The terms Emptiness and Suchness will be familiar to students of Eastern thought. Emptiness is not the emptiness of bucket or chair. The normal emptiness of bucket and chair is an element of Platonic Form, of which my understanding is that the essential necessity of an object's function is the truth of its universal form. This is a thought provoking view, but there is another school of thought considering all forms to be Empty. Suchness refers to the observation that things are radically just as they are.
Emptiness refers to the fact of existence: of thing: of all. No thing contains anything in the Platonic way. If we insist that a baseball contains horsehair, or that a can contains beans, we are right as far as that goes; but let us consider "object" in a consequence-free matrix. For a pig a bicycle is meaningless: the seat, the handlebars, the wheels; utterly without implications. For this pig the bicycle is Empty in the way the way we are trying to convey. All things are Empty. They couldn't contain anything if they wanted to. Mind fills them with content the same way water stays in a bucket: by law of accident. When this is recognized, things can be seen as they are.
Once we get our mind around the Emptiness thing, we are in a position to understand what is meant by Suchness. No thing can deviate from the fact of it's existence: every Thing is absolute presence. Any and every Thing is flawlessly and exactly it's being: the perfect example of its Self, totally and radically existent, be it a philosophy or a grain of sand. This is Suchness, and Suchness is Empty.
Suchness and Emptiness by their very arch-reality are indifferent to human meaning, but only when we have an understanding of Emptiness and Suchness are we in a position to recognize that all life takes place in a meaning-saturated gestalt.
Does a Dog have Buddha Nature?
hmmmm
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