Emptiness & transformation
Exhaustion, regeneration and a sustainable capacity to act in political engagement.
“Emptiness is the open that permits a mutual interpenetration. It brings forth friendliness. […] The bird is also the flower; the flower is also the bird.”
– Byung-Chul Han, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (our translation)
Burnout is widespread in engaged contexts — and yet we rarely speak about it. What if exhaustion were not a personal failure but a response to structural conditions?
We look at emptiness from two perspectives: as the emptiness of exhaustion, and as a place of the in-between and of the ways in which human and other-than-human beings relate. From a Buddhist point of view, the concept of emptiness is above all about dissolving boundaries. It stands for an anti-dogmatic view of things. If the self is empty, then the boundary between I and world is permeable too. That does not mean differences disappear, but that they are not absolute.
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