Ontological Emptiness as Reflected by the Basque Huts: An Ontolinguistics of Śūnyatā?

Making worldviews work: A heuristic, a planet scan, a case and their transversal implication

“…This synthesis tries to suggest the depth and extent of putting a given worldview under a scheme like the 5-Key one. Beyond the particular notes of previous proposals that try to understand the Basque worldview and mention some concomitances with others (Oteiza, 1963; Ortiz-Osés, 2007; Segurola, 2020), psychological mindsets and their onto-epistemic foundations are thus made explicit in a systematic and extensive way, concluding that the Basque worldview should be situated among inward views with a shamanic and animist profile (as the reports by Barandiaran, 1972 and others imply), but also with elements of the so-called ‘wisdom traditions’ (such as their ontological emptiness, see Renteria-Uriarte, 2022). The cultural psychology of Basque people can be dismissed as ‘folkloric’ (after a superficial reading of Barandiaran, 1960-1962) or as ‘Freudian and Oedipal’ (after a a contemptuous reading of Ortiz-Osés, 1999, 2007), but an extensive 5-Key analysis would show that Basque language, mythology and other cultural expressions reflect a naturalistic, a-hierarchical, feminine and meditative worldview with power to help us mull over our future and try to improve it.…”

“…The debates on the Basque worldview have mythical records as their main evidence, but they can be enriched by other sources to answer the questions about the 5-Key structure. First of all, Huts or ‘active emptiness’ is the concept to define the nature of things in the Basque language (Renteria-Uriarte 2022); for example, zaku hutsa can mean ‘an empty bag’ but also ‘purely a bag, nothing else; ’ txirotasun hutsa or ‘empty misery’ is ‘total misery; ’ egi hutsa is ‘an absolute truth; ’ and Immanue Kant´s Critique of Pure Reason is, in Basque, the ‘Critique of Empty Reason’. Overall, bere hutsean or ‘in its emptiness’ means ‘in its pure nature’.…”