**Theme 1: Ontological Foundations: Substance, Process, Emptiness, and Physical Models** What is the ultimate nature of reality? Is the world built from stable, enduring building blocks—fundamental substances—or is it an ever-flowing stream of processes, relationships, and events? This fundamental ontological question has generated divergent answers across philosophical traditions and has been continuously reshaped by the findings of science, often revealing limitations in intuitive assumptions. The quest for stable foundations dominated much of classical Western philosophy. Reacting against the apparent flux of the sensory world, thinkers sought enduring principles. Plato proposed that true reality resides not in the changeable physical realm, but in a transcendent world of perfect, eternal **Forms**—essences like Beauty or Justice—which physical objects merely imitate. His student, **Aristotle**, brought the search for stability back to the empirical world but retained a focus on substance. In his *Metaphysics*, he defined **substance** (*ousia*) as the primary reality: individual, concrete things composed of underlying matter (*hylē*) given definite structure by an immanent **form** (*eidos*). Change, for Aristotle, was the orderly process of a substance realizing its inherent potential, actualizing its form. This Aristotelian framework, prioritizing identifiable substances with inherent natures, exerted immense influence for nearly two millennia, shaping a Western worldview where understanding often meant grasping the fixed essences of things. Eastern philosophical traditions, however, often presented radically different perspectives, perspectives largely unknown or unengaged by mainstream Western thought for centuries. These traditions frequently emphasized dynamism and interdependence over static substance. Early Vedic thought in India conceived of **Brahman** not as a static creator god, but as the singular, ultimate reality dynamically unfolding and differentiating itself into the multiplicity of the cosmos. Later Hindu thought elaborated this within vast cosmic cycles (*kalpas*) of creation and dissolution, framing existence itself as ceaseless becoming. Buddhism, particularly through the Madhyamaka school founded by **Nagarjuna**, mounted a direct assault on essentialism, a critique whose depth Western philosophy would only begin to parallel when confronted with the paradoxes of modern physics. The core concept of **Shunyata** (Emptiness) denotes the lack of *svabhava*—any intrinsic, independent, self-sustaining nature in phenomena. Things are “empty” precisely because they are dependently originated (**Pratītyasamutpāda**); they arise, exist, and cease only in intricate webs of mutual conditioning, devoid of any permanent, underlying substance. Reality, in this challenging view, is fundamentally relational and impermanent. The **Yogacara** school further explored how our perception of a world of discrete objects is constructed by consciousness, obscuring the underlying, interdependent flow of mental events. Similarly, Chinese **Taoism** envisioned reality as the ceaseless flow of the **Tao** and the dynamic interplay of **Qi** (vital energy) through the complementary forces of Yin and Yang, valuing harmony achieved through alignment with process, not adherence to static forms. While the Greek philosopher Heraclitus had also stressed universal flux, these Eastern process-ontologies represented sustained and highly developed alternatives to the substance-metaphysics dominant in the West. The rise of modern science initially seemed to dramatically vindicate the substance view. **John Dalton’s atomic theory**, emerging from the quantitative revolution in chemistry led by figures like Lavoisier, proposed that matter was composed of discrete, fundamental particles—atoms—possessing definite weights and properties. These atoms combined in fixed ratios, providing a brilliantly successful explanation for the laws of chemical composition. Atoms appeared to be the ultimate, indivisible substances, the stable building blocks underlying all material change. The subsequent development of structural chemistry, elucidating how these atoms connect to form molecules, further reinforced this particulate, substance-based picture. Even the later quantum mechanical descriptions of chemical bonding, while more complex, often retained a conceptual framework centered on atoms linked together. Yet, deeper explorations within physics began to erode this classical picture, introducing concepts that resonated, perhaps unexpectedly, with process and relational ontologies developed centuries earlier in the East. The work of **Michael Faraday** and **James Clerk Maxwell** on electromagnetism marked a crucial turning point with the development of **field theory**. Instead of viewing forces as direct interactions between particles across empty space, they proposed that charges and currents create fields—continuous entities pervading space—which then mediate interactions. Light itself, according to Maxwell’s unified equations, was revealed to be a self-propagating disturbance in the electromagnetic field. This shifted the focus from discrete particles to the dynamic behavior of the field itself, suggesting that the “space between” might be ontologically significant. **Albert Einstein’s General Relativity** radically extended this conceptual shift. His theory dispensed with Newton’s absolute space and time, replacing them with a unified, dynamic **spacetime**. Mass and energy were shown to curve this spacetime fabric, and this curvature, in turn, dictates the motion of matter and energy. Gravity was no longer a force acting *between* substances, but an emergent property of the geometry of spacetime itself. This conception presented a fundamentally relational view where matter, energy, and the geometric structure of reality are inextricably intertwined and mutually influential, moving far beyond a simple picture of substances interacting within a passive container. The most profound challenges to the substance paradigm came from **Quantum Mechanics**. The discovery of **wave-particle duality** showed that fundamental entities like electrons behave sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves, depending on how they are measured, defying fixed categorization and suggesting context dependence is fundamental. The **Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle** established that certain pairs of properties cannot be simultaneously known with perfect accuracy, implying that objects may not possess definite, inherent properties independent of observation. Perhaps most strikingly, **quantum entanglement** revealed non-local connections where particles remain correlated instantaneously regardless of distance, undermining the notion of separate, independent entities with purely local interactions. Quantum Field Theory (QFT), the modern framework for particle physics, goes further by describing particles themselves not as fundamental substances but as mere excitations or quanta of underlying quantum fields, making the field, a continuous and dynamic entity, arguably more fundamental than the localized particle. This quantum picture—with its context-dependent properties, inherent uncertainty, profound non-local interconnectedness, and field-based ontology—presents a vision of reality starkly at odds with classical substance metaphysics. Intriguingly, it finds suggestive conceptual resonances with core ideas from Buddhist philosophy, ideas developed through entirely different methodologies. The lack of inherent, fixed properties in quantum entities parallels the concept of *Shunyata* (emptiness of *svabhava*). The intricate interdependence and non-locality suggested by entanglement echo the principles of *Pratītyasamutpāda* (Dependent Origination). While avoiding facile equivalences, this convergence suggests that the intuitive, substance-based view of reality, so ingrained in Western thought and early science, may be fundamentally incomplete. Both the rigorous experimental and mathematical explorations of modern physics and the introspective, logical analyses of certain Eastern philosophies seem to push towards a reality better understood as a dynamic, interconnected, and context-dependent web of relations and potentialities, where process may be more fundamental than enduring things.