Form is empty; emptiness is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is also not other than emptiness.' `For all things and events, conventional truth and ultimate truth are interconnected. We cannot posit one without the other.' Explain how you interpret these two statements. It is understood that the concealer truths and ultimate truths are mutually exclusive, that you cannot have one as well as the other. If we have a conventional truth, then it cannot be an ultimate truth. This causes a possible problem with the quote cited from the Heart Sutra – form is empty; emptiness is form. If form is the conventional truth, then here it is saying that such concealer truths are empty of inherent existence. In the Madhyamaka Prasangika school ultimate truth and emptiness are synonymous, which would seemingly create a problem with the logic – how can it be that emptiness is both an ultimate truth as well as a concealer truth? Emptiness is no other than form; form is also not other than emptiness. Here it is clearly saying that emptiness, the noninherent existence of phenomenon, is also form which implies it is both a concealer truth and an ultimate truth at the same time. There seems to be a problem. The lines from the Heart Sutra are embodiments of the second part of the question, that all things and events, as conventional truth and ultimate truth are interconnected some way. However it is reasonable to understand mutual exclusion of both truths given a very simple example. I take my “I” to be inherently existent, because I grasp at its permanence and solidity – to my mind, I exist from my own side. This is the nature of my suffering. Avoiding nilihism, the “I” as I see it and conceptually grasp it within my experience does not exist as I understand – I am holding onto the wrong end of the existential dichotomy. The ultimate truth is hidden, concealed by the negation implied by the logical statement “I inherently exist as a fixed, permanent phenomenon on my own side.” A simple logical reversal would be that I do not inherently exist, and I am an impermanent phenomenon. This final statement would correctly imply my ultimate nature, and I no longer see myself conventionally (like its that easy! ). Sidebar
The notion of conventional and ultimate truth seems to be highly philosophical – how can it ever be applied to the Four Noble Truths, and indeed to alleviate the worlds suffering? Like many things in Buddhism thought, there are levels of meaning which offer deeper levels of insight and realizations. Conventional and ultimate truths seem like highbrow concepts that we could ignore and still reach nibbana. Permanence is an intrinsic atom of wrong view, yet it is the nature of what helps us survive. But a permanent wrong creates a single possibility, and then we cling to it, we fixate and grasp it. And as we narrow our experience to this single view, we exclude a wonderous tapestry of richer experience – the high fidelity reality is lost to our myopic lense of permanency.
If we were less solid, less fixed on our conceptions and our everyday experience, maybe, just maybe, we would become more flowing with the world around us, like a buttercup swaying in a summer breeze. Instead, our closed, rigid world view is built from the stanchions of how it should be, of how life is supposed to be in our world. Instead of embracing life with a fixed idea of what should be, what would it be like to be more accepting and open to the world as it, as it unfolds? Through mindfulness, if we regulate our experience such that when attachment arises, as soon as we become aware, we smile at it lovingly for all of the times it has helped you stay alive, but let it pass on by like the very moment itself. And when we let the attachment go, in its place is the high fidelity of what could be. Then, surely our hearts open and reach for the possibilities and move and sway in the continuum of our life, as the flowing buttercup in a summer breeze.
A conventional truth is itself an ultimate truth, for it is ultimately empty, itself a concept of an ignorant mind. We cannot discuss a conventional truth alone, for whatever it is we attribute its conventional nature, or better still, its concealer nature, we can therefore imply there is the other, the ultimate truth nature. My computer is a concealer truth, it has the conventional nature to it. But by definition, it also has the ultimate truth nature, it is just that that nature is excluded from all experience or understanding unless one endeavours to recover it within the mind. Thus conventional truth and ultimate truth are one entity or related concept. There is obstructive space and nonobstructive space. An obstructive space could be a house, but its very nature is that it obstructs nonobstructive space that was there previously. Remove the house, and there exists nonobstructive space – but we cannot see it while the house is present, we can only discover it through logic and analysis. In this example, the mind that apprehends the house sees the conventional truth. However the mind that sees the house as the obstruction to nonobstructive space sees the ultimate truth. So accordingly, the house is the same basis to analysing both the conventional truth and the ultimate truth – they are intrinsically linked, and it is not possible to posit one without the other. Whenever we apprehend a conventional truth within our minds, at the same moment in time and space there exists the ultimate nature of the same phenomenon, but we have to seek it. We use the same object with a different mind, and from that mind we apprehend one of the two truths. A mind that sees a house is a deluded mind, and it is a nondeluded mind that sees that the house hides nonobstructive space. In both cases the same object is used to achieve a different mind. The term isolate, which is a derivation of the latin term insula, which means to put aside ideas or feelings, is used to describe the two truths. When a mind experiences one truth, the mind sees only that truth with the loss of the other in that mind at that moment. The mind cannot experience both truths at the same time, because as has been mentioned, they are mutually exclusive. When the mind considers one truth, the associations and meanings attributed to its name conjure up ideas and conceptions within the mind relevant to that truth. At that very moment, one truth is held in the mind, while the other is put aside or excluded from the mental continuum. Yet crucially, at the very same instant, the ability to apprehend the other truth exists by changing the isolate. Objects of knowledge have both truth natures, as has been lightly covered previously. A cup has a conventional truth nature and an ultimate truth nature. The cup is a conventional truth, but it has the nature of ultimate truth, because there is in hidden truth that the cup doesn’t
actually exist the way that I perceive it. Its true mode of existence is ultimate truth, and this is why the conventional truth by definition is excluding something. A stationary car is a car that is static and unmoving, that is how we perceive it. Yet at the very same time what the mind overlooks about the stationary car is that it has the nature to be a moving vehicle – you cannot have one without the other (assuming the car is fully functional). This is a crude example of how a different, more concrete example has the two natures. The conventionality of the car is its stationary state, but its excluded reality is that the car is a moving vehicle. The car cannot be stationary and moving at the same time. So whenever our mind sees a stationary car, it does not see a moving car, and vice versa. The isolate in this example is the meaning behind the name of its state, rather than just a different name, but the analysis still holds. So now if we consider the Heart Sutra once again, we can look to understand just how interconnected form is to its emptiness. Form is empty, emptiness is form. Here it is saying that emptiness and form are profoundly linked, you cannot have one without the other. Any form, be it created physically or from the mind has arisen not on its own accord, and thus it is empty of inherent existence. Emptiness is form here very succinctly implies that to even consider an emptiness, we must therefore have form from which we can apprehend its emptiness of. How can we see the lack of inherent existence of a chair without having the chair? You cant. The chair lacks its inherent existence, and the very implication of a lack of inherent existence assumes something to which the statement applies – here are our isolates.