From Understanding <i>Śūnyatā</i> to Connecting It with the <i>Tathāgatagarbha</i>: The Emergence and Evolution of Sengzhao’s <i>Emptiness of the Nonabsolute</i>

Historical transmission and other controversies related to Sengzhao’s <i>Things Do Not Shift</i> have long been a subject of scholarly attention. However, his essay <i>Emptiness of the Nonabsolute</i> has been insufficiently studied, despite being traditionally deemed emblematic of the Chinese understanding of <i>Mādhyamaka</i> philosophy. The present study shows that this essay has also historically generated divisions and debates in the Chinese context. It finds that <i>Emptiness of the Nonabsolute</i> expresses the <i>Mādhyamaka</i> philosophy of emptiness in a distinctly Chinese manner by grounding itself in the principle of dependent origination, and by transforming issues of being and nonbeing and the name and the “thing-in-itself” into conditional emergence. Nevertheless, Sengzhao’s essay evoked the two markedly distinct construals of <i>Buzhengukong</i> 不真故空 and <i>Bushizhenkong</i> 不是真空 as <i>Tathāgatagarbha</i> and Buddha-nature philosophy within Chinese Buddhism. <i>Bushizhenkong</i> directly aligned Sengzhao’s ostensibly representative theory of <i>Mādhyamaka</i> emptiness in China with the doctrinal framework of <i>Tathāgatagarbha</i> and Buddha-nature, triggering almost a millennium-long period of discussions and controversies.