http://www.chan1.org/ddp/channews/08-1995.html
Buddha said, "When this voidness
(of the individual) is perfectly clear you will realize that all
dharmas are void." The arhat has only attained the voidness of the
individual, so the arhat has not yet attained the full perfection
of emptiness. He would like to stay in nirvana, so for him nirvana
is not empty. Likewise, he has an aversion to birth and death, so
his experience of the emptiness of birth and death is not thorough.
It's as if you said, "The Ch'an Center is a terrible place. I want
to be free of it, so I will go across the street and never come
back." You cross the street, and you are free of the trouble and
the evil of the Ch'an Center. However, as long as you dare not
cross the street, and hold on to the idea that the Ch'an Center is
a demonic cave, you are still attached to it. The Ch'an Center is
not empty for you, and you are not thoroughly free of it. The Arhat
is like that, and both nirvana and birth and death are not
thoroughly empty for him.
The Buddha says, "When this voidness (of the person) is perfectly
clear, you will realize that all dharmas (phenomena) are void."
This is the state of the Mahayana bodhisattva. A bodhisattva
realizes that not only the self which is formed of the five
skandhas is empty, but the five skandhas, themselves, are also
empty. The three realms, birth and death, in fact, all dharmas, are
empty. If the cycle of birth and death is empty, then what can it
do to me? So a bodhisattva does not seek to depart from the cycle
of birth and death, but he also is not deluded within the cycle of
birth and death. This state is called the emptiness of both person
and dharma, and it is the completion, or perfection, of emptiness.
When one has realized the emptiness of dharmas, one is liberated
from nirvana dharma as well as from samsara dharma.
