Parmenides argued that what-is cannot arise from what-is-not. Lucretius made it the first law of nature. Christian theology answered with creatio ex nihilo. Uddālaka Āruṇi in the Chāndogya asks the same question — “how could being be born from non-being?” Leibniz asked the deeper one: why is there something rather than nothing? See the phrase on the Sententiae page.
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related by shared connectionsThe Pre-Socratics
The first Greek philosophers — from Thales to Democritus — who asked what everything is made of and replaced myth with argument.
The Forms
Plato’s eternal, perfect, unchanging realities — Beauty itself, Justice itself, the Good — of which the things we see are imperfect copies.
Being vs. Becoming
The first great quarrel in Western philosophy — is reality one and changeless (Parmenides) or everlasting flux (Heraclitus)?
Śūnyatā (Emptiness)
Emptiness — the Mahāyāna teaching that all things lack intrinsic, independent existence (svabhāva), because they arise in dependence on causes, parts and concepts. Not nothingness, but the openness that makes change and freedom possible.
Uddālaka Āruṇi
Upanishadic teacher who instructed his son Śvetaketu with salt in water and the seed of a banyan, ending each lesson — “tat tvam asi”, that thou art.
The Heart Sūtra
The shortest and most famous Mahāyāna scripture — a single page in which the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara declares that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”, negates every Buddhist category, and ends with a mantra: “gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond — awakening, hail!”