Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly
An illuminating study.
Book Description
The doctrine of the two truths--conventional and ultimate--evolved as early Buddhists struggled to reconcile apparent contradictions within the collected sayings of the Buddha. Over time, the teachings on the two truths have taken their place at the heart of the Buddhist view of reality. Buddhist philosophers have made them central to the elaboration of an abhidharma, a "higher teaching" that explains how the mind apprehends and misapprehends the world. It is through the two truths that we understand how mind attaches itself to objects having no intrinsic existence, thereby creating suffering. Understood as a teaching on reality as opposed to merely a linguistic distinction, the doctrine played a key role for the followers of Mahayana in articulating the essential differences between their own view and what they called the Hinayana view-especially in defining the central ideas of selflessness and emptiness. Echoes from an Empty Sky, for the first time, eschews an exclusively Mahayana standpoint for the exploration of the two truths in order to examine the doctrine in the context of the Hinayana.
