Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma view says everything is ultimately reducible to smaller parts; the Madhyamaka says it’s ultimately just emptiness; the Yogācāra says it’s all mind; Chinese Huayan and Tiantai views have their own trippy takes.
It recently hit me, though, that there’s actually a huge point of metaphysical agreement among all the Buddhist schools: huge enough to mean that this disagreement about the ultimate isn’t what matters most to them. And that’s on the point I discussed last time: namely that what really matters in Buddhist metaphysics isn’t so much the nature of the ultimate. Rather, it’s breaking down the conventional!
On that point there is a major continuity across Buddhist tradition. Between the different major philosophical schools of Madhyamaka, Abhidhamma/Theravāda and Yogācāra, there is huge disagreement about how to characterize ultimate truth. But what they don’t disagree on is that conventional truth is merely conventional, it’s in some respect illusory – in ways that change our understanding of all of it. They all agree that we have to see through conventional reality; they just disagree as to what we have to see through it to. It’s when we treat merely conventional reality as ultimately real that we get into trouble, and we get attached to it.
The self is the most obvious such conventional illusion – but it’s only the most obvious one. Theravāda texts like the Milindapañhā – the earliest text I know of to use the conventional/ultimate distinction – say the self is a mere convention, only its parts are ultimately real. But they also say the same thing about chariots and other medium-sized dry goods. In Theravāda as in Madhyamaka, our everyday conventional understanding of reality is full of error, and not just about the self.
So the Buddhism scholar Mark Siderits is wrong when he proclaims that only non-self, and not emptiness in general, is the metaphysical idea that really saves us from suffering. (At least unless the anātman, the “selflessness”, in question is the selflessness or essencelessness of all things and not merely human persons – in which case emptiness is what we mean by non-self, in the Madhyamaka context anyway.) Non-self is merely the most prominent case of ultimate truth – of the deconstruction of the conventional. The self is broken down, like everything else. And that breakdown, of self and other, gives you the power of nonattachment.
The (to me anyway) startling conclusion from all this is that at some level you can actually leave the nature of ultimate truth out of the picture: the most important metaphysical point for Buddhists really isn’t how you characterize (or don’t characterize) ultimate truth. Rather, the key is to break down conventional truth, to see it as merely conventional. The mere is huge! It is essential that the Theravāda philosopher Buddhaghosa indeed uses “mere” (matta) to refer to the conventional. That mereness, that only-ness, is central to both his Theravāda Abhidhamma and to Madhyamaka: the recognition that the conventional is only conventional, is what liberates us! The endless metaphysical debates in Buddhism are an answer to the question of: well, if reality as we normally understand it isn’t ultimately real, then what is? But that question is parasitic on an existing and more important answer, that medium-sized dry goods like chariots and persons and onions are not ultimately real, that they are mere, and that that mereness matters.
All of that, in turn, answers an important question asked by Buddhologist Tom Tillemans in his “Madhyamaka Buddhist Ethics”: “does the Madhyamaka anti-realist philosophy that all things are empty of intrinsic nature make any difference to discussions about what people ought to do and why?” (354) It doesn’t make an ethical difference in the context of Tillemans’s original question: that is, it doesn’t make a difference from other Buddhist schools. But it does make a big difference from non-Buddhist ways of seeing the world, in which the everyday things are real and we need to care about them.
The difference between emptiness and other Buddhist conceptions of ultimate truth doesn’t make a big practical difference. What does make a difference is recognizing that conventional truth is merely conventional, is unreal, illusory, in a really significant sense. Thus crucially, contra Chicago Buddhologist Dan Arnold, the Madhyamaka philosophy of Candrakīrti and Śāntideva is not “deference to the conventional”. For Madhyamakas as for other Buddhists, the conventional is not just mere, it is deeply flawed – something we need to loosen our attachment to.
To be not ultimate is to be essenceless, suffering, impermanent, impure – it is to be characterized by the four illusions at the heart of Candrakīrti’s ethical vision. That’s what it means to speak of ultimate truth at all, even if we then say (as Siderits and Arnold do) that “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”: it’s to see the conventional as merely conventional – as Buddhaghosa says, despite claims to the contrary. The conventional self is actually no self, conventional happiness is actually suffering, the conventionally permanent is actually impermanent, the conventionally pure is actually impure.
Now there is something important that the Sideritses and Arnolds see about the Madhyamaka Buddhist perspective: namely that in Madhyamaka there’s something inert about ultimate truth. Nothing happens ultimately; the action is in conventional, it’s where we can actually do stuff, can actually be liberated. But the Madhyamaka point is that you need to see conventional differently – not merely seeing it as not-ultimate, which can sound like the correct seeing doesn’t make much difference, but as impermanent, non-self/essenceless, suffering. (Again, that part holds true for Theravāda Abhidhamma and for Madhyamaka, and very likely for Yogācāra as well.) The presence (or presence-absence, whatever) of ultimate truth means that you can no longer see conventional truth the way you normally would have.
So I realize my biggest problem with Siderits and Arnold isn’t with their catchy line “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”, per se. There is a certain way in which that claim is a reasonable way to characterize Madhyamaka. What’s absolutely wrong is to then say, as Siderits does, that that claim does little to liberate us! However you characterize the ultimate truth – even if it’s in terms of saying that there is no ultimate truth – seeing the ultimate truth as it is, and seeing the conventional in a way that is broken down rather than merely accepting the conventional in the way it appears to us, is central to getting liberated. That is what prajñā – the liberating metaphysical insight – is. It is right view, the correct seeing that gets you out of suffering.
The link in this sentence is broken: „And that’s on the point I discussed last time: namely that what really matters in Buddhist metaphysics isn’t so much the nature of the ultimate.“
Thank you for catching that! It should be fixed now.
Thank you for this insightful post. Is this why the Buddha rejected the concept of the self — regarded by many other philosophical schools of his time as the ultimate reality and the object of liberating knowledge — in the first place? As some scholars have suggested based on studies of the early Buddhist texts, the Buddha was not denying the self in an ontological sense, but rather pointing out that the question of its existence is irrelevant (and perhaps unknowable). If the aim of meditative practice is to perceive the deceptive nature of conventional reality, recognising it as impermanent, dependently arisen, and the source of suffering, then the pursuit of some alternative ultimate truth, such as a self beyond the conventional, would only distract from this task. Perhaps, then, the emphasis on no-self in the early texts functioned as a kind of upaya: a skillful means to turn attention away from the futile search for the self and redirect it toward the immediate reality of one’s lived experience, where true benefit lies? This also explains the diversity of views on the metaphysical status of ultimate truth that arose in later traditions: since the Buddha made no definitive metaphysical claims about this, it was easy to extrapolate various divergent views based on what he did say. But the Buddha’s own concern, which, as you suggest, is reflected in all Buddhist schools, was not, it seems, to establish the nature of ultimate reality, but to shift the telos of contemplative practice from the pursuit of an ultimately existent self to a direct, penetrative, moment-by-moment understanding of our ordinary, conventional experience, which is the only thing that can lead to the end of suffering.
I don’t think the Buddha ever said the question of the self’s existence is irrelevant. In the suttas, he did say there were some metaphysical questions that were irrelevant, that tend not to edification – but the self was never one of them. Liberation requires recognizing that the self is only conventionally real, in order to shed attachment to it.
So we come to the stand-off on Buddhist studies. Can anyone now know what the Buddha really taught or thought, given that the record we have was compiled long after the living memory had faded? What Surabhi offers is nicely stated, and does capture rather well the kind of understanding that emerges from stody of early Buddhist texts. Yet for all that, marked by foreign terms like upaya and telos, marking the contemporary effort to construct interpretation, which can never be the lived experience to be interpreted.
And Amod does reach beyond such limitations simply by asking after what is common to all the traditions. Then again, since they all derive from the sangam where the pitakas or baskets of the lore were first recited, surely depended on how it was organized, which evidently involved sanskrit-speaking scholars who were concerned to distance themselves from the Hindu discourse on the atman. What that might mean for contemporary discussions about self is another matter. Here I am mindful of the example of Socrates, who thought one should certainly not take the self to be indestructible, or indeed to be taken for granted, as it really needs our care: if no more that a capacity for truth, still vulnerable to deceptions and delusions.
What I’m missing here is the direct experience of conventional expectations cracking up in face of the Buddha’s disarming ways, typically in gales of laughter. People seeking to join a following typically seek to make sense of it by gauging something of the leader’s motiives, aims, methods or capabilities. And one may well assume that people often sought to engage the Buddha in ways designed to reveal such traits. But his answers were always simpler, more immediate and practical than expected. There, I must say it’s the Zen tradition that speaks to me, of just Zen flesh, Zen bones: the living company of monks that the Buddha did care for.
And for Surabhi s perspective, that leaves the thought that the Buddha’s self or individual personality did not matter for his role as caring leader, and should not detain us in fruitless speculation. Nor do our own manifold limitations have to mattet for our efforts to contribute, if we can but leave them be as mere appearances, the garment of flesh and bones, which is eminently disposable. To get in this way round to the endemic problem of individualism is valuable to me.
I should really say Yogic, rather than Hindu, for the large presence around Buddha of Jains and Ajivikas. Jains around Mahavira are often mentioned in early Jain scriptures with their Vedic gotras, highlighting their status as Brahmins, but not of course as Hindus!
In the matter of atman as self, I’m thinking not of the early Upanishads from the end of the Vedic eras, but rather the later Adyatma discourse on spiritual fitness (jitindriya) which actually dominated the discussions recorded in the Mokshadharma. Not well known now but still important for understanding the yoga commentary and yoga Upanishads. The initial impact of Samkhya was blunted by Adhyatma, and gave way to new speculations on cosmic evolution. Hence Sankara’s return to the early Upanishads in the spirit of revival, which ironically bought him closer to Buddhism!