Debajyoti Gangopadhyay

Devising means of expressing nothingness comprises a significant part of global history of ideas. Though representing nothingness is having an underlying oxymoronic tone, the concept of śūnya or nirākāra can still be considered as one of the primordial archetypes of human thought process which continued to express itself in different ways in mathematics, philosophy as well as in different psycho-somatic meditative variants. Here we will give a brief outline of the development of understanding of śūnya in different Indian traditions and the ways one can be engaged today with these from modern logical and empirical perspective.

In this article we have tried basically to lay out an outline of possible overlap between the metaphysical standpoints of the Madhyamik Buddhism with the so called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. We argued here that , both Madhyamik Buddhism as well as Copenhagen develop some common grounds of skepticism or cautionary notes against the classical intuitive Realist ideology committed to ontological priority of individual . So , though the presiding contexts of Madhyamik Buddhism and quantum mechanics are admittedly very different , we can still judge the ontological merit/ implications of ‘the cautions’ on comparative grounds .. And we have argued on this basis here about the possibility to sculpt out some norms of justification for starting a meaningful Dialog between Buddhism and modern Physical science.