BEYOND EMPTINESS: NĀgĀrjuna and the Hidden GROUND: Ground

Look for the bottom of the world and you will not find it. Every floor you reach turns out to be standing on another. Nothing carries its own weight. Eighteen centuries ago a philosopher in India followed this thought further, and more honestly, than anyone before him or since. His name was Nāgārjuna, and he showed, one unhurried step at a time, that no thing owns its own being - that everything is what it is only by leaning on everything else. He is right. This book does not argue with him. It walks beside him, all the way down. But at the very bottom of his descent Nāgārjuna makes one quiet assumption and never turns around to check it. He assumes that because no single step holds its own weight, there can be no last step at all - that the ground gives way forever. This book is about that one unchecked assumption, and about what happens when you test it instead of trusting it. Because it turns out that the very feature Nāgārjuna found everywhere, that nothing stands on its own, is the exact fingerprint of a process that does not fall forever but closes in, steadily, on a single point it can never dissolve. From there the floor of the world comes into view. Not a thing among things. Not one more essence waiting to be emptied. Just the one point that emptiness keeps returning to instead of erasing - a ground you can, in the end, even weigh, because modern physics finds it sitting exactly where the argument says it must be, in a vacuum that is never truly empty. Beyond Emptiness is for anyone who has ever felt the floor of things drop away and wanted to know, honestly and without consolation, whether it drops away forever. It honors the deepest case ever made for a world without foundations - and then quietly shows that case the staircase it was standing on the whole time. >