They do not merely insist that human life is impermanent, that man has no immortal soul, and that in time every trace of our existence must vanish. They go on to indicate, as the wise man’s goal, a release from this transient life which seems to be no release at all—a state called nirvana, which may be translated “despair,” and the attainment of a metaphysical condition called shunyata, which is a voidness so void as to be neither existent nor nonexistent! For nonexistence implies existence as its logical correlate, whereas shunyata is so void that it does not imply anything at all.
