What is left of the two truths?

What you will work out

• Explain why Nāgārjuna’s arguments leave the Abhidharma account of the two truths unable to stand as it was.
• Explain what “conventional” means in 24.8–10, using Candrakīrti’s three explanations and the translators’ account of customary ways of talking and thinking.
• Compare three readings of ultimate truth, as a reality beyond concepts, as the absence of all entities and as the claim that there is no ultimate truth, and say what each needs.
• Assess whether conventional claims can still be right or wrong, and name the kind of disagreement that answer leaves open.

The master rod

Imagine a market town where every cloth merchant checks a measuring rod against the master rod kept in the town hall. Customers trust a merchant’s yard of cloth because, in the end, it answers to that master. Then a clerk opens the case in the town hall and finds it empty.

What follows? One answer is that every measurement in the town has been a fraud, since nothing ever stood behind it. Another is that very little has changed: the merchants’ rods still agree with one another, customers still get what they pay for, and a merchant who sells short lengths can still be caught. The discovery changes what we think measurement rests on. Whether it changes whether measurements can be right or wrong is a separate question.

Nāgārjuna’s arguments put his opponents in something like the clerk’s position. Every lesson so far has relied on the distinction between what is conventionally true and what is ultimately true. That distinction was the opponents’ own, and it rested on something Nāgārjuna has spent five lessons taking away.

What the arguments have taken away

Recall the framework from lesson 1. For the Abhidharma thinkers, a statement is conventionally true if acting on it reliably succeeds, as “this chariot will carry you to town” does. It is ultimately true if it describes the simple, ultimately real elements, the dharmas, which have natures of their own. And the two levels were connected. Chariot talk works because the dharmas are arranged chariot-wise; conventional truth was, in the end, explained by ultimate facts.

Nāgārjuna accepted this account of what a dharma would be and argued that there are none. If that is right, the framework loses both of its supports. Ultimate truth has lost its subject matter, since there are no ultimately real dharmas for it to describe. And conventional truth has lost the facts that were supposed to explain it. Something has to give.

Two truths, and a cup

Chapter 24 is where Nāgārjuna says what he makes of the distinction. It opens with an objection that the guided course’s lesson “Does emptiness mean that nothing exists?” follows closely: if everything is empty, the Buddha’s central teachings can no longer be true (24.1–6). Nāgārjuna replies that the objector has misunderstood emptiness, and then states the distinction on which his whole answer rests:[1]

8. The Dharma teaching of the Buddha rests on two truths: conventional truth and ultimate truth.

9. Who do not know the distinction between the two truths, they do not understand reality in accordance with the profound teachings of the Buddha.

10. The ultimate truth is not taught independently of customary ways of talking and thinking. Not having acquired the ultimate truth, nirvāṇa is not attained.

What does “conventional” mean here? The word the translators render this way is saṃvṛti, and Candrakīrti, as they report him, explains it in three ways. On the first, it means “concealing”: conventional truth covers up how things really are from ordinary people. On the second, it means mutual dependence. On the third, it refers to the customs that govern the daily conduct of ordinary people, including the conventions linking words to what they name and thoughts to what they are about. The translators add that when Indian commentators offer several explanations of a term, the last is often the one they favor.

Verse 10 uses a plainer word, which the translators equate with conventional truth. The Sanskrit vyavahāra, “customary ways of talking and thinking”, is what we call common sense: the ways of getting around in the world that “have proven useful in that they generally lead to success in meeting people’s goals.” Candrakīrti compares it to the cup that a thirsty person needs in order to drink. The ultimate truth cannot be taught except through the conventional, just as water cannot be drunk without something to hold it.

The translators then draw a conclusion that shows how much has changed since lesson 1: “what Abhidharma takes to be the ultimate truth turns out, on the Madhyamaka understanding, to be merely conventionally true.” The dharmas were supposed to be the bedrock beneath convention. On this understanding they are themselves useful concepts, conventionally true descriptions like the chariot.

What could “ultimate” still mean?

If the dharmas are conventional too, what is left for the word “ultimate”? Interpreters have given very different answers. Three are worth setting side by side, because each makes the study’s arguments mean something different.

A reality beyond concepts. One family of readings, prominent in the first Western philosophical studies of Nāgārjuna, took him to divide the world into appearance and reality. Westerhoff reports that Theodore Stcherbatsky, writing in 1927, ascribed to him “an absolute noumenal reality” underlying the changing world of appearances, and that T. R. V. Murti developed the same Kant-influenced reading in 1955.[2] A related view has a much older source. The Yogācāra philosopher Dharmapāla, as Westerhoff reports him, criticized the Mādhyamika Bhāviveka for saying that nothing exists ultimately: something must remain to be known, he argued, and the true nature of things is completely beyond concepts. On readings of this kind, the arguments clear away false descriptions so that a reality no description can capture comes into view. What they need is that there be such a reality. Westerhoff rejects them for exactly that reason. A reality that is what it is independently of every concept, even if we can never grasp it, is still a thing with a nature of its own. On his view it brings intrinsic nature back “through the back door”.

The absence of all entities. The other two readings come from a single line of commentary. The Akutobhayā says that the ultimate truth is the realization that no dharmas whatsoever arise, and the translators describe two ways to understand it.[1] On the first, ultimate reality contains nothing that arises, and since Buddhists generally deny that anything is eternal, it contains no entities at all. To realize emptiness would then be to see the true character of reality: that it is utterly empty of existing things. What this reading needs is a way to keep that description of ultimate reality from sounding like the claim that nothing exists at all, which lesson 1 saw chapter 15 refuse.

No ultimate truth. On the second reading, the translators write, “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.” What is realized, on this view, is that the very idea of how things really are, independently of our useful conventions of speech and thought, is incoherent. Their own commentary on 24.18 describes the middle path in terms close to this reading: it avoids both extremes, they write, “because it denies that there is such a thing as the ultimate nature of reality.” Westerhoff develops the same reading at length.[2] On his account there is no theory that describes how things are independently of our interests and concepts, and so conventional truth is all the truth there is. He adds that we should not call convention a distortion. A distortion bends something that has a shape of its own, and it is precisely the idea of a world with a shape of its own, apart from all description, that he takes the arguments to have undermined. This reading also recalls the translators’ suggestion in lesson 5 that the Buddha’s graded teachings rise in usefulness rather than in accuracy. What this reading needs is an account of why conventions are not arbitrary. The last part of this lesson takes up that need.

The market town can tell each story. On the first reading, a master rod exists but is locked away where no one can ever lay it against cloth. On the second, the case is simply empty. On the third, the very idea of a rod that measures without anyone measuring was confused from the start.

None of these readings speaks for all of Madhyamaka. Each has had serious defenders, and the verses do not decide between them on their own.

No difference between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa?

One verse shows how much depends on the choice. For Buddhists, saṃsāra is the round of rebirth and suffering that lessons 4 and 5 described, and nirvāṇa is its ending, the goal of the Buddhist path. Like rebirth, they are explained here as the setting of the arguments, not endorsed. Near the end of its examination of nirvāṇa, chapter 25 says:

19. There is no distinction whatsoever between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. There is no distinction whatsoever between nirvāṇa and saṃsāra.

Read carelessly, this says that the Buddhist path is pointless, since its starting point and its goal are the same. The translators read it as a claim about ultimate truth: since nothing has intrinsic nature, nothing ultimately true can be said about either, and so there is no ultimate difference to state. “Note, however,” they add, “that this says nothing about the conventional status of nirvāṇa and saṃsāra. A Mādhyamika can still hold it to be conventionally true that nirvāṇa and saṃsāra are very different states.” Five verses later Nāgārjuna goes further still: “No Dharma whatsoever was ever taught by the Buddha to anyone” (25.24). Candrakīrti, as the translators report him, sees no difficulty here either. To the extent that the Buddha’s teachings help us overcome suffering, they are conventionally true.

A reading, not a given

This study has read every “there is no X” as “there is ultimately no X”, and added what still holds conventionally. That practice is itself an interpretation, with a history. In The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Westerhoff calls the two truths the historically attested way of reading the apparent contradictions in Nāgārjuna, and he describes how the Tibetan scholar Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) made supplying the word “ultimately” a deliberate method of interpretation.[3] He also names its cost. Applied everywhere, the method can make Nāgārjuna’s denials concern only “strange ultimately real simulacra”, and so domesticate them. When Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis, a claim lesson 8 examines, the method takes him to mean no ultimately real thesis. But what, Westerhoff asks, is “the difference between holding an ultimately real thesis and just holding a thesis?” In his earlier book he notes that there seems to be no textual evidence that Nāgārjuna expected such qualifications to be supplied.[2]

Westerhoff does not conclude that the distinction should be dropped, and the study keeps it. The translators read the verses this way, the distinction is Nāgārjuna’s own (24.8–9), and without it the arguments are easily heard as saying that nothing exists at all. But the word “ultimately” is part of an interpretation, and it should be read as one.

Can a conventional claim be wrong?

If conventional truth is all the truth there is, a worry follows at once. Conventions differ between people and change over time. Does anything then go, so that every convention is as good as any other? Westerhoff notes that Indian sources did not explicitly discuss this worry, and he takes it up himself.[2]

His first reply is that any community we can understand and argue with must share some standards with us, or we could not recognize its beliefs as beliefs at all, and that some standards can be better than others: more coherent with the rest of our practices, for example, or better at reducing pain. His second is an illustration he takes from the scholar Tom Tillemans. How a wine tastes depends on the people tasting it; without tasters there would be no sourness or sweetness. Yet a wine-taster who calls a wine acidic can be wrong. “Even within the realm of conventional truth,” Westerhoff concludes, “we therefore do not ‘make it all up’.” Some conventional statements are better than others, though none is ultimately true.

He is candid that this does not settle every case. His hard case is a chemical, phenolthiourea, that for genetic reasons tastes bitter to about three-quarters of the population and has no taste for the rest. Separate the two groups, and it is hard to see how either could call the other’s judgment mistaken. Westerhoff’s answer is that communities who differed this deeply about everything, and not only about one taste, could not interact at all, and so the worry would lose its point. That is a reply about whether such a disagreement could arise, not a way of settling it if it did.

Return to the market town. Ultimately, on Westerhoff’s reading, there was never a master rod: no measurement is correct by answering to something with a nature of its own. Conventionally, the merchants’ rods still agree, a short yard can still be detected and the customer who complains can still be right. The empty case in the town hall changes what measuring rests on, not whether a measurement can fail.

Try a disputed call

Imagine a club tennis match in which Fergus, the umpire, calls a serve out. The server protests. A spectator shrugs: “The lines on the court and the rules of tennis are only conventions. So the call can’t really be wrong.”

Using this lesson’s account of conventional truth, explain how Fergus’s call can be correct or mistaken. Then name the kind of disagreement the reply cannot settle. Writing an answer is optional.

A full explanatory answer

The spectator’s mistake is to move from “the rule is a convention” to “nothing under the rule can be right or wrong”.

A convention supplies a standard, and judgments made under it succeed or fail by that standard. The rules settle what counts as out: a serve that lands beyond the service line. They do not settle where this ball landed. That is a question about the ball and the line, and Fergus can get it wrong, as a merchant’s rod can come up short. A replay, a mark in the clay or a line judge with a better view could show that he did.

This is the difference between “conventional” and “anything goes”. On the reading Westerhoff develops, conventional truth is not a distorted copy of some deeper truth about the serve. It is the only kind of truth there is, and it still has standards. Ultimately, there is no ball, line or “out” with a nature of its own. Conventionally, the serve landed where it landed, and a correct call says so.

The answer has a limit. It shows how a judgment can be wrong within a shared set of rules. It does not show how to settle a disagreement between whole systems of convention: between two clubs that play by different rules, say, or between groups who, like the two populations tasting phenolthiourea, share no standard for the question at issue. Westerhoff himself leaves that harder case open.

Carry this forward

On the readings this lesson has followed furthest, there is no ultimate truth in the sense the opponents wanted: no final description of how things are in themselves. But then a new temptation appears. If emptiness is what the analysis always finds, is emptiness itself the ultimate truth, the one thing that really is? The next lesson, “Is emptiness empty too?”, follows Nāgārjuna’s answer.

Sources and limits

[1] Nāgārjuna, Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, translated with commentary by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Wisdom Publications, 2013), for the verses of chapters 24 and 25 and the translators’ commentary.

• Chapter 24’s outline and the opponent’s objection (24.1–6): pp. 267–271.
• 24.8–10 with commentary: pp. 272–274. The verses are on pp. 272–273; Candrakīrti’s three explanations of saṃvṛti and the translators’ remark about favored explanations on p. 272; the two readings of the Akutobhayā on pp. 272–273; the gloss on vyavahāra, Candrakīrti’s cup and the sentence about the Abhidharma ultimate on p. 274.
• The commentary on 24.18 about the middle path: p. 278.
• 25.19–24 with commentary: pp. 302–305, with the translators’ note on the conventional difference on p. 303, 25.24 on p. 304 and Candrakīrti’s remark on pp. 304–305.

Words in square brackets are the translators’. Candrakīrti and the Akutobhayā are reported only as the translators report them. Nirvāṇa, saṃsāra and rebirth are explained as the setting of the arguments, not endorsed.

[2] Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), for the history of Western readings, the rejection of an ineffable ultimate, his own account of truth and the relativism objection. These sections and their endnotes were read in full.

• Stcherbatsky and Murti: §1.4, pp. 9–10.
• Dharmapāla and ineffable substances: §10.1.3, pp. 205–207, with “through the back door” on p. 206.
• No ultimate truth; convention not a distortion: §10.5, pp. 219–222, especially p. 220.
• Relativism, the wine-taster and phenolthiourea: §10.5, pp. 222–224, with the quotation on p. 223 and the remark about Indian sources in note 42 (p. 222).
• No textual evidence that Nāgārjuna expected qualifiers to be supplied: chapter 4, note 42, p. 75.

Westerhoff reports Stcherbatsky, Murti and Dharmapāla (the last through a study by Hoornaert), and the wine-taster through Tillemans; none of their works was read. The lesson treats Westerhoff’s account of truth as one reading among the three it describes.

[3] Jan Westerhoff, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 2, section 4c, “Contradictions and Nāgārjuna’s thought”, for the two truths as a device for reading apparent contradictions, Tsongkhapa’s interpolation procedure and its cost. The section and its footnotes were read in full. The copy consulted is the publisher’s corrected proof, whose page numbers have not been checked against the published edition, so the section title is given instead of pages. Westerhoff writes the name Tsong kha pa. Tsongkhapa’s works were not read.

The market town and Fergus’s call are original teaching examples; the wine-taster and phenolthiourea are Westerhoff’s.