One day while Pai-chang was still his student the two were out walking together and saw in the sky a formation of wild ducks. No core of self-nature or intrinsic essence supports our names, linguistic conventions, and projections.
Objects are none other than dependency relationships and names.
This view thoroughly denies the mind-matter split of Cartesian dualism, the core of many of our Western prejudices that impede both our philosophic and scientific understanding. According to the Madhyamika, the very emptiness of independent existence of all phenomena is what allows them to function through their relationships and be sources of help and harm. In contrast, if objects inherently existed then they would of necessity be immutable and impotent, unable to act on us or we on them. Philosophically we must be able to move back and forth between the ultimate and conventional truth of phenomena. Of the Gold Lion, the gold metal symbolizes noumenon and the figure of the lion symbolizes phenomenon.