There are two truths in Buddhism, conventional and ultimate truth. This penetrating insight dates back to the original Buddha. Understanding the two truths and the relationship between them is vital in seeing through the illusion of inherent existence and realizing emptiness or Śūnyatā.

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Nagarjuna’s philosophy of the Middle Way or Mahyamaka school of Buddhism shows how the two truths are different and yet despite this difference are critically the same. An understanding of this paradox is a journey of remarkable insight and clarity. Nagarjuna’s doctrine of the emptiness of emptiness is imperative on this account.

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The references used for this article focused on the brilliant works of Jay Garfield, Professor of Philosophy, Buddhist scholar and translator.

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Conventional Truth

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Conventional truth involves our everyday experience and understanding of the way the phenomenal world appears and functions. If our senses and cognition are in working order we recognize that fire burns, that dark clouds foreshadow rain and that birds and not elephants fly. Conventional truth is our agreed upon identification of things and how they work, and this understanding directs our worldly activities.

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Conventional truth includes what is called valid cognition because it is able to distinguish conventional truth from conventional falsehood, an important difference. For example, there are consequences in distinguishing a snake from a rope and that sense of being right matters.1 If there was no reliability to our everyday assessments our activity would be senseless. There is a coherence, so that conventional truth cannot be constructed randomly or simply as we choose.

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However, our conventional reality is also deceptive. Objects, both coarse as in a rock and subtle as in thought, appear as distinct entities when they are not. Phenomena are mistakenly perceived and conceptualized as self-established, each with their own core nature that makes them what they are. In Buddhism, this deception is called inherent existence and is identified as the root error responsible for suffering.

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Through examination and analysis, the Middle Way school asserts that no independent phenomena exist whatsoever. While objects appear to exist as separate things, this sensory-cognitive appearance is illusory. Phenomena are neither self-created nor self-enduring, but arise in dependence upon conditions without a nature or essence of their own. The example of fire is classic in illustrating what it means to depend upon conditions, one of the key types of dependencies in emptiness teachings.

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Fire, which is seen to fundamentally exist, depends upon oxygen, fuel, heat, friction, and other innumerable conditions to appear, and does not exist intrinsically, as a thing in itself. If the conditions for fire are removed, there will be no fire. Fire cannot ignite itself or burn itself. The characteristic of fire depends upon conditions that are not considered to be fire and that are also dependently arisen. For instance, air is not considered to be fire because fire is not found in air. Nor is fuel such as wood, that also depends upon sun, rain, soil, etc., considered to be fire either. Fire, like all phenomena, is unfindable because it has no separate nature. Because fire does not independently exist, it appears under certain conditions and no longer appears when conditions change.

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The assumption that objects inherently exist does not hold up upon deeper examination. This does not mean that fire does not exist at all, but that there is no independent nature or essence that is fire. If things existed in and of themselves rather than dependently, everything would be isolated and unchanging and nothing would relate to anything. It is the illusion of the inherent existence of phenomena that Buddhist philosophy targets and its nonexistence is the meaning of the word emptiness.

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The Buddhist insight that form is empty is not an outright denial of phenomena but of their independent status. It is the understanding that the only kind of reality phenomena can possibly have would be interdependent and thus essenceless, empty. This leads to a central realization regarding the meaning of conventional truth. To recognize that phenomena dependently exist is to see that because they cannot ultimately be singled out, they can only be conventionally designated and conventionally true. This difficult and subtle point will be elaborated upon throughout the article.

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“We do not say that because things are empty they do not exist; we say that because things exist they are empty.” A Prasaṅgika-Madhyamaka Tibetan saying 2

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Because everything is empty of an essential, definable nature, conventional truth not only depends upon conditions but upon thought. The conventional designation of phenomena does not point to inherently existent things, but are relative, relational characterizations, like large is to small, or as smooth is to rough. What we consider to be different things, depend upon other things to be considered different. When characteristics are seen to exist independently, they deceptively appear to have their own inherent nature. Such reification is a conceptual overlay that gives the false impression that characteristics stand outside of thought as their own separate things.

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This reification process also mistakes empty, relative characteristics to be the properties, as they are literally called, of an object or objects, as in it’s solid or they’re shiny. It mistakes relative descriptions as being owned by or belonging to an object, or to a subject as in the case of a self. But there are no objects hiding behind these characteristics, collecting or harboring them, no concealed core in which to find the essence of things. There are not two objects, one with characteristics and one without characteristics. Instead, all objects are designated on the basis of relationally described characteristics and to be an object is merely to be characterized.

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We call a table a table because the top is characterized as firm rather than pliable, because it has legs or a base for height, and functions in one way relative to another, not because it possesses a table nature or essence. For if it was taken apart it would no longer be identified as a table. This same understanding can be applied to a person. There is no core nature that establishes a separate self, no center to which mind and body parts or characteristics belong. Tables, fire, people and all phenomena are designated by thought in dependence upon relationally characterized parts. They do not exist objectively, from their own side.

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This is why conventional truth is referred to as nominal truth, as true in name only. It is to point out that what depends upon conditions cannot have an essential nature or existence that can be pointed to, so that all objects of knowledge can only be nominal designations. This does not mean that everything is only a name in the sense of being reducible to independent and imaginary mental activity. If that was so, whether something was said to be a snake or a rope would make no difference and what was conventionally designated would have no rhyme or reason. To exist nominally means that as everything is interdependent and boundaryless, nothing can ultimately be identified. To say that phenomena are nominal is to say that they are conventionally constructed by what works, by what yields reliable results, not by what is, as in identifying real, self-grounded things.

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We do not end up with objective truth in which our observations reference truly definable phenomena. There is no observer that is separate from the observed and vice versa. Like fire and light, subject and object are co-arisen and thus, both are empty. But this is not to suggest that we are left with nonexistence or nonsense either. A snake is distinguished from a rope amid the coherence of interdependent existence, but not because a snake and rope have their own self-nature.

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This is the teaching of dependent arising, the teaching of the Middle Way, neither reifying conventional phenomena nor dismissing them as nonexistent. Phenomena appear, function and exhibit consequences, but do so dependently and conventionally. We need to engage in a vision of the essenceless interdependence of things, of the empty interrelatedness of what is neither thing nor nothing, like objects in a mirror or like echoes, like interreflections rather than entities.

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“Whatever is dependently co-arisen

That is explained to be emptiness.

That being a dependent designation,

Is itself the middle way.