Running on Emptiness: A Layman's Take on the Two Truths

I was first introduced to the Two Truths doctrine with the common simile of the wave and the ocean. Phenomena, including my own sense of self, were like waves on the ocean, perceived by everyday persons like me as discrete things and not merely the temporary manifestations of the ocean that they actually were with no separate existence or identity. I found I could embrace the idea that my lifelong sense of self was a delusion, because I was a manifestation of the Great Ocean of Ultimate Reality, which I later understood as Buddha-nature. I saw the world as waves, but I felt that with enough practice, and if I looked deeply enough, I might experience glimpses of the Ocean. The idea that I was just a wave was the Relative or Conventional Truth, whereas, the idea that I was a manifestation of the Great Ocean of Ultimate Reality was the Ultimate Truth. That was cool.

Later I came across the writings and teachings of Stephen Batchelor, and he has somewhat famously commented that he sees the doctrine of the Two Truths as possibly the most problematic development in the history of Buddhism. He feels that this has introduced a very dangerous dualism: that there is a higher “Truth” that transcends our everyday reality, our mundane truth, and is only able to be perceived by enlightened beings. His opinion goes against most schools of Buddhist teachings and has received a fair amount of push-back. It made me reconsider my previous ideas and I became curious about the origins and development of this widely recognized teaching.

The doctrine of the Two Truths is not found in the Nikayas or the Agamas, but at least one Mahayana sutra is referenced to attribute it to the Buddha:

You, the knower of the world,
Realized the two levels of reality,
By yourself, not studying them from others.
They are the relative and the ultimate.
There is not some third level of reality.
Shakyamuni, Sutra of the Meeting of Father and Son
Pitāpūtrasamāgama-sūtra

I’ve only found pieces of this sutra in English. The quoted excerpt shows up in a few writings on the Two Truths, and may be based on some earlier Abhidharmic writings from one or two centuries after the Buddha’s death. And while this translation doesn’t use the term truth, it does contain the ideas of relative and ultimate. The earliest example of the idea of two Truths is often attributed to the Questions of King Milinda, an early Buddhist text from about 100 BCE, three or four centuries after the Buddha’s death. The King poses questions about the dharma to the monk Nagasena. Usually the questions are about two teachings that seem to contradict each other. In one answer Nagasena tells the king that only the skandhas, the aggregates, are ultimately real, while “Nagasena” and “I” are only conventionally real. And again, while this piece of the text concerns conventional reality and ultimate reality, the term “two truths” is not present.

Conventional truth and ultimate truth are dependent on what is determined to be conventionally real and to be ultimately real. And I want to be clear about what is not intended by the terms conventional and ultimate. As Ken Wilber puts it, all phenomena are at once wholes and parts. As a whole they are made up of lower order parts, which are in themselves wholes, but at the same time they are also a part of a higher order whole. This appears to be the case regardless of how high or how low you go. They all display both a unity, the whole, and a diversity, the parts, which could also be thought of as a general aspect and a specific aspect. If I am looking at the forest, that is the general aspect or the unity. If I am looking at the individual trees, that is the specific aspect or the diversity. One view is not the conditional and the other the ultimate, one is the general and one is the specific. I think that there is some confusion about this at times.

A debate between different Buddhist schools over what is conventionally real and what is ultimately real went on for centuries in India and Tibet and to a lesser degree in China, it is still debated. The arguments in these philosophical debates get very sophisticated and abstract, with finer and finer points being made. They become quite challenging to follow. However the great Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna (150-250 CE), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school, cuts through it all with the deconstruction of such arguments in his Mulamadhyamakakarika. He doesn’t propose his own arguments about the nature of reality, he instead aims to “ease fixations” on any arguments that don’t recognize the dependent origination and emptiness of all things.

Nagarjuna refers to the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta as the basis for his ideas:

[Buddha:] “This world, Kaccana, for the most part depends upon a duality (dvayam) – upon the notion of “it is” (atthita) and the notion of “it is not” (natthita). But for one who sees with right understanding (sammapanna) the arising of the world as it happens, there is no notion of “it is not” in regard to the world. And for one who sees with right understanding the ceasing of the world as it happens, there is no notion of “it is” in regard to the world. …
“Everything is’: Kaccana, this is one dead end. ‘Everything is not’’, this is another dead end. Without veering towards either of these dead ends, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma by the middle…”
Samyutta Nikaya 12.15 Trans. S. Batchelor

And he writes in his Mulamadhyamakakarika:

The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma
Is based on two truths:
A truth of worldly convention
And an ultimate truth.

Those who do not understand
The distinction drawn between these two truths
Do not understand
The Buddha’s profound truth.

Without a foundation in the conventional truth
The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.
Verses 24.8, 9, 10 (all MMK trans. Jay Garfield)

Here is where we find the use of the term “two truths.” Problematically, Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika is written in brief, direct and sometimes cryptic verses and disagreements over their translation and interpretation continue. I turned to various scholarly analyses to help me try to understand what Nagarjuna was actually teaching. This involved an investigation into the ideas of emptiness and conditioned arising.

My understanding is that all phenomena lack, or are empty of, an inherent nature or essence: they are not “things” but “processes”, a process of arising and ceasing from moment to moment. Their existence depends upon various conditions, that is, conditioned arising.

“Let be the past, Udayin, let be the future. I shall teach you the Dhamma: when this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.”
Majima Nikaya 79, ii 32, p. 655.

However, conditionality is not causation, these conditions have no causal power, they can’t cause things to be, but they can be useful in explaining or predicting the arising of phenomena. And there are innumerable conditions, the more you look for them, the more you will find. Jay Garfield has a good explanation of Nagarjuna’s conditionality.

“The argument against causation is tightly intertwined with the positive account of dependent arising and of the nature of the relation between conditions and the conditioned. Nagarjuna begins by stating the conclusion (1: 1): neither are entities self-caused nor do they come to be through the power of other entities. That is, there is no causation, when causation is thought of as involving causal activity.[4] Nonetheless, he notes (1: 2), there are conditions–in fact four distinct kinds–that can be appealed to in the explanation and prediction of phenomena. An example might be useful to illustrate the difference between the four kinds of condition, and the picture Nagarjuna will paint of explanation. Suppose that you ask, “Why are the lights on?” I might reply as follows: (1) Because I flicked the switch. I have appealed to an efficient condition. Or (2) because the wires are in good working order, the bulbs haven’t burned out, and the electricity is flowing. These are supporting conditions. Or (3) the light is the emission of photons each of which is emitted in response to the bombardment of an atom by an electron, and so forth. I have appealed to a chain of immediate conditions. Or (4) so that we can see. This is the dominant condition. Any of these would be a perfectly good answer to the “Why?” question. But note that none of them makes reference to any causal powers or necessitation.”
Jay L. Garfield
Philosophy East & West, Apr94, Vol. 44 Issue 2, p219, 32p
(http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Nagarjuna/Dependent_Arising.htm)

Again from the Mulamadhyamakakarika:

If things did not exist
Without essence,
The phrase, “When this exists so this will be,”
Would not be acceptable.
Verse 1:10

I take that to mean that if things were not empty of an essence, empty of a static or fixed identity, they would not be able to change. From moment to moment to moment everything is changing, from one thing to another and another. It’s not that phenomena are not real, it’s that we tend to perceive them as discrete things. And while our egos find it expedient and convenient to deal with reality as if it were made up of discrete phenomena, this creates a deep but subtle delusion. Discrete things are not real. If we look deeply into any phenomena, be it a chair or be it the self, no fixed essence or nature can be found. As Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, the chair is made up of non-chair elements, the self is made up of non-self elements. The chair and the self inter-are with all things, he calls this interbeing, here it is called conditionality. Anything with an inherent nature would exist solely because of that nature, and that nature would be fixed and unchanging. Because of it being fixed and unchanging, it would be unable to generate something outside of itself, as that would entail change. It would not be dependent on conditioned arising, and that, argues Nagarjuna, would be impossible.

If the existence of all things
Is perceived in terms of their essence,
Then this perception of all things
Will be without the perception of causes and conditions.
Verse 24:16

Nagarjuna’s “truth of worldly convention” is that how we experience our world depends entirely on our conventions. So what is meant by convention? Language, money and social customs are all conventions and agreement on them can be either tacit or explicit. Here are some definitions:

• General agreement on or acceptance of certain practices or attitudes: By convention, north is at the top of most maps. 
• A practice or procedure widely observed in a group, especially to facilitate social interaction; a custom: the convention of shaking hands.
• A general agreement about basic principles or procedures: as in science or justice; also: a principle or procedure accepted as true or correct by convention.

So we perceive phenomena, our experience of reality, through the lens of our conventions; this is our conventional reality. And while there is a vast diversity of conventions, there is also a great enough commonality within that diversity that, dependent on the limits of language, others thoughts and experiences can usually be made sense of. Nagarjuna continues:

Whatever is dependently co-arisen
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation
Is itself the middle way.

Something that is not dependently arisen,
Such a thing does not exist.
Therefore a non-empty thing
Does not exist.
Verses 24:18 & 19

So if conventional reality only contains phenomena that are dependently arisen, and our feelings, perceptions, reactions and thoughts about these phenomena are also dependently arisen, then conventional truth would be: everything without exception arises and passes away dependent on conditions and is thus empty of any inherent nature. If we accept this, then what is ultimate truth?

Phenomena are empty of something, they do not emerge out of something called emptiness. I have seen emptiness referred to with the term voidness. I have also seen it said that all things arise out of emptiness, sometimes called an unconditioned void of potential or just the unconditioned. But that is not what the Buddha seems to have meant when he explained the unconditioned.

“And what, monks, is the unconditioned? The ending of desire, the ending of hatred, the ending of delusion: this is called the unconditioned.
Samyutta Nikaya 43.1 Trans. S. Batchelor

Here the Buddha employs one of his skillful teaching methods. He takes what was a well known term and turns it on it’s head. In Vedic thought of the time, becoming one with the “unconditioned” was the highest aspiration. But the Buddha takes this noun and turns it into a verb. The “unconditioned” then becomes: to be “unconditioned by” desire, hatred and delusion.

Again, emptiness is not a thing, it is not something that phenomena arise out of, like waves out of the ocean. That would be a reification of emptiness and turn emptiness into something eternal. But something eternal is unconditional, it does not arise and cease dependent on conditions, it is therefore non-empty and, regardless of some teachings, for anything to be non-empty is considered an impossibility. The ocean is as empty as the waves and emptiness is also itself empty. Emptiness is actually only a concept that is useful to point out that our perception of things as discrete is an illusion, a representation by the ego as it works to make order out of our sensory input. Nevertheless, our perceptions are not unreal, and they make sense because of our conventions; that is conventional reality. So ultimate reality is not something called emptiness and ultimate reality cannot contain anything that is non-empty, because to be non-empty is an impossibility. That being the case, ultimate reality is not different from conventional reality, which leaves us with only a conventional reality and no ultimate reality. And without an ultimate reality to depend on there can be no ultimate truth. Jan Westerhoff says it better than I:

“According to the Madhyamaka view of truth there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are, independent of our interests and conceptual resources employed in describing it. All one is left with is conventional truth, truth which consists in agreement with commonly accepted practices and conventions. These are the truths that are arrived at when viewing the world through our linguistically formed conceptual framework. But we should be wary of denigrating these conventions as a distorting device that incorporates our specific interests and concerns. The very notion of distortion presupposes that there is a world untainted by conceptuality out there (even if our minds can never reach it) that is crooked and bent to fit our cognitive grasp. But the very notion of such a “way things really are” is argued by the Madhyamika to be incoherent. There is no way of investigating the world apart from our linguistic and conceptual practices, if only because these practices generate the notion of the “world” and of the “objects” in it in the first place. To speak of conventional reality as distorted is therefore highly misleading, unless all we want to say is that our way of investigating the world is inextricably bound up with the linguistic and conceptual framework we happen to employ.

However, emptiness is not to be understood as a description of reality as it is independent of human conceptual conventions, as its main purpose is to combat the wrong ascription of svabhava (“own being” or “essential nature”) to things. The absence of svabhava or emptiness is nothing phenomena have within themselves, but only something which is projected onto them from the outside in an attempt to rectify a mistaken cognition. Therefore the theory of emptiness is not to be regarded as an ultimately true theory either. Such a theory would describe things as they are independent of human interests and concerns. But the theory of emptiness is intricately bound up with such interests and concerns: if there were no human minds who mistakenly read the existence of svabhava into phenomena which lack it there would be no point in having a theory to correct this. It is only due to our erroneous view of things that the theory of emptiness is required as a corrective.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Nagarjuna
Copyright 2010 by
Jan Christoph Westerhoff

There is nothing that can be known to exist ultimately; everything does exist, but only conditionally, conventionally. Nagarjuna eliminates all other arguments as incoherent or invalid and by a process of elimination all we are left with is conditional reality and that is the conventional truth. But even talking about conventional truth can prove problematic. The idea of truth works very well when talking about making a morally truthful statement: My name is Carl or 2+2=4. But when you start talking about larger ontological truths you wind up with, as the Buddha says, “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views.” Nevertheless, not having an ultimate truth is unsatisfying for many. There seems to be a human yearning for higher truths to believe in such as Freedom, Morality, Justice, God, Buddha-nature or just Truth. It is of no small value to this world that a vast number of people find these beliefs, or hope to find these beliefs, helpful in living better, more meaningful lives. However, the idea that there are larger “Truths” to believe is often the origin of conflict. Disagreements over which “Truth” is the true “Truth” continue to be the cause of immeasurable suffering.

A common argument against this denial of ultimate truth is that enlightened beings have developed to the point where they have had a totally non-conceptual cognition, or knowing, of a transcendent non-dual reality, and that that is a direct knowledge of the ultimate. This can lead to the dualism of them and us, enlightened and unenlightened, ultimate and conventional. But does experiencing something give you complete knowledge of it? The Heart Sutra talks about complete-and-perfect enlightenment. This could be seen as mythic language being used as a skillful means in teaching, unfortunately, with time, it not uncommonly can turn into dogma and get taken as fact. So it can be taught that a complete-and-perfect enlightenment can be experienced, and that frames the expectations of the experience. But just because an experience produces a sense of complete-and-perfect doesn’t mean it actually is complete-and-perfect. If everything is conditional and ever changing, how can it then also be complete-and-perfect? While these experiences can only be approximately described, and their meanings are entirely subjective, they are not meaningless, they are generally profound. However, they can be profound in a positive sense of deep interconnectedness or, as modern research has shown, profound in a negative sense of deep disconnectedness. In other words, these experiences are conditional. The idea of “enlightenment” seems to take a deep experience of non-duality and attribute to it an experience of ultimate reality, which can then be interpreted as a realization of ultimate truth. This then becomes a belief; it’s meaning can neither be proven, nor can it be dis-proven, it is something metaphysical. The Buddha seems to have considered metaphysical arguments a distraction and would not engage in them. His unanswered questions are an example of this.

This samyutta is organized around questions that the Buddha left unanswered. Most of the discourses here focus on questions in a standard list of ten that were apparently the hot issues for philosophers in the Buddha’s day: Is the cosmos eternal? Is it not eternal? Is it finite? Is it infinite? Is the body the same as the soul? Is the body one thing and the soul another? Does the Tathagata exist after death? Does he not exist after death? Both? Neither?
MN 72 (Majima Nikaya) lists the reasons why the Buddha does not take a position on any of these questions. In each case he says that such a position “is a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. It is accompanied by suffering, distress, despair, & fever, and it does not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation; to calm, direct knowledge, full awakening, Unbinding.”
Introduction to the Avyakata Samyutta by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.intro.than.html

Another example of being caught in fruitless inquiry is his parable of the arrow. A man shot with a poisoned arrow will not let it be removed until he knows who shot it, what the poison is, what the arrow is made of, etc. And of course he dies before he can get his answers.

Reality is empty all the way up and all the way down. And though our knowledge is dependently arisen and restricted by our conventions, this doesn’t mean that we can’t really know anything; we are capable of knowing things very deeply. Our conventional reality is a shared reality, it is not a dream or a hallucination. It’s just that our perception of our perceptions is representational. Imagine you are wearing virtual reality goggles and headphones with a built in camera and microphone. Everything you see and hear would be an electronic representation. But it would be a reliable representation of the reality that surrounds you. Software takes the electronic input from the visual and auditory circuitry in the goggles and turns it into something comprehensible to us. If we wore the goggles and headphones long enough we would forget them. Our ego and sense of self does something similar with how we process our experience. And while this representation gives us the practical and convenient illusion that our experience is made up of discrete things, looking more deeply we can see through this illusion and realize the profound interpenetration of all things.

To me, the Buddha qualifies as a pragmatist. He offers us something to do, and to see for ourselves whether it is helpful. He doesn’t seem very concerned about declaring a “Truth” or providing a description of ultimate reality. He is regarded as the great physician, offering treatments for our existential condition. And our existential condition is living with dukkha.

This is dukkha: birth is dukkha, ageing is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha, encountering what is not dear is dukkha, separation from what is dear is dukkha, not getting what one wants is dukkha. This psycho-physical condition is dukkha.
Mahavagga. I, 6.16-28

We live in an ever changing conditional reality with two things we can know for sure: we were born, and we don’t know why, and we will die, but we don’t know when. And in addition: we are all burning with the three fires of greed, anger and ignorance; and, we are all subject to old age, sickness and death; and because of this ever changing conditional reality, we can never know anything completely. But balancing out all of that is if all things weren’t empty and arising and passing away dependent on conditions, we would be fixed and incapable of change and growth.

I see trying to determine Truth as misguided. The real question appears to be whether there exists a reality beyond the conventional one we perceive. My conclusion is that we can have no way of knowing, it’s all speculation, projection and wishful thinking. Still, there is widespread belief in the existence of a greater reality based on a teaching or a spiritual experience or an intuition or just a yearning; and it may feel entirely justified, right and true. And I believe the faith in that view to be sincere. However, what I’ve found in the teachings of the Buddha and Nagarjuna has led me to have faith in another view: that we are beings in a conditional reality and therefore are unable to have knowledge of anything beyond this reality. If we let go of ideas of larger truths and deeper realities, all we are left with is this reality in which nothing can be found to have any essential nature and any knowledge we have is conditional and framed by our conventions.

I’m confident that my lifelong sense of a discrete self will remain a delusion generated by my ego; and that’s OK, it’s how I make sense of my immediate experience. But I do try to remind myself to work at seeing through that delusion and see myself more clearly as an ongoing process in the continual arising and ceasing. I also now see my belief in a Great Ocean of Ultimate Reality as having been a welcomed illusion. It provided a comforting reassurance of being part of a miraculous Eternal All. But the real miracle is not some Eternal All, the real miracle is that we exist at all, and in such sublime richness and wonder. How is it that I am here speaking to you? Fortunately, due to our conditional reality being empty, we have, in this very life, the capability, as well as the freedom, to change, develop, and experience some awakening. And that really is most sufficient.