"Engaging some comments made by Francois Jullien in A Treatise on Efficacy serves well to begin articulating a Daoist sense of emptiness. According to Jullien:   There are two ways to understand emptiness. One is an emptiness of inexistence, seen from the metaphysical point of view of being or nonbeing: this is the emptiness of Buddhism (sunya in Sanskrit; cf. kong [空] in Chinese). The other is the functional emptiness of  Laozi (the notion of  xu [虚])… The two are radically different, although some people have been tempted to confuse them, and, as a result, they have become contaminated. (It is well known that, in part at least, it was on the basis of that misunderstanding that Buddhism… penetrated China. That is, after all, perfectly understandable, since the only way to assimilate thought from outside is by misunderstanding it)."   What follows in the spoiler is an in depth examination of Jullien's statement by Ryan Shriver, especially focusing on the meaning of 'kong' and 'xu' from section II in Shriver's paper here.