As a Buddhist monk for a very short time and temple boy for a year, and in many writings I have read, I've been taught over and over Emptiness does not mean empty, that is a fundamental misunderstanding, in one aspect Emptiness actually means full, Emptiness means not physical, not directly visible, I came to believe, there's a lot of nonsense being spread about emptiness by the secular Buddhist and Forest Monk tradition, which is a fundamentalist very literalist almost cult that rejects mainstream Therevada Buddhism as corrupt, unfortunately on the web the Forest Tradition and secular Buddhist sort of drown out the more tradition Buddhist schools, which are mostly centered in Asia, and don't have a very strong English language voice, I was trained by traditional South East Asian refugee temples that taught a Buddhism that was very different from what you read on the web. Some of these conservative traditional Buddhist even profess belief in God, they see no contradiction between God and Buddhism. I'm not sure that Emptiness is similar to Tao, but its the impression I have, emptiness was taught as the source of much of the Buddha's wisdom, and one of the hardest things to understand and comprehend without long study, so I would be careful to suspect pat definitions of what the Emptiness is anymore than I would be careful to suspect pat definitions of what the Tao is.
