Logic of Emptiness still unconvincing. Please help explain I've been a practitioner of Vipassana and Mahamudra for 2 years now. One thing quite bothering me is various explanations from different teachers on emptiness logically disturbing...
Usually, it goes like this:

The flower before you seems real. Now get closer, you no longer see flower, but just leaves, stem. Even closer, you &quot;see&quot; atoms, electrons, etc.
See? the flower is &quot;empty&quot; of inherent existence. The same goes for &quot;self&quot;. Try search for the &quot;self&quot; in your thoughts, arm, leg, etc. and you would find nothing.

Of course I could appreciate this mentally helps in someway in practice. But something falls short.
First, it feels &quot;outdated&quot; to me, in a post-calculus world, that it denies the validity of an aggregate object, by pointing towards an infinitesimally small part of it. Zeno paradox?
Secondly, the requirement of &quot;look closer&quot; (or farther) seem to assert the perceiver model. That logic (or its inverse) would seem to imply that, &quot;in order for something A to be truly existent, that thing needs to be A in all perceivable cases&quot;. That A would then seem to be only possible as some kind of &quot;totality&quot;, or awareness itself. So that felt like a semantics game then.
I'm sure there're better ways to explain the Buddhist emptiness logic in a more modern compatible way. Please enlighten me.
Thanks!
Your confusion is clear as day to me. :) As is the true meaning of &quot;emptiness&quot;. The challenge is how to explain it to you in a way you can understand. :)
You are stuck on this idea of &quot;object&quot; being something that exists ontologically. Whether it's made of parts, whether it's a transient aggregate that will eventually fall apart, right now it is real, it exists, regardless of the observer, you say.
The problem is not that it does not exist. The problem is that in the ontological reality there are no distinct objects. Whatever actually exists is delineated into &quot;objects&quot; by the perceiving mind.
This delineation (identification of objects in time and space, and by their characteristics) depends on the scale and perspective of observation.
You think, first the objects exist, and then we identify them. But it is the opposite, first we pick our perspective and criteria (either deliberately or, more often, because we were conditioned to see things in a certain way) and then we delineate and designate objects. So what is it that exists before delineation? Whatever it is, it's not &quot;objects&quot;. Let's call it Emptiness ;)
Because the range of your perspectives is very limited, it seems to you that the way objects are usually designated/delineated in our society is the only way that makes sense, and therefore it seems to you that this way to designate them is identical with their ontological nature.
Take a chair, for example. When we say &quot;chair&quot; is empty we don't mean that nothing at all exists out there. We mean that the delineation and designation of objects by e.g. humans, ants, and some hypothetical aliens is potentially different. An ant perceives chair as part of the landscape. An alien living a different temporal scale may perceive chair as a final phase in life of a tree.
And yet, a chair is a chair, you'd say, even if some other species ignorantly misperceive it. We know that this in fact is a chair, you say - and this is where you're wrong, according to Mahayana Buddhism. This is just a habit of anthropocentric thinking, that's all.
Of course most of the objects we deal with in our social reality were specifically designed for convenient usage in some pragmatic contexts. This tricks our mind into confusing their symbolical meaning in our reality (their pragmatic function) with their essence. But if you go outside human world, ambiguity of delineation/designation will be easier to spot. Take the clouds for example, or the mountains, or the water streams, or the natural species - especially if you observe them over long time. Do they have rigid well-defined identities? No, they are notoriously hard to delineate.
It's not just delineation though, it goes even deeper than defining spatial/temporal boundaries of our objects. The thing is, in the act of identification we focus on certain properties of phenomena and ignore other aspects or properties. If we were to focus on other properties we would not just draw different boundaries, our phenomena would be delineated by other measurements than their positions or sizes in time and space. Again, think about the boundaries of species, in what space are they located?
Everything exists in some way, sure, but nothing exists as conveniently separate, clearly identifyable, qualitatively static, and with its true workings perfectly matching our idea of its external appearance - as naive people and children tend to imagine.
Nothing is as solid as it appears.
This is what's meant by Emptiness, and the more your perspective expands the deeper it gets. It's not about existence vs non-existence, it's about conceptualization, identification, recognition, delineation, designation, reification - and getting mentally and emotionally attached to spatial/temporal/conceptual abstractions.