Emptiness is the claim that divides the Buddhist world. Nagarjuna, around the second century, argued that nothing has svabhava — own-being, an essence it holds independently — because everything arises dependently, and that this is what dependent arising was saying all along. The Theravada tradition uses the word too but keeps it narrower, applied to persons and to phenomena as not-self rather than as a universal solvent. The famous move is the last one: emptiness itself is empty, a medicine and not a position, and the texts warn that a person who turns emptiness into a thing they believe has caught the snake by the wrong end.