This whole world is only māyā; in reality, nothing exists. It appears like a dream vision, empty both internally and externally in the supreme sense.

The sūtra operates simultaneously on two registers: the ontological and the epistemological. Ontologically, the world is empty (śūnya) in its own consistency. Epistemologically, this does not mean it does not appear—it appears exactly as a dream appears—but rather that its mode of appearance does not imply independent existence.

The formulation “empty both internally and externally” (śūnyābhyāṃ) merits attention. The world is not empty because it lacks matter; it is empty because it lacks svabhāva, its own self-sustaining nature. It is dependent in all its dimensions, dependent on the consciousness that projects it. This is madhyamaka emptiness reinterpreted in Vedāntic terms: not negation, but absence of inherence. The experience of awakening from a vivid dream is the paradigmatic experience that every yoga practitioner must internalize not as theoretical knowledge but as an operational model of reality.