 Yet, if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of being (i.e., at negation of the illusory independent substantial reality of things and the ego), then the idea of “emptiness” is not itself  emptied.[8]  That would leave us with either a pessimistic nihilism or, ironically, a reified view of śūnyatā itself. These are what the Buddhist tradition calls “śūnyatā-sickness” (Japanese: kūbyō). True śūnyatā must be understood to dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative) nothingness (see Nakamura 1975, Vol. 1, 278). Hence, in Mahāyāna we find an explicit return—through a “great negation” of a reified misunderstanding of being—to a “great affirmation” of a non-reified understanding of being. Emptiness thoroughly understood is nothing separate from or opposed to “being” properly understood. As the often chanted lines of the Heart Sutra put it: “[phenomenal] form is emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal] form; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” (see Bercholz &amp; Kohn 1993, 155). The famous Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher of śūnyatā Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) went so far as to provocatively state: “The limits (i.e., realm) of nirvāna are the limits of samsāra. Between the two, also, there is not the slightest difference whatsoever” (Inada 1993, 158). In other words, nirvāna is neither a nihilistic extinction of nor a transcendent escape from the phenomenal world (samsāra); it is rather an enlightened manner of being-in-the-world here and now (see Garfield 1995, 332). This radical reaffirmation of the phenomenal world was particularly stressed in East Asian developments of Mahāyāna Buddhism, where we find such remarkably affirmative phrases as: “true emptiness, marvelous being” (Japanese: shinkū-myōu).