The Buddhist doctrine of two truths as religious philosophy

Abstract

These stanzas from a hymn attributed to Nâgârjuna reflect a problem recognized in many Buddhist attempts to express the truth. The problem basically is how to use language to release human beings from their attachment to deceptive (false) mental and emotional habits. The Buddha and his followers claimed they could provide a path, a means, of release from life's anxieties and frustrations. This meant that the Buddhist teach ers (therapists) had to entice their hearers into trying the Buddha's remedy, but without diluting its cathartic power to the point where it became simply a narcotic or worse, a poison. Thus, in expressing the truth (dharma) the spiritual teachers recognized, on the one hand, that the truth which illumines must be appropriate to the spiritual condition of the hearer, and on the other, that there is a criterion of truth which distinguishes salutary teachings from perversions. One way of explaining how there could be a variety of truth statements some appearing to be mutually contradictory while also affirming that there was a criterion of truth which applied to all truth claims was to assert that there were two kinds of truth: conventional or world-ensconced truth (samvrti-satya), and ultimate or highest truth (jparamartha-satya). While this distinction solved some problems in relating different Bud dhist statements, it raised new questions at another level of explanation. For instance, if there are two kinds of truth, what is the relationship between them? Are these kinds of truth simply two kinds of statements having their own linguistic (i.e. logical) structures that apply to different realms of discourse (as in the difference between metaphorical and ana