The Transition from Anatta to Emptiness · Part 2
Space Is Also a Formation
Because the binding of a perception is so total and so effortless, as the flower showed, the mind takes one further step, usually without noticing it has taken any step at all: it throws the resulting object outward into something already assumed to be there waiting — an empty, neutral, three-dimensional grid called space, existing prior to and independent of anything placed within it. The flower, on this assumption, does not participate in producing the space it occupies. It is simply inserted into a container that was already fully formed before the flower ever arrived.
This assumption cannot survive what has already been shown. The internal and external were never two independently established regions with a boundary between them for the flower's radiance to fall on one side of; the same finding applies, without modification, to the space that supposedly separates the flower from the one looking at it. A bounded shape requires spatial contrast to be a bounded shape at all, in exactly the way red required contrast with the green of the stem to be this red at all. There is no way to specify a location without something located there to specify it by, and no way to have a localized object without the surrounding space that gives its boundary meaning. Space and object do not stand in a sequence, one waiting empty for the other to arrive. They arise together, each supplying what the other needs to be intelligible, neither one first.
None of this touches the conventional usefulness of space — distances are still measured, directions still given, a flower still handed from one place to another. What is refused is only the further, quiet assumption that this coordinate grid exists on its own, indifferent to and prior to the located things with which 'here' and 'there' are designated together. This matters beyond the flower, because the question of where someone goes at death depends entirely on whether such a container is available for anyone to go into or out of — and the analysis just completed shows that it never was.