Nāgārjuna can be interpreted as saying that when we seek svabhāva, we never find it, we find only emptiness. When we look for a thing, conceived of as a substance or essence—the tree itself, underlying the appearance of its properties, or stripped down to its essential part—we are never able to find it.
Apart from the parts and properties we perceive, like the leaves and their colours, the number of branches, the width of its trunk and so on, which we recognize as highly unstable and which we tend to think of as peripheral to the actual tree, there is nothing else that can be called the tree.
Ultimately,then, the 'things‘ that we experience, do not exist with svabhāva, but are all intimately related to each other, to the way we perceive them, to our language, and to our practices.
To put it another way, we carve our experiential field into 'distinct‘ objects; they
do not exist that way prior to our experience of them, and our naming them. The reality
we take for granted, therefore, where we see things existing with svabhāva, is a matter of linguistic and conceptual conventions, which we adopt in order to make sense of the
world, and to be able to operate in it.
Our activity requires, among other things, that we can agree on the way we distinguish objects, so that we can communicate about them.
Yet, this does not imply that there truly are such static, independent, and unitary objects to which our words point; as we have seen, when we look for such entities, we cannot find them. Rather, so-called 'things‘ exist as referents of words only in dependence upon our actual thoughts and talk of them. Linguistic convention plays an important part in Nāgārjuna‘s characterization of the Two Truths, and more will be said about it below.