The Final Non-Duality 2 – Buddhism: Emptiness and the Movement Beyond Suffering

The Eternal Structure Misread as Impermanence

Among the spiritual paths of the world, Buddhism stands out for its analytical clarity and radical focus on the problem of suffering. Its foundation — the Four Noble Truths — begins not with metaphysical speculation but with existential urgency: dukkha, the suffering that characterizes life, and the promise of its cessation.

Its insight is profound and, in many ways, aligned with the structure of Being: there is no independent, permanent ego; everything we cling to as “self” is a shifting constellation of aggregates. Grasping leads to suffering, and liberation lies in letting go of what was never truly ours. This denial of a static or substantial self (anattā) challenges the notion of a fixed identity and opens the path to freedom not through control, but through release.

And yet, as with other great traditions, something unexamined remains at its core — a contradiction that undermines its most central claims, even when wrapped in the language of wisdom.

At the heart of Buddhist doctrine lies the principle of impermanence (anicca): the idea that all things arise and pass away, that nothing lasts, that everything is in flux. It is from this law of becoming that suffering emerges: because beings change, decay, and die, because all that we love must disappear, we suffer. Therefore, we must learn to detach, to perceive the impermanence of all things, and awaken to nirvāṇa — the cessation of suffering, the extinction of craving.

But here the hidden contradiction becomes apparent. The doctrine of impermanence rests on the assumption that beings come into and go out of existence — that they arise from nothing and return to nothing. This is precisely what Severino names contraddizione C: the idea that Being can become non-being, and that non-being can become Being.

If something is truly impermanent — if it ceases to be — then we are forced to posit a passage into nothingness. But nothingness, by its very definition, cannot be — it cannot appear, it cannot become. Therefore, becoming is impossible. What-is cannot have come from what-is-not. What-is cannot become what-is-not. To affirm impermanence is, subtly but fatally, to affirm nihilism.

Even the doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā), which in the Mahāyāna tradition corrects the metaphysical extremes of earlier schools, often falls prey to misreading. Śūnyatā does not mean that things do not exist, but that no thing exists independently or in isolation. It is a denial of substantial, self-existing entities — not a denial of Being itself. Nāgārjuna’s insight is devastating and liberating: all things are empty of own-being (svabhāva), and what appears, appears only in relation.

Yet even here, the contradiction returns. In the movement from ignorance to enlightenment, from samsara to nirvāṇa, from suffering to cessation, we are again confronted with the notion of becoming — that one condition can end, and another begin. Even if nothing has an essence, to say it ceases is to assume that it once was and now is not. But that which truly was cannot cease to be. If suffering appears, it appears necessarily; if nirvāṇa appears, it too is eternal.

Buddhism, in its deepest intuition, glimpses the eternal relational structure of Being: nothing exists in isolation, and identity is not self-grounded. But it misreads this structure as impermanence, as if relation implies temporality, as if emptiness implies becoming. The structure of Being is indeed without self-being — but it is also without non-being. It is eternal necessity, not process.

To suffer is not to fall into error; it is a necessary appearing within the whole. To seek cessation is not wrong — it is the unfolding of that same necessity. But no being, no event, no experience ever “ends.” What appears, appears eternally — not in time, but in Being.

Thus, in rereading śūnyatā, we do not deny its insight. We reveal its foundation. Emptiness is not void. It is the eternal openness of Being — the non-isolated, non-substantial necessity of all that is. What Buddhism sees as passing, the structure of Being sees as eternally relational. There is no “cessation” of suffering; rather, suffering appears within the whole, as a necessary and irrevocable moment of the infinite.

The path, then, is not one of becoming free. It is the recognition that freedom is eternal, and that even suffering, even craving, even the illusion of impermanence — all are part of the unmistakable, unchangeable fullness of Being.