What is emptiness? What is engi?

“Emptiness is form, form is emptiness” is a famous passage from the Heart Sutra.

This is my own interpretation, but what it means is that “there are no things in this world that we think of as real. There are only things that are unchanging and universal. That doesn’t mean that real things don’t exist at all, but that unchanging and universal things also appear before us as real things.” In other words, it’s not an extreme position that real things and real things don’t exist at all, but rather we should accept both and look at what is universal and unchanging (this way of thinking is called the “middle way”).

I am not very knowledgeable about Mahayana Buddhism, but this idea itself describes the state that Buddhism, and ultimately ancient Indian yogis, aimed for, and is not unique to Mahayana Buddhism.

So, if substance is not defined by substance, then what is it defined by?

That is “engi”. “Engi” expresses the relationship between subjects. It is the idea that all entities do not exist independently, but exist through relationships and causality with other entities. This leads to the idea that entities exist even if they do not exist.

The state of liberation refers to the state of escaping from the entanglement of these threads of causality and simply looking directly at this “unchanging and unchanging thing.”

In this article, I will use Mahayana Buddhist terms such as emptiness and dependent origination to explain things, but since I am not very knowledgeable about this subject (I am more interested in ancient Indian philosophy), I will not necessarily use the Buddhist definitions of the words.

Engi is the primitive definition of the world.

What I have said so far has a very religious tone to it, and some people may be allergic to it. However, this idea of good luck is close to that of people who live a very primitive hunting lifestyle. They made almost no distinction between humans and other things. Statements such as the deer talking or the wind eating dinner (apparently some Inuit people use this to describe the evening calm) were not metaphors, but were part of their world.

For people who primarily lived by hunting and gathering, there was no relationship of dominance and subordination with nature as there is today. Therefore, for them, everything was the same, and they did not think of themselves as the center, but rather lived with a shared sense of living within relationships and causal relationships with the things around them as one of the same things.

World State and Omen

So, how do entities on Ethereum (cats, pigs, zombies, heroes, smart contracts, etc.) exist? They exist because of “relationships” and “causality” between entities. The state of Ethereum is established by the relationships between addresses generated from public keys scattered as elements, smart contracts generated from those, and each transaction, and entities on Ethereum exist within the context of that state. And that state exists universally and is common to the world, and there is not a single entity on Ethereum that escapes the web of this Ethereum state.

A world where you can see through the spider’s web

There are many causes and effects that are so complex that they are no longer analysable, and it is common to intentionally treat or make others treat causation as non-existent. This leads people to think of entities as having independent existences, which creates attachments to the worldview.

In other words, it is a world where humans work together to push other humans into cages.

We don’t yet know what effects Ethereum will have. However, what is about to be born is something that will allow us to see through the causal threads between entities that arise from changes in universal protocols, or at least leave them as analyzable and provable, and have the potential to increase human freedom and improve society.

In the context of liberation mentioned above, showing the thread of origin does not enable one to escape from entanglements, but it can provide a higher perspective.