Madhyamaka explains emptiness by showing that whatever appears does so only in dependence upon causes, conditions, and conceptual designation. If something truly possessed inherent nature—svabhāva—it would have to exist by its own power, independently of anything else, unchanging and self-established. Yet all phenomena are observed to arise, endure, and cease only within a web of conditions, and to be understood differently in different contexts. Because they are dependently arisen and relational, they cannot at the same time be independently grounded from their own side. Emptiness (śūnyatā) is precisely this absence of independent, intrinsic essence in what appears.

This analysis is deepened through examining how things are related to their parts, causes, and effects. A phenomenon cannot be found as identical with its parts, nor as entirely separate from them, nor as a mere heap that is somehow already the whole; under scrutiny, no solid core that could count as an inherent nature is discovered. Similarly, causes, effects, and the entity itself are all empty of any fixed, self-sufficient existence. What remains is a functional, conventional reality in which tables, persons, and events operate, but only as dependently arisen and conceptually designated phenomena, not as ultimately self-grounded substances.

Madhyamaka further clarifies this through the two truths and the use of the tetralemma. On the level of conventional truth, fire burns, actions have consequences, and language works; phenomena appear and function within dependent relationships. On the level of ultimate truth, when these same phenomena are examined with reasoning, they cannot be found to exist inherently as existing, as not existing, as both, or as neither. This fourfold analysis undermines any attempt to fix things into absolute categories, without denying their conventional efficacy. The “middle way” thus avoids both the extreme that would reify things as eternally existent and the extreme that would deny their conventional appearance altogether, presenting emptiness as the absence of an impossible mode of existence rather than a nihilistic void.