Process Buddhism: Two Truths or One Truth?

In Buddhism we have the idea of the Two Truths: conventional truth and ultimate truth.
In Process Buddhism, in contrast, there is only one truth.

Conventional truths (saṃvṛtisatya) are what is true in terms of everyday ordinary experience, which ranges from truths about the most basic things of everyday life (pots, tables, cats, cars, houses) to the more complex dynamics observed by the natural sciences (wave-particle duality, electromagnetism, chemical reactions, biological growth, economic cycles) and yogic practices (nimitta, dhyāna, samādhi, siddhi, ānanda, nirvikalpaka). Conventional truths are distinguished from conventional falsehoods in that they are of the purview of cognitive actors who are not conditioned by defective sense-organs and mental processing and whose findings are validated by social consensus with other similarly non-defective cognitive actors, thus rendering them empirically and epistemically valid (pramāṇa), reliable and reproducible.

Ultimate truth (paramārthasatya) is the truth about reality as it is as such (tathātā) when directly seen (darśana). Conventional truths are relative, which is to say that they are dependent on (pratītya) or relative to conditions extrinsic to or outside of themselves in order to obtain their status of truth, including the minds which apprehend them. Ultimate truth is beyond all that: it refers to what is intrinsic, independent, and true no matter if there is someone there to recognize it.

Only highly awakened beings (ārya) see things in terms of ultimate truth, everyone else sees things in terms of conventional truth. Conventional truth is also sometimes glossed as “concealer” truths, in that in order to even function as apparents truth they must cover up or conceal what is really true. Therefore the “truth” of conventional truth is at best a partial truth predicated on the ignorance of the genuinely true ultimate truth, relative to which it can only be considered as false. Conventional truths may be valid and reliable with respect to their own domain predicated on an ignorance of how things actually are, but only ultimate truth is incontrovertibly valid and reliable.

This dichotomy of the Two Truths is an important hermeneutic or interpretative framework that allows us to make sense of the massive collection of Buddhist teachings, thus closely related to the categorization of some teachings as being simply “expedient” and some being “definitive” with regards to all matters of the basis, path and result of the process of awakening. Without this hermeneutic tool it would seem, when taken at face value, that many Buddhist teachings contradict one another, and so it is indispensable if we are to look at that whole corpus as being coherent and consistent with itself, otherwise we take on the more difficult and even more contrived task of determining which teachings are “authentic” and which are not.

I have had some friends express skepticism about this dichotomy, however, because it implies a hierarchy where ultimate truth is “more true” than conventional truth and suggests that there is something beyond conventional truth that we should turn our attention to. But conventional reality is the world in which we actually exist: the world of pain and pleasure, suffering and bliss, terror and ecstasy; the world of friends and adversaries, of comrades and enemies, of the beloved and the unloved, of you and me. The idea of an ultimate truth feels too abstract and otherworldly in contrast, but in order to resolve the myriad problems faced in our world to day we need more concreteness and this-worldliness, not less!

I too share a similar skepticism about the two truths when they are understood hierarchically, which is to say, to see them as somehow independently existent things in competition for the same domain of reality. This can only lead to one of two conclusions: we either admit that the ultimate is all that really exists and everything else is an unreal mental fabrication, or we jettison with the whole category of ultimate truth altogether and affirm conventional truth as the only form of truth that is possible. The former is arguably the route taken by Sarvāstivāda Buddhist realists (who affirm the ultimate truth of spatio-temporally partless particles and uncompounded space) and Yogācāra Buddhist idealists (who affirm the ultimate truth of the mind), while the latter is taken up by Mādhyamikas, with Svātantrika-Mādhyamikas cataphatically denying that anything exists ultimately and Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamikas apophatically denying that anything can be said from an ultimate standpoint.

While I find myself most aligned with the Prāsaṅgikas, there is a subtle distortion that can arise when the Prāsaṅgika method is presented as an actual view (dṛṣṭi) about the nature of reality. When presented as a view, this results in the contradictory notion that there is something conceivably “ultimate” against which we can take up the disposition to reject. Just like the disposition to accept such an ultimate except in inverted form, this is to veer off from the equanimous disposition of meditative equipoise that is beyond accepting or rejecting. Thus rendering the Prāsaṅgika as a view sets it up to be a publicly-facing destructive (and thus nihilistic) program rather than a publicly-facing creative program, the latter of which I think Process Buddhism is more suited to be as a dialogical partner in communion with the world.

However, when properly understood, the destructive or deconstructive power of the Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka is well serviced to the reconstructive aims of process philosophy. Whatever conventional truths are recovered or discovered by Process Buddhism, the Prāsaṅgika can subject it to an analytic of the Two Truths in order to ensure that such conventional truths are nothing more than conventional truths and in so doing will validate the fact that they are open/empty truths in-process and without a final, ultimate character. But as a public-facing creative program, Process Buddhism can only be said to embody one truth: the truth of lived experience as the indivisible unity of the nature of primordial open/emptiness and the nature of unceasing creative advance. Here there are no “two truths” as if the two natures can be meaningfully separated into different isolates. There is neither the one final eminent reality of the “ultimate” nor the multiplicity of conditioned creative processes that are “merely” conventional. There is simply the ordinary, everyday world, thoroughly imbued with its own radiant, resplendent glory — as true as true could ever be!