The Buddhist understanding of emptiness is that all things are devoid of meaning until we assign meaning to them.
Reality is like a blank canvas, bare until the painter comes along and creates something on that emptiness.
Words are a good example of something naturally empty that we nonetheless experience as full of meaning.
Every word you know is simply a combination of sounds, completely devoid of meaning until someone at some point in history decided that its particular sound should have a particular meaning.
If we didn't assign meaning to the sounds we make, they would just be sounds.
From the Buddhist perspective, all things are like this: empty of inherent meaning.
That's not to say they're meaningless.
It's just that the meaning comes from us, the givers of meaning, not from the things themselves.
There's what is, and then there's the story we create about it.
There's an awesome Buddhist parable that illustrates this concept well: One day, an old farmer is out working in the field when, out of the blue, a horse appears.
The farmer's neighbor comes running over and exclaims, "How fortunate you are! A horse has appeared out of nowhere, and now it's yours!"
The farmer simply replies, "Who knows what is good and what is bad?"
The following day, the farmer discovers that the horse has broken out of the corral and run away.
The neighbor comes running over and exclaims, "How unfortunate for you! Your horse is now gone!"
The farmer simply replies, "Who knows what is good and what is bad?"
Later that day, the horse shows up back in the field with four additional horses.
Once again, the neighbor interprets this as good fortune, and once again, the farmer replies, "Who knows what is good and what is bad?"
Later, the farmer's son falls off one of the horses while riding and breaks his leg.
"How unfortunate," says the neighbor. "Your only son has a broken leg!"
But the farmer simply replies, "Who knows what is good and what is bad?"
The next day, the army comes to town to conscript all the young men for a war, but it can't take the farmer's son because of his broken leg.
The neighbor comes running over and says, "How fortunate for you. My son was taken, but yours has a broken leg and because of that..."
He pauses and simply says, together with the farmer, "Who knows what is good and what is bad?"
This is emptiness.
It's the understanding that as life unfolds, it doesn't mean anything.
It's neither positive nor negative.
All things simply are as they are.
