Emptiness - the Eastern View

Our Western minds have a difficult time grasping the Eastern idea of emptiness.  If something is empty, it's useless and non existent, right?  Eastern thought sees emptiness as a part of a unity.  Emptiness is a component of the whole.  Instead of me explaining, here is a bit of Alan Watts explaining the concept from the Taoist perspective:

Thirty spokes unite at the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

This space is not “just nothing” as we commonly use that expression, for I cannot get away from the sense that space and my awareness of the universe are the same, and call to mind the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui-neng, writing eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:

The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars, and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.

Thus the yin-yang principle is that the somethings and the nothings, the ons and the offs, the solids and the spaces, as well as the wakings and the sleepings and the alternations of existing and not existing, are mutually necessary.

Yang and yin are in some ways parallel to the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra says, “That which is form is just that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is just that which is form.”

The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”