Old School Emptiness is an engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and innovative study of the Buddhist notion of emptiness (suññatā/śūnyatā/空) as elaborated in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese sources. As a whole, the book's arguments may heuristically be divided into critical and constructive elements, to which are devoted three chapters each.
Chapter 1, “Swollen with emptiness”, begins the critical work by delineating what is here identified as the “generally held understanding of śūnyatā within the sphere of Buddhist studies” (p. 3). According to this narrative, Nāgārjuna is taken to be the “epitome” or “telos” (p. 8) towards which earlier elaborations of śūnyatā tend. Huifeng thus briefly traces how śūnyatā has been interpreted in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, Abhidharma, and “Early Buddhism” according to this “dominant position” (p. 28).
Chapter 2, “Criticism, hermeneutics and tradition”, continues the critical project in a more theoretical vein. Drawing on the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Gadamer, Huifeng problematizes the narrative he has identified through “historical”, “text-critical”, and “strictly hermeneutic” (p. 44) approaches. Respectively, these methodological critiques seek to demonstrate that the prevailing narrative is guilty of anachronism (§2.4.1), source biases (§2.4.2), and importing etic interpretive presuppositions (§2.4.3). Huifeng rounds out this chapter with a summary of the “core questions” (p. 29) under study in the remainder of the work (§2.5).
In chapter 3, “Text-critical sources”, Huifeng traces the critical sources for the study of suññatā/śūnyatā in the “Early Buddhism” of the Pali Nikāya and Chinese Āgama collections (§3.1), and the “Mainstream Buddhism” of both the Sthavira and Mahāsāṃghika schools (§3.2).
Chapters 4 and 5, “Interpretation of Suñña(tā) in early Buddhism” and “Interpretation of Śūnya(tā) in sectarian Buddhism” are by far the longest in the book, and constitute “the body of [Huifeng's] inquiry” (p. x). The first of these investigates suñña(tā) in early sources under five sub-headings: “The Suñña abode for meditation (Suññāgara)” (§4.1), “Suñña of self or what pertains to self (Anattā and Anattiya)” (§4.2), “The Suññatā mental release and meditation (Suññatācetovimutti and Śūnyatācetasamādhi)” (§4.3), “The three Samādhis: Suñña, Ākiñcañña/Appaṇihita and Animitta” (§4.4), and “Suññatā and dependent origination” (§4.5). In the final section, “Suñña(tā) in early Buddhism” (§4.6), Huifeng summarizes these “five main meanings” (p. 249) of the term and applies his findings to both text-historical questions regarding the convergences and/or divergences among doctrinal traditions and the chronological stratification of early sources, and the broader question of the relation of suññatā to the Buddha's core teachings.
Huifeng then moves his inquiry on from the early to “the mainstream sectarian period” (p. 172). Specifically, he studies śūnyatā with reference to “Not self of individual (pudgalanairātmya) and not self of dharmas (dharmanairātmya)” (§5.1), “Role of Śūnyatā in the cultivation of the holy path” (§5.2), “Śūnyatā as Nirvāṇa and the inexpressible” (§5.3), ‘Śūnyatā as illusion and non-validity” (§5.4), and “Śūnyatā and dependent origination” (§5.4). These sections range among an array of schools and sub-schools, including what he calls the Sthavira and Mahāsāṃghika nominalists, Vātsīputrīya personalists, and Theravādin and Sarvāstivādin Ābhidharmika realists (p. 173). Huifeng then devotes a section to “Śāstra collated lists of Śūnyatā” (§5.6), with particular attention to the Paṭisambhidāmagga, an early sectarian para-canonical Theravādin text. The chapter concludes with a summary of the five usages of ‘Śūnya(tā) in sectarian Buddhism” (§5.7), a comparison of these with the five usages of early Buddhism, and some concluding comments as to how the material studied complicates the blunt “standard narrative of śūnyatā” (p. 293).
Finally, chapter 6, “Old school emptiness: a hermeneutic of Śūnyatā”, returns to general methodological questions regarding the critical interpretation of pre-modern Buddhist texts. Huifeng problematizes the “linear and sequential model of development” (p. 299) as applied to both the schools of Buddhist teaching and the teachings themselves, and situates his work as “a historically and critically conscious part of the tradition of śūnyatā itself” (p. 307).
The main shortcoming of the book is that the narrative of suññatā/śūnyatā that Huifeng claims is “paradigmatic within the sphere of modern Buddhist studies” (p. 56) is largely that of mid-twentieth-century scholarship and no longer regarded as reliable, let alone paradigmatic, among specialists today. Although Huifeng does cite many recent publications, his critique is primarily aimed at figures such as Stcherbatsky, Lamotte, Murti, Conze, and Ramanan (cf. pp. 8–9); it neglects to address the philosophically sophisticated and historically astute elaborations of Madhyamaka undertaken over the last two decades by scholars such as Dan Arnold, Jay Garfield, C.W. Huntington, Mark Siderits, Tom Tillemans, and Jan Westerhoff. In a work published in 2016 and centrally concerned with overturning “the academic narrative of śūnyatā [which] itself appears to have Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka as its telos” (p. 296), this near-complete absence of twenty-first century scholarship on Nāgārjuna's philosophy is a serious deficiency. Huifeng's claim that he has “consciously not covered” either Madhyamaka or Prajñāpāramitā in the book in order to “overcome” this narrative (p. 296) cannot mask the fact that his “corrective to the methodology of the dominant narrative of śūnyatā” (p. 304) is a “corrective” to sources that are outdated and/or peripheral to, rather than constitutive of, contemporary Madhyamaka scholarship.
The major strength of Old School Emptiness thus lies not in its critical but in its constructive project. Thankfully, the detailed studies of emptiness Huifeng provides in chapters 4 and 5 stand independently of whatever one takes the prevailing position to be, and introduce a truly impressive range of Pali, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese primary sources located outside of the Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka traditions. These references range over a wide spectrum of content, genre, and provenance within multifarious Buddhist traditions, are copiously and judiciously commented, and helpfully include the original language text in hundreds of footnotes. Huifeng also draws on a vast body of scholarship in Modern Chinese not widely cited by Western scholars; his indebtedness here to the prolific Chinese scholar Yinshun 印順 is particularly evident throughout the book.
In all, Huifeng's study performs a valuable function by significantly nuancing our understanding of Buddhist emptiness, and should therefore be of great use to scholars specializing in Buddhist studies, and more broadly in religious studies, intellectual history, or textual hermeneutics.
