Two truths doctrine
The Buddhist doctrine of the two truths differentiates between two levels of satya in the teaching of Śākyamuni Buddha: the "conventional" or "provisional" truth, and the "absolute" or "ultimate" truth.
The exact meaning varies between the various Buddhist schools and traditions. The best known interpretation is from the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, whose founder was the 3rd-century Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher Nāgārjuna. For Nāgārjuna, the two truths are epistemological truths. The phenomenal world is accorded a provisional existence. The character of the phenomenal world is declared to be neither real nor unreal, but logically indeterminable. Ultimately, all phenomena are empty of an inherent self or essence due to the non-existence of the self, but temporarily exist depending on other phenomena.
In Chinese Buddhism, the Mādhyamaka thought is accepted, and the two truths doctrine is understood as referring to two ontological truths. Reality exists in two levels, a relative level and an absolute level. Based on their understanding of the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, the Chinese Buddhist monks and philosophers supposed that the teaching of the Buddha-nature was, as stated by that Sūtra, the final Buddhist teaching, and that there is an essential truth above emptiness and the two truths.
The doctrine of emptiness is an attempt to show that it is neither proper nor strictly justifiable to regard any metaphysical system as absolutely valid. The two truths doctrine doesn't lead to the extreme philosophical views of eternalism and annihilationism, but strikes a middle course between them.
Etymology and meaning
Satya is usually taken to mean "truth", but also refers to "a reality", "a genuinely real existent". Satya is derived from Sat and ya. Sat means being, reality, and is the present participle of the root as, "to be". Ya and yam means "advancing, supporting, hold up, sustain, one that moves". As a composite word, Satya and Satyam imply that "which supports, sustains and advances reality, being"; it literally means, "that which is true, actual, real, genuine, trustworthy, valid".The two truths doctrine states that there is:
- Provisional or conventional truth, which describes our daily experience of a concrete world, and
- Ultimate truth, which describes the ultimate reality as śūnyatā, empty of concrete and inherent characteristics.
- complete covering or the "screen" of ignorance which hides truth;
- existence or origination through dependence, mutual conditioning;
- worldly behavior or speech behavior involving designation and designatum, cognition and cognitum.
Background
The 3rd-century Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher Nāgārjuna and other Buddhist philosophers after him introduced an exegetical technique of distinguishing between two levels of truth, the conventional and the ultimate.A similar method is reflected in the Brahmanical exegesis of the Vedic scriptures, which combine the ritualistic injunctions of the Brahmanas and speculative philosophical questions of the Upanishads as one whole "revealed" body of work, thereby contrasting the with.
Origin and development
The concept of the two truths is associated with the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, whose founder was the 3rd-century Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher Nāgārjuna, and its history traced back to the earliest years of Buddhism.Early Indian Buddhism
Theravāda
In the Pāli Canon, the distinction is not made between a lower truth and a higher truth, but rather between two kinds of expressions of the same truth, which must be interpreted differently. Thus a phrase or passage, or a whole Sūtra, might be classified as neyyattha, samuti, or vohāra, but it is not regarded at this stage as expressing or conveying a different level of truth.Nītattha, "of plain or clear meaning" and neyyattha, " having a sense that can only be guessed". These terms were used to identify texts or statements that either did or did not require additional interpretation. A nītattha text required no explanation, while a neyyattha one might mislead some people unless properly explained:
' or ', meaning "common consent, general opinion, convention", and paramattha, meaning "ultimate", are used to distinguish conventional or common-sense language, as used in metaphors or for the sake of convenience, from language used to express higher truths directly. The term vohāra (Pāli; Sanskrit: vyavahāra, "common practice, convention, custom" is also used in more or less the same sense as samuti.
The Theravādin commentators expanded on these categories and began applying them not only to expressions but to the truth then expressed:
Prajnāptivāda
The Prajñaptivāda school took up the distinction between the conventional and ultimate truths, and extended the concept to metaphysical-phenomenological constituents, distinguishing those that are real from those that are purely conceptual, i.e., ultimately nonexistent.Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism
Mādhyamaka school
The distinction between the two truths was fully developed by Nāgārjuna, founder of the Mādhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy. Mādhyamika philosophers distinguish between saṃvṛti-satya, "empirical truth", "relative truth", "truth that keeps the ultimate truth concealed", and paramārtha-satya, ultimate truth.Saṃvṛti-satya can be further divided in tathya-saṃvṛti or loka-saṃvṛti, and mithya-saṃvṛti or aloka-saṃvṛti, "true saṃvṛti" and "false saṃvṛti". Tathya-saṃvṛti or "true saṃvṛti" refers to "things" which concretely exist and can be perceived as such by the senses, while mithya-saṃvṛti or "false saṃvṛti" refers to false cognitions of "things" which do not exist as they are perceived.
Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā provides a logical defense for the claim that all things are empty and devoid of any inherently-existing self-nature. Emptiness itself, however, is also shown to be "empty", and Nāgārjuna's assertion of "the emptiness of emptiness" prevents the mistake of believing that emptiness may constitute a higher or ultimate reality. Nāgārjuna's view is that "the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth". According to Siderits, Nāgārjuna is a "semantic anti-dualist" who posits that there are only conventional truths. Jay L. Garfield explains:
In Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the two truths doctrine is used to defend the identification of dependent origination with emptiness itself :
In Nāgārjuna's own words:
Nāgārjuna based his statement of the two truths on the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta. In this text, Śākyamuni Buddha, speaking to the monk Kaccāyana Gotta on the topic of right view, describes the middle course between the extreme philosophical views of eternalism and annihilationism :
According to the Tibetologist Alaka Majumder Chattopadhyaya, although Nāgārjuna presents his understanding of the two truths as a clarification of the teachings of the historical Buddha, the two truths doctrine as such is not part of the earliest Buddhist tradition.
Buddhist Idealism
Yogācāra
The Yogācāra school of Buddhist philosophy distinguishes the Three Natures and the Trikāya. The Three Natures are:- Paramarthika, also referred to as Parinispanna in Yogācāra literature: The level of a storehouse of consciousness that is responsible for the appearance of the world of external objects. It is the only ultimate reality.
- Paratantrika : The level of the empirical world experienced in ordinary life. For example, the snake-seen-in-the-snake.
- Parikalpita. For example, the snake-seen-in-a-dream.
''Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra''
East Asian Buddhism
When Buddhism was introduced to China by Buddhist monks from the Indo-Greek Kingdom of Gandhāra and classical India between the 2nd century BCE and 1st century CE, the two truths teaching was initially understood and interpreted through various ideas in Chinese philosophy, including Confucian and Taoist ideas which influenced the vocabulary of Chinese Buddhism. As such, Chinese translations of Buddhist texts and philosophical treatises made use of native Chinese terminology, such as "T’i -yung" and "Li-Shih" to refer to the two truths. These concepts were later developed in several East Asian Buddhist traditions, such as the Wéishí and Huayan schools. The doctrines of these schools also influenced the ideas of Chán Buddhism, as can be seen in the Verses of the Five Ranks of Tōzan and other Chinese Buddhist texts.Chinese thinkers often took the two truths to refer to two ontological truths : a relative level and an absolute level. For example, Taoists at first misunderstood emptiness to be akin to the Taoist notion of non-being. In the Mādhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, the two truths are two epistemological truths: two different ways to look at reality. The Sānlùn school thus rejected the ontological reading of the two truths. However, drawing on Buddha-nature thought, such as that of the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, and on Yogācāra sources, other Chinese Buddhist philosophers defended the view that the two truths did refer to two levels of reality, one which was conventional, illusory and impermanent, and another which was eternal, unchanging and pure.