of sabhāva, where ultimate dhammas are treated as real in their own domain, even if impermanent, conditioned, and not-self. Yogācāra, likewise, uses “svabhāva” differently again, in its three-natures framework, and later buddha-nature literature can sound more essentialist, which fuels further debate. From a Theravādin standpoint, these moves in Mahāyāna might perhaps look like overextensions. Very broadly, Theravāda seems to suggest that one can preserve the usefulness of analyzing ultimate dhammas with their own marks, while still insisting that none can be taken as self. Mahāyāna, on the other hand, can be read as insisting that going one step further (i.e., denying even that level of ultimate existence) is necessary.

(Of course, this is a broad, high-level comparison, and both traditions have internal debates and nuanced sub-schools that complicate the picture.)