Conventional and Ultimate truth
- Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy
- conventional truth refers to the linguistic conventions we use to describe the world, where as ultimate truth refers to the underlying emptiness of the intrinsic nature these conventions
- These conventions are still valid in their utility
- dharma taught by the Buddha, which he says is precisely based on the theory of the two truths: a truth of mundane conventions and a truth of the ultimate
- all things including ultimate truth are ultimately unreal, empty of any intrinsic nature including the emptiness (śūnyatā) itself, therefore all are groundless
- to assert that all things are empty of any intrinsic reality, for Nāgārjuna, is not to undermine the existential status of things as simply nothing. On the contrary, Nāgārjuna argues, to assert that the things are empty of any intrinsic reality is to explain the way things really are as causally conditioned phenomena
- Nāgārjuna’s central argument to support his radical non-foundationalist theory of the two truths draws upon an understanding of conventional truth as tied to dependently arisen phenomena, and ultimate truth as tied to emptiness of the intrinsic nature
- Since the former and the latter are co-constitutive of each other, in that each entials the other, ultimate reality is tied to being that which is conventionally real.
- Nāgārjuna advances important arguments justifying the correlation between conventional truth vis-à-vis dependent arising, and emptiness vis-à-vis ultimate truth. These arguments bring home their epistemological and ontological correlations
- He argues that wherever applies emptiness as the ultimate reality, there applies the causal efficacy of conventional reality and wherever emptiness does not apply as the ultimate reality, there does not apply the causal efficacy of conventional reality
- According to Nāgārjuna, ultimate reality’s being empty of any intrinsic reality affords conventional reality its causal efficacy since being ultimately empty is identical to being causally produced, conventionally. This must be so since, for Nāgārjuna, “there is no thing that is not dependently arisen; therefore, there is no such thing that is not empty”
- Knowledge of the conventional truth informs us how things are conventional, from the ordinary commonsense perspective and thus grounds our epistemic practice in its proper linguistic and conceptual conventional framework.
- Knowledge of the ultimate truth informs us of how things really are ultimate, from the ultimate analytical perspective and so takes our minds beyond the bounds of conceptual and linguistic conventions.
- Contemporary scholarship suggests that the Buddha himself may not have made any explicit reference to the two truths.
- Recent studies also suggest that the two truths distinction is an innovation on the part of the Abhidhamma which came into prominence originally as a heuristic device, useful for later interpreters to reconcile apparent inconsistent statements in the Buddha’s teachings
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