PREFACE
Buddhism says everything is empty even “the emptiness of emptiness BUT Buddhism cannot use the denial of essence to establish its own account of meaning without making the denial itself meaningful. It cannot appeal to convention to escape the problem, because “convention” is another concept whose identity and significance must be established within the very system under examination
The claim “there is no essence” does not reach silence; it destroys the conditions under which the claim could mean anything
That is what makes the problem so severe. Buddhism cannot simply declare victory by saying that it has transcended conceptual thought. If its doctrine is asserted, it must answer for its meaning; if it abandons meaning altogether, it has no doctrine left to defend
The Buddhist claim to transcend logic through the “emptiness of emptiness” is a structural fraud. If the word “emptiness” lacks an identity essence or intrinsic existence, it carries zero semantic data and dissolves mid-sentence. You cannot use a non-existent signpost to point to reality; the statement is literal, meaningless noise.
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