sunyata (Sanskrit, ’emptiness’), a property said by some Indian Buddhist philosophers to be possessed necessarily by everything that exists. If something is empty it possesses no essential or inherent nature (svabhava), which is to say that both its existence and its nature are dependent on things or events other than itself. The thesis ‘everything is empty’ is therefore approximately equivalent to ‘everything is causally dependent’; the contradictories of these theses were typically argued by defenders of emptiness to be incoherent and thus not worthy of assent. To deny emptiness was also taken to require the affirmation of permanence and non-contingency: if something is non-empty in any respect, it is in just that respect permanent and non-contingent. See also BUDDHISM , MA ADHYAMIKA , NA AGAAR — JUN. P.J.G.