The purpose of this paper is to analyze the term “the nonduality of emptiness and existence” often used to elucidtate Buddhist nondualistic middle path in Chinese Buddhism. Through this analysis, we can discuss two further questions. Fisrt, is “the nonduality of emptiness and existence” a properly conbined term? Second, is it a suitable term to elucidtate Buddhist non-dualistic middle path? In contemporary Buddhist studies, the more common approaches are philological and historical. In this paper, I take a philosophical approach for two reasons. Frist, my main fi eld is Buddhist philosophy. Second, historical approach may provide historical answer, such as who or when this term was said or how this term varied among different period of time and different schools. In this paper, I want to focus on the doctrinal meaning of this term and its related concepts such as emptiness and non-dualistic middle path. A feasible way of constructing the doctrinal meaning of emptiness and non-dualistic middle path can start from reading into Buddhist teachings. By analyzing the the term “the nonduality of emptiness and existence,” we found that emptiness is a concept for describing the continual-changing process of the world. Existence is the appearance of the co-arising conditions and non-existence is the lake of the related conditions. Accordingly, being non-dualistic, existence and non-existence are just different sections of the whole changing process. The changing process lacks a fi xed core or entity, and can therefore be described as emptiness. Emptiness in Buddhism does not mean nothingness. Through this analysis, we can understand that emptiness is not an opposite concept to existence. Emptiness is a concept that points to the process including existence and nonexistence. In conclusion, it is not appropriate to combine emptiness and existence as a conceptual pair to illustrate Buddhist non-dualistic middle path.
