Gorampa on the Objects of Negation: Arguments for Negating Conventional Truths

A Buddhist reconfiguration of John Hick's pluralistic hypothesis: a Madhyamaka perspective

“…The founder of the Tibetan Gelug school, Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), interprets Nāgārjuna to be saying that we should avoid the ‘metaphysical commitments of both essentialism and nihilism’ (Thakchöe (2007), 97, and see Tsongkhapa (2006)) 7 . To take emptiness to be a reality exempt from dependent co-arising ( pratītyasamutpāda ), and to take emptiness to be ultimately real while taking everything else to be merely conventionally real, would be, as Tsongkhapa puts it, to fall into both extremes simultaneously.…”

“…This is a teaching that is usually traced back to the earliest strata of Buddhism, although different Buddhist traditions have understood and employed the distinction in diverse ways. The core idea is that there is a principled distinction between truth about the ultimate ( paramārtha-satya ) and truth about conventional reality ( saṃvṛti-satya ) (for an excellent discussion, see Thakchöe (2007)). This led early Buddhists, particularly those in the Abhidharma tradition, to talk about two ways in which statements can be true, or two perspectives – one ultimate and one conventional – from which reality can be described.…”

“…Each side of the duality is not distinct from the other, but intermingles with it in a most intimate way’ (Priest (2018), 124) 12 . As Tsongkhapa interprets this relation, the two truths are ‘ontologically identical but conceptually distinct’ (Thakchöe (2007), 17) and neither can be reduced to the other ( ibid ., 2). This standpoint of both supposing and suspending claims about ultimate truth deconstructs śūnyatā as the ground, source, or external reality of phenomenal forms.…”