Briefly Noted: There are a lot of scholars in the hell realms.

That’s something one of my Buddhist friends used to say when we got too intellectual: a reminder that understanding alone doesn’t free us from suffering. We need to practice.

Jim Palmer’s recent Substack piece reminded me of a conversation I once had with an Episcopal priest who, discovering I was a Buddhist, told me part of his master’s thesis had effectively dismantled the Buddhist idea of nothingness.

I asked if he meant emptiness, the lack of inherent existence. He said no and walked me through his understanding of the Sanskrit shunyata, but in the end he was still defining it as nothingness, the absence of something specific, like meaning.

To him, it reflected a spiritual error in Buddhism: one that denies God, negates creation, and collapses into despair, which is a fair critique of nihilism but also something Buddhism explicitly rejects.

Somehow, he had conflated the deeply profound concept of emptiness with a fairly ordinary notion of nothingness and, in doing so, managed to refute a position Buddhism doesn’t hold while congratulating himself for debunking one of its central teachings.

That moment has stuck with me over the years because it shows just how easy it is to believe we understand emptiness when we don’t.

Palmer’s piece does a nice job clarifying an important part of the confusion. He distinguishes Western nihilism, the lived collapse of meaning, from emptiness, which leads to joy, not despair.

But the problem runs deeper. It’s not just confusion. Even a correct understanding of emptiness is only the beginning.

In my Mahayana tradition, it begins by identifying what’s called the object of negation: the way the things we normally see appear to exist from their own side, independent of the mind perceiving them. We examine that appearance, contemplate the reasons this way of existing is impossible, and then meditate on the experience that emerges. By doing this, we gradually gain a deeper and deeper understanding of how things actually exist, as opposed to the way they appear.

We do this to understand the middle way. Outside of meditation, we fall easily into one of two errors: either things exist just as they appear, or they don’t exist at all. These aren’t uniquely Western mistakes, but in Buddhist practice they’re explicitly identified as errors. The middle way is the rejection of both extremes.

It’s possible to study these ideas, even teach them, while never truly understanding the profound experience they’re pointing to. But without that deep understanding, we can never move beyond the cycle of suffering to reach nirvana, no matter how refined our intellectual understanding becomes.