It’s always been curious to me that svabhāva the sort of thing that we can accurately hypothesize about (i.e. make claims about the various properties or qualities that must obtain by an entity with purported svabhāva or the consequences which are entailed if an entity really had svabhāva ) even though under Madhyamaka analysis it is revealed to be impossible and primordially non-arisen, which is to say that the purported svabhāva of things are not only not found, but it is understood that it could have never been the case because the very notion contradicts the principle of dependent origination.
It seems like the negated term, niḥsvabhāva (“without” or “devoid” of intrinsic nature) is more or less interchangeable with śūnyatā or emptiness. And I think this is somewhat instructive: svabhāva and śūnyatā are constitutive opposites: each gains its own identity only through apoha (exclusion of the other). And since the operation of apoha is a pre-thematic, pre-conceptual cognitive obscuration driven by purposive activity, only a post-thematic, post-conceptual change in consciousness can inverse the relation in which svabhāva obscures śūnyatā so that śūnyatā is disclosed, which necessarily entails the cessation of clinging to svabhāva because the hypostatizing structure of dualistic consciousness has ceased. Madhyamaka analysis can be understood to be a thematic (bodhisattva path) and conceptual response (prasanga dialectics) that bridges the gap between the pre-thematic, pre-conceptual cognitive obscuration of the ultimate truth of śūnyatā and the post-thematic, post-conceptual cognitive disclosure of the ultimate truth of śūnyatā.
All to say, it is becoming clearer to me that the realization of śūnyatā does not really involve the elimination, annihilation, extrication, or explaining away of svabhāva , because what we have to critically remember is that svabhāva was never real in the first place, so there is nothing to get rid of in the final place. But in order for this to be a genuine post-thematic, post-conceptual realization of śūnyatā, we have to actually look for svabhāva directly and realize its primordially non-arisen nature — whether gradually by means of progressively analysing the tetralemma of possible modes of existence of svabhāva in analytic meditation or suddenly by totally releasing and self-liberating the grasping tendency altogether. These two methods or means are not necessarily opposed but are often interdependent, for if we progressively realize that it is not the case, not not the case, not both and not neither, then grasping is automatically liberated in the same sense that you automatically stop reaching for something you were looking for in a particular place once you see that something is not actually there.
Because the assumption of svabhāva is an effect of an apoha operation driven by existing purposive activity, then in the absence of the assumption of svabhāva that purposive activity and the self associated with that activity also ceases, because agent, action and object are interdependent. This frees us up to be different kinds of agents engaged in different kinds of activity pointed towards different kinds of objects. And because Madhyamaka analysis was not just conceptual but thematic, this means that the post-thematic, post-conceptual realization of niḥsvabhāva qua śūnyatā results in the thematic dharma seeds flowering into our becoming as Bodhisattvas engaged in virtuous conduct for the sake of liberating others, rather than remaining as sentient beings engaged in non-virtuous conduct for the sake of gratifying a sense of self.
This flip in the mode of becoming once śūnyatā is genuinely realized (which is to say, one has accomplished the first Bodhisattva Bhumi marking entry into the “path of seeing”) might also give us a clue as to how to engage with the problem of what, if anything, “remains” after Madhyamaka analysis (a problem which arguably is part of the source of the zhentong/other-empty v.s. rangtong/self-empty controversy in Tibetan Madhyamaka): because Madhyamaka is thematic and conceptual even though it brings us to that which is beyond the thematic and the conceptual, it pre-configures our dispositional poise such that its continuation after the realization of two-fold emptiness of self and other still guarantees the spontaneous creative emergence of virtuous conduct. Whether this post-thematic, post-conceptual conduct is “self-empty” or “other-empty” is besides the point because it is by nature post-thematic and post-conceptual and thus beyond the purview of determination in terms of empty or not-empty, both or neither.
Holopoiesis 