Shunyata and nothingness

The sanscrit word shunyata stands for “nothing, absence, emptyness” and names a key-experience in Buddhism. Around this word it’s possible to draw an extraordinary comparison between Buddhism and Existentialism.

The existentialist philosophers displayed deep awareness for the “drama” of our being in the world, without any possible answer to the question “Why?”, for the tragedy of being-there.
They faced the irruption of Nothingness in our consciousnesses, considering its consequences without consolations and censorship.
Following the guiding lines of last editorials, I’d like to write just about these consequences.
Nothingness takes everything and it’s impossible to escape it ignoring it: our consciousness knows it and our viscera talk about it, through what the West called anguish (and today calls anxiety, depression, panic crisis). The Buddha calls it dukkha.
Our consciousness doesn’t give discounts, at least not for a long time. Soul disease is because of lack of foundation and impermanence of worldly goods; we can’t be based  on anything. But we could say that if there is a God, his being-there gives sense to the world, His creation: at this point Nothingness bursts in, with all its final, destabilizing power.
“Why there is something, in general terms, why not nothing?”.
Can we ignore the basic question?
“The world is, instead of not being there, instead of nothing”.
And we are discouncerted in this awareness:  we can find the same awareness in the great art of the first half of the twentieth century, with its signals of strangeness and breakdown of normal canons. From Kafka to Beckett, from Morandi to Munch, from Berg to Stravinski, this awareness thunders in our viscera and in our intelligences. If the world is instead of nothing, and this is undoubtable, so we can tell the same of every being, God included. But the Faith would make the objection that “Deus est per se subsistens, causa sui”: that is, according to the Doctor of the Church St. Tommaso d’Aquino, God exists because of himself.

I remember the dialogue in the italian film “Berlinguer ti voglio bene” where Roberto Benigni asks to the bricklayer:
Who made this house?
A bricklayer!
And who made the bricklayer?
The father of the bricklayer.
And who made the bricklayer’s father?
The father of the father of the bricklayer.
And who made the father of the father of the father of the father........of the bricklayer’s father?
God has done him!
And who made God?
Don’t worry for this!!

With regard to the first cause we are still at this point, St. Tommaso included.
Buddha started from the defeat of every faith and reason: the question “why?” is without solution. In fact, whatever would be the cause of the world, it would be an existing cause, and would fall again in the basic question: why a cause (a being) instead of  nothing!?
So, on what will we ground our values?
What will cure us of non-sense?
Buddha shows the solution, the overcoming of dukkha in the realization of shunyata.

Does he mean we should let ourselves down in the experience of the mistery of existence, keeping discipline, and find the way of deep enlightenment in the same substance of existentialist despair?

For this aim he proposes the Eight-parts path: the most significant term of this path is the adjective samyag, generally translated in “right” (right understanding, right intention, right living... right contemplation), that I’d enrich with “licit”.
How living licitfully, without stealing, without metaphysical inventions?

I believe that this is the feeling that joins us to Prince Siddhartha, who 2500 years ago searched and found the answer within himself.