Chapter 10 (The Notion of Two Truths)

The world as an illusion

We are ignorant of certain fundamental characteristics of the world as it is. These can be broken down into the impermanence of the material world, the fabricated illusory nature of the world that we create in our minds and the impermanent and illusory self (Chapter 4). Objects exist but the meaning that we impart to them we create in our minds. We create imaginary self identifies, and relationships between and with other people. We ascribe ownership and impart meaning to objects which have no intrinsic meaning in themselves.

No-self and emptiness

Another way to look at the world’s unrealness is through the Buddhist concepts of no self and emptiness. Original Buddhism spoke of three marks of existence: dukka (suffering), annica (impermanence) and anatta (no self). What the Buddha meant by anatta is not completely clear. Was he denying the existence of the Hindu Atman or making a more qualified and less controversial statement that that there is no permanent individual? There are certainly statements in the Pali canon where the Buddha seems to be saying that when he looked deeply inside himself as the sages of Upanishads had, he did not find an inner Atman. What the Buddha clearly did mean by annata is that there is no permanent self. In Buddhism, the self we recognize as us is a collection of five aggregates: 1) body [including the mind which in Eastern thinking is considered a sense organ], 2) sensations, 3) perceptions, 4) psychic dispositions (i.e. impulses, habits, emotions, attachments) and 5) conscious thoughts. I don’t find these as useful as thinking of the individual as being composed of a body, spiritual consciousness and mind (Chapter 3) but in either case the individual is a composite of separable parts. In the Buddhist literature, one frequently used analogy for the individual is a flame. A flame is a composite of the fuel in the wick, ignited and sustained by heat and oxygen. Once the flame is extinguished, where does the flame go? Of course, it doesn’t go anywhere; it simply no longer exists.

In later Buddhism the concept of emptiness emerges. Emptiness can turn into a deep topic that is not always easy to understand depending on how it is presented. At one level emptiness can be seen as a generalization of no-self to everything i.e. that nothing including objects, events, even thoughts and ideas have more than a qualified existence. Emptiness here is not to say that matter doesn’t exist but rather material objects are also transient events rather than permanent things. Another analogy that can used is that of a wave of water. A water wave is not a thing, it is an event. If one tries to capture a wave at the shore, one can capture the water but not the wave. The wave is the event. All matter in the long run can be viewed as such. Even mountains are eventually worn away by erosion, earth quakes or human actions.

However, emptiness in the later Mahayana Buddhist tradition would come to take on a deeper meaning. I’ll try to give you my own sense of what that emptiness means. But to start it is important to note that in original Buddhism as still lives on in the Theravada tradition the Buddha was considered a normal human being, no different than you or I who through his own enormous efforts discovered the truths that he did and then taught others. The Buddha was not a God who could be prayed to for help but using the Buddha’s teaching others could discover the same truths that he had and follow the Buddha in the path to Nirvana. However it was a path that each had to follow for themselves. No one could do it for you. When the Buddha died, he passed away into Nirvana and was no longer available. Only his teachings remained behind.

In the later Mahayana Buddhism this view would change. The Buddha would come to be considered a God that could be prayed to. In original Buddhism the ideal follower was the arahant, one who had entered the path and was pursing enlightenment for himself. The concept of the arahant would come later to be considered selfish. Shouldn’t a truly enlightened being seeing the suffering of others want to help them? In Mahayana Buddhism the ideal would become that of the Bodhisattva, one who had achieved Buddhahood and could move into to Nirvana but out of compassion for those left behind vows to return to human form until all creatures are liberated from Samsara.

There would also be a change in later Buddhist thinking concerning the nature of the Buddha and emptiness. The Buddha would come to be considered as having three bodies: a body of essence (dharmakaya), a body of bliss (sambhogakaya) and a body of magic transformation (nirmanakaya) (see Embree, Sources of Indian Tradition, Chapter 6). The body of magic transformation was the Buddha in his earthly body as he lived as Siddhartha Gautama. The body of magic transformation was an emanation of the body of bliss. The body of bliss lived as an individual entity, eternally in a Godly heaven. The body of bliss was in turn an emanation of the body of essence, the ultimate substance which pervades and underlies all existence. The body of essence was true emptiness. I would argue that it is the same as Nirvana, the Hindu Brahman, the Dao, the Good or the One of Plato or Plotinus, the world soul of the stoics or the Source referred to in Chapter 3.

Nagarjuna and the notion of two truths

I first encountered the notion of two truths in the context of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. The concept of emptiness is particularly associated with Nagarjuna who lived in the second century CE. He was the founder of the Madhyamaka school or the middle path and associated with Nalanda University, the famous Buddhist university in northwest India that flourished from the 5th to the 12th century CE. His name comes from a merging of the name of the underwater serpent king, Naga and Arjuna of the Bhagavad Gita.

Nagarjuna works with another already developed Buddhist concept known as dependent origination or conditioned arising. All things have causes and lead to other things (or events). The sequence is conceptualized as a chain with 12 links that drive the process of death and rebirth. The 12 links can be easily found in many versions online (Google “12 links of dependent origination”). They are sometimes presented as simple chains, other times as elaborate colorful Buddhist art works. I don’t find the specific sequence that particularly helpful in my own thinking. However, since it is a chain if you break one link the chain is broken and breaking the chain of dependent origination means that there is no more death and rebirth. In the 12 links of dependent origination ignorance is the weakest link. Ignorance can be broken by understanding.

While the Buddha’s middle way was a way of practice between the extremes of asceticism and the self-indulgence of ordinary life, Nagarjuna’s middle way is a conceptual middle way between the notion of a perpetual thing and nothing. It is a notion of two truths that things exist in a conditioned temporary way that are between existing and not existing. Nagarjuna uses a rigorous logic to examine the problems of existence and non-existence, in the end mainly concluding the impossibility of any clear assertions and that all possibilities are flawed (Siderits and Katsura, Nagarjuna’s Middle Path). Logic is not the answer. Rather the key is non thinking knowledge. Enlightenment is beyond all description and words and must be directly experienced. Interestingly, the Buddha consistently discouraged philosophical speculation arguing that it wasn’t helpful on the path to enlightenment. In the end Nagarjuna can be seen as showing the pointlessness of philosophical analysis and reasoning using the methods of logic. Nagarjuna comes to endorse a philosophical middle way that is between the conventional notion that things exist and an ultimate notion that everything is empty.

Shankara and a notion of two truths

Adi Shankara lived in the 9th century CE and is the best known and most influential of Hindu Advaita Vedanta philosophers. Shankara would describe the world that we think we see as an illusion. That illusion can be seen in several ways. Firstly, as described above, everything here is impermanent, in constant change and subject to decay although in our conventional view of world things seem solid and at least semi-permanent. Secondly, there is the fabricated world that we create in our minds, the imaginary self identifies, the me and mine, the us and them, where we impart meanings to objects that have no intrinsic meaning in themselves. A third interpretation of the illusion can be seen Shankara’s notions of monism in which he asserts that the Atman of the individual (the soul) is in fact identical to Brahman, one name for the Source (Chapters 3). We see things as separate entities when they are really only one, i.e. Brahman. We don’t see things for what they are. Shankara frequently uses the analogy of the rope and the snake. When we first see a rope, we may mistake it for a snake. Once we realize that it is a rope we understand its true nature.

The most famous formulation of monism is the statement in the Upanishads “tat tvam asi’ usually translated as “you are that.” At the deepest level you are Brahman. You are not this person you think you are. Rather you are Brahman. Furthermore, the Atman is the same in all of us. Thus, the whole world is one. However, Brahman and Atman can’t be appreciated directly with the senses. Like Nagarjuna, Shankara saw the fundamental human problem as ignorance. Spiritual liberation comes about by seeing through the illusion of permanence, realizing our fabricated identities and world view, giving up all attachments to that world as well as seeing that you are that. Shankara endorse the notion of there being a conventional truth (the world is real and seems to consist of many things) but at the same time there is an ultimate truth (it is impermanent, fabricated and there is only Brahman). Reaching an understanding of this ultimate truth is the key to breaking the cycles of death and rebirth.

What to do?

So, what is left if we strip all the fabrications away and look at what remains? The truth is not very much. There is a physical body, a mind and a spiritual consciousness but not a lot else. In that case what is the purpose of life. What should you do? What can you do? Albert Camus thought that we search for meaning and purpose in a world which has no meaning or purpose. Camus saw religion as a crutch we create to give meaning and purpose to life when there is none. In this hopeless setting what is there to do? One option that might be considered is suicide. Camus considers this but rejects that option. Instead, he argued that we should adopt the attitude of the rebel and resist the unjustness of our state. Camus took solace in the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a mortal king who desired immortality. He was able to trick the lord of death and tie him up, so that for a period of time, no one on earth died. Eventually the gods realized what had happened and released the lord of death. To punish Sisyphus, they gave him his immortality. However, they compelled him to each day push a heavy rock up a hill but at the end of a day of pushing, the rock would roll back down the hill and the following day Sisyphus would be compelled to repeat the exercise. Camus saw Sisyphus as paradoxically happy in his rebellion against the gods.

The notion of two truths as a way of life

We’re caught in the situation that everything we do is in one sense meaningless. Everything here is impermanent and the world of apparent “meaning “is fabricated. Nagarjuna’s notion of two truths is a philosophical notion routed in Buddhist ideas about emptiness. However, the notion of two truths can also be interpreted that there is a conventional or relative truth and an ultimate truth. The relative truth is the world matters to some extent. We get up in the morning. We have responsibilities, a job to go to, bills to pay. If we ignore those responsibilities, there will be consequences. This practical approach is similar to Shankara’s notion of a a conventional truth (the world is real and at one level must be taken seriously but at the same time ultimately impermanent and fabricated).

Yet, if we look in the long perspective, the ultimate truth is most of this doesn’t matter. As John Maynard Keynes observed “in the long run we are all dead”. Or let’s think about it in the very long run. Based on modern notions of science, our sun will eventually burn out. If all life on earth is not fried in the super nova that the sun becomes before its final demise, life will be extinguished as the earth becomes stone cold. Then does what we do today matter? In the long cosmological cycles are postulated by Hindu, Buddhist and stoic philosophers wherein periodic conflagrations occur in which the universe is destroyed and then recreated, does what we do today matter in that scenario? Not really. It is all empty and unimportant. In the long run what we do here only matters to the extent that it influences what happens after death which is critical.

Holding the notion of two truths together at the same time is not easy. In original Buddhism as lives on the Theravada tradition today, it is not even considered possible. To have any real chance of making progress in this lifetime, it was necessary to separate oneself from all mundane earthly concerns. To give up family, possessions and money and if not retreat into a forest at least enter a monastery where strict ascetic practices can be observed and the world shut out. Progress towards liberation in this lifetime was only possible for the monk or nun who had renounced worldly concerns. That would change in later Mahayana Buddhism where liberation for house holders engaged in ordinary life would be considered possible but would still be difficult.

Hinduism’s stages of life postulate a graded approach. We can recognize something similar in Western societies. The first stage is that of the student who is preparing to assume a responsible role in society. The student graduates to become the householder, one who is engaged in work, family life and adult responsibilities. After those obligations have been fulfilled retirement follows. In Western life, this means retiring from work but remaining engaged with family and enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. In the East there is also a fourth stage that of the sannyasa, one who has renounced all connections to the world in the search for liberation. This final path, considered the extraordinary path, is not really found in the West and in the East was followed only by those few intent on finding liberation in this lifetime.

Four paths to insight and liberation

There are four basic paths to insight and liberation and let us define insight as seeing the world the way it is and liberation as escaping the cycles of death and rebirth. The four paths are: 1) knowledge (Jana), 2) devotion (Bhakti), 3) action (karma) and 4) meditation. Knowledge can be seen as you reason your way to the truth. Devotion is as in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna tells Arjuna just be devoted to me; just believe in me. It is a pure act of trust and belief. The way of action also features prominently in the Bhagavad Gita. It stresses just do what is right and don’t be concerned about the consequences. Act without attachment to the outcome of the action.

Mediation is the most mysterious of the four paths but is also the most powerful. Mediation creates the environment that leads to knowledge, although not necessarily during the meditation state itself. Meditation here is not reflective or contemplative thinking. It has no element of thinking. Rather the goal is to train the mind to have a fixed one-pointed concentration on a meditation object. Meditation allows one to see or at least sense that unseen world which exists beyond death and cannot be appreciated with the physical senses, that reality which cannot be described in words.

Chapter 4 saw three principles that are common to all mystical approaches to the spiritual journey as:

1) See the world the way it is

2) Give up all attachments

3) Return to the Source

Seeing the world the way it is means seeing the impermanence, the fabrications, which can be glimpsed through reasoning aided by meditation. Giving up attachments begins by insight into why one would want to give up attachments. Holding that notion of two truths simultaneously becomes central to attaining it.

References

Siderits and Katsura, Nagarjuna’s Middle Way, Wisdom Publications, Somerville MA, USA, 2013.

Ainslie T. Embree (editor). Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume 1, Second Edition, Columbia University Press, 1988.

Albert Camus, The Rebel, Vintage Books, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, Vedanta Press, 1946.

The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, second edition, 2007.