Emptiness and Quantum Theory

This essay is adapted from a talk given by Carol Russell on April 7, 2026


I once heard a teacher say that one way — a really effective way — to keep your practice alive, is to take risks. Take risks by getting outside your usual patterns, your usual ways of thinking. Maybe this means meditating longer than usual, or getting up earlier to practice. Maybe this means trying on new ideas. Playing your edge. 

The subject of quantum theory is definitely at my edge. 

What has really excited me about the subject of quantum theory is how much it resonates with the Buddhist teaching of emptiness. That has made the whole subject light up for me. The idea that a concept from over 2000 years ago is possibly being confirmed by the most current of scientific thinking is nothing short of astonishing.

So, I invite you into this very elementary – hopefully not misleading - exploration of the possible connection between quantum theory and emptiness.

Emptiness is a profoundly liberating teaching. It can be the most significant fact to realize about existence, both on a personal level and of all phenomena. It can also be perplexing. Perhaps because of our associations with the English word ‘emptiness,’ the common English translation of the word sunyata, we might think it means a bleak vacuity, meaninglessness, or a state of deficiency. Joseph Goldstein calls the word emptiness itself ‘unappealing.’ It doesn’t immediately invoke the sense of beauty, awe, and especially the unbinding of suffering that the experience of emptiness opens up for us.

Our lives involve suffering, this is the First Noble Truth. What is also true is that there is unnecessary suffering; some say the proportion of unnecessary suffering outweighs the suffering that is a natural part of life. Unwholesome habits of speech, thinking, and actions, the way we chase after things that give us only momentary satisfaction, our emotional reactivity to what is happening in life, and our gripping to our views are some of the ways we contribute to our own suffering. 

The Second Noble Truth identifies clinging and craving as the cause of suffering. And why do we crave? This is the crux of why emptiness is so crucial to our liberation. Craving is based on an essential error in how we see ourselves and the world.

We take it for granted that things are as they appear; myself and things out there are as independently real as they seem to be, they exist inherently, in and of themselves. I exist separately from each of you, from this computer, from the cushion. I am an independent entity. It is a useful biological function of the brain to have this superficial sense of self. It is how we survive and take care of ourselves. 

And in the brilliance of Buddhist practice, it is possible to see it is this erroneous belief of an individual ‘I’ that can gain or lose things, and that I must protect this self-sense, that causes me to crave and cling, and leads inevitably to stress and disappointment, because the self-sense and the world are ultimately unreliable. 

Have you ever noticed how the self-sense changes, sometimes feeling dense and separate, like when we are embarrassed, and sometimes feeling connected and spacious, like when we are generous? It is helpful for me to see the self-sense as a gradient.

To see the empty nature of self is to realize the absence of inherent existence that self appears to have. This is the core Buddhist teaching of anattā, not-self.  Self doesn’t exist independently from anything else. Not just self, but all things; nothing exists ‘from its own side.’

Another way to think of it is nothing is autonomous of the mind; self and the world arise dependent on the mind. Understanding emptiness is a meditative and conceptual journey to see that it is the mind — which by the way is also empty — fabricates reality, and one realizes gradually that it happens, how it happens, and how to do it less. 

Emptiness is mentioned in early Buddhist teachings. The Buddha said, ‘One who knows with regard to the world that ‘all this is unreal’ abandons the near shore and the far, like a snake its worn-out skin.’ In other words, we no longer pursue and try to hold onto what we know lacks substantiality, is in some way not real in the way we think it is, and we learn to put down that identity, and, like shedding an old skin, we let it be. 

Emptiness was further developed in the Mahayana tradition, most importantly by Nagarjuna in the second century. He wrote, ‘Whenever there is belief that things are real…desire and hatred are generated [from clinging] … Without that belief no defilements can occur… And when this is completely understood, all views and afflictions dissolve.’ 

As I said earlier, some people find the concept of the lack of inherent reality implies life is meaningless, and therefore there is no reason to care for one another and the world, or that we have no ethical responsibilities. Nothing could be further from the experience of emptiness. This teaching isn’t saying that things don’t exist or that it calls for the heart to close down. It’s not nihilism.  

Emptiness is the middle way. It finds the wondrous place, as Burbea writes, ‘between assumptions of existence and non-existence, being and non-being, and it is this that needs to be understood.’

As Brenda said recently, one way to practice emptiness is to see boundless possibility. This can loosen up the narrow conclusions we have about who we are and what the world is. Play the edge. Don’t be defined by our habits, especially when we are uncomfortable. This lessens selfing on a moment-by moment basis. Can we be inspired to consider boundless possibilities for the world? I suspect I am not the only one who thinks the world desperately needs us to imagine it into new potentialities.

Another way to open to emptiness is to be of service to others. In fact, compassion, humility, kindness, and generosity arise naturally as the self-sense lessens, as we become self-less. As it is said, compassion is emptiness in action. ‘A new world won’t arrive unless we roll up our sleeves and begin creating it,’ writes Kurt Spellmeyer.

Does this make sense? It is dizzying. Emptiness defies the common-sense assumptions we have about existence and non-existence. This is a taste of the mysterious and profoundly liberating path of emptiness.


For me, one of the challenging aspects of getting my mind around quantum theory is that what is unfolding on the quantum level of reality is not what I experience in day-to-day life. What I experience in my day-to-day life is what is described by classical physics — mechanics, laws of motion, gravity, forces at work shaping the world. This is how I experience the world through my senses. 

And yet quantum mechanics — the physical laws that govern subatomic particles — has wide-spread applications that are all around us: GPS navigation, lasers, medical applications like MRIs, optics, semiconductors, cryptography, nuclear weapons. Quantum theory has predicted wildly unimaginable phenomena. For a hundred years, every prediction has turned out to be correct. So, even though we aren’t living our day-to-day existence aware of the quantum reality, it impacts our lives on many levels.

Quantum theory is the framework that describes the behavior of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales. Instead of matter as a particle or a wave, it posits a duality.  Rather than being able to predict a certain result, quantum mathematics predicts probabilities.

Then there is quantum superposition, which is when two contradictory properties are, in a way, present at the same time. An object could be here, and at the same time somewhere else. Of course, we never see an object in two places at once, we just see the consequences, the quantum interference, of the superposition. What’s especially bizarre is that an object’s behavior is influenced simply by observing it. This is what Schrödinger was explaining with his famous cat thought experiment. A cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and the cat is observed — the wave collapses — this is quantum superposition of cat-alive and cat-dead. 

Does this make sense? Absolutely not. This is the puzzle of quantum theory.

Richard Feynman in 1964:  ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’

That was more than 60 years ago, and fortunately curious scientists have not stopped attempting to explain quantum mechanics. Though not one model to explain what is happening has been proved, scientists and philosophers have come up with some fascinating theories.

There’s a theory of infinite parallel universes where all the probabilities are playing out. A theory of hidden variables which Einstein favored, in which the physical world is predictable as in classical physics, yet there are things about it we will never know. There’s a theory that the wave collapses so fast we can’t measure it.  There’s a hypothetical speculation that quantum phenomena are responsible for consciousness. 

David Bohm theorized that the universe has an undivided wholeness and explicit order that includes both matter and consciousness. We can start to see why discussions of quantum theory are just as much philosophical as they are mathematical.

Another theory, one that is of the greatest interest to me, is the ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum theory. The theory states that every ‘thing’ expresses itself and acts on any other ‘thing’ it comes into contact with. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is continually affecting everything it comes into contact with, even simply by observing it. Before I did a bit of reading on the subject, I thought of the ‘observer’ as a scientist in a lab with sophisticated measuring instruments influencing a particle to behave differently because it is being observed. But this theory goes way beyond that.

This theory asks, what if we pay attention to the interactions rather than what appear as individual objects? What if the world is made of what physicist Carlo Rovelli calls "a dense web of interactions." How would a thing be known if we didn’t interact with it?

He writes:
Individual objects are the way in which they interact. If there was an object that had no interactions, no effect upon anything, emitted no light, attracted nothing and repelled nothing, was not touched and had no smell….it would be as good as nonexistent.

Any object is an ‘observer’ of any other object that it comes into contact with. So, any interaction is an ‘observation.’ Carlo Rovelli goes on to say, ‘The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others.’

Can you begin to hear the possible correlation with emptiness — that nothing exists in isolation? Nothing has an inherent separate existence. The world that appears to us arises dependent on our own mind interacting with it.

Rovelli again:
‘There is, of course, something bewildering about the vision of the world that emerges from this theory. We must abandon something that seemed most natural to us: the simple idea of a world made of things…. When we look around ourselves, we are not truly ‘observing’: we are instead dreaming an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misinformation) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world for any discrepancies.’

Empirical, mathematical research is pointing to the same possibilities that the Buddha and later Buddhists came to long ago — that things are not as substantial as they appear to us, that the self and all phenomena lack autonomous, inherent existence, and that the properties of any ‘thing’ are dependently arising within the mind, in relationship to everything else. 

The way something appears is dependent on interaction, interaction with the interpretive mind of the observer; ‘everything is what it is with respect to something else.’ Or, as the Buddha teaches, the mind, through ignorance, fabricates all the aggregates of experience: form, vedanā, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.

Rovelli writes: ‘Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective — no point of view that is absolute and universal.’

Both the Dharma and quantum theory teach that clinging to views is erroneous — views are always dependently arising in the mind and inevitably partial. 

Including the view of what we take ourselves to be — a separate independent self. 

Rovelli:
It is for this reason as well, I believe, that the very idea of an individual ‘I’ – that solitary and rebellious ‘I’ …that self that I believe to be completely independent and totally free…recognizes itself, in the end, as only a ripple in a network of networks…’

I hope I have given you a taste of why I am excited by the mutual confirmation between the Dharma and quantum theory – how both have the liberating potential to free us from the stress of clinging to a fixed sense of self, others, and the world. 

I will never be a quantum physicist. I will never understand the mathematical basis for quantum theory. But realization of emptiness lies at the heart of our practice and can  be understood and experienced. I will end with this quote from Rob Burbea that says it beautifully:

‘As we learn to deepen our understanding through meditation, we discover that not only does seeing into emptiness bring a rare and crucial freedom, sweet relief, joy, and love, there is in the seeing of it more and more a sense of beauty, of mystery.  ... We uncover a dimension of wonder in things that we hadn’t known before, because the void-ness of things is something truly magical when experienced deeply.’