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This is a phrase that is used often in Buddhist liturgy and today a team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow. Their model also suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. They even suggest that from inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular [1].

Buddha taught that our perception of time is a merely a localized reference that depends entirely upon our own observation - time unfolds in dependence upon our mind - and Buddhist scholars and lineage holders have been expounding this truth for nearly 1500 years!

In the Prajna Paramita (Heart of Wisdom and Perfection of Wisdom Sutras), Bodhisattva Avalokitshvara explains to Sariputra that all things and phenomena, even time itself, arise out of emptiness, and that with the perfection of wisdom, we can come to fully realize this. Now we have modern evidence to suggest that this may indeed be the ultimate nature of reality - form is emptiness and emptiness is form [2]. Shantideva, in the ninth chapter of the Bodhicharyāvatāra, demonstrates the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, and how we may perfect our wisdom realizing emptiness [3].

Over the centuries, great Mahayana scholars have elucidated the meaning of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras in their commentaries. In “Ocean of Nectar”, where Geshe Kelsang Gyatso continues this noble tradition by providing an explanation of Chandrakirti’s famous commentary Guide to the Middle Way, we can see this understanding brought full circle as Geshe Kelsang explains with breathtaking clarity, the logic upon which this can be proven, even without modern technology, by realizing the true nature of our own mind. [4]

It has been demonstrated by the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (and now the scientists) that all things arise from, and dissolve into;

e m p t i n e s s . . .

This is why it is also said that NOW is the time to turn the wheel of Dharma to realize our true nature and full human potential!

OM AH HUM

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7440217.stm
[2] http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/emptiness.html
[3] http://www.shantideva.net/guide_ch9.htm
[4] http://kadampa.org/en/books/ocean-of-nectar