Two Levels on Which the Same World Can Be True

Buddhist philosophy distinguishes two levels of truth rather than treating every statement as either simply true or simply false. Conventional truth, sometimes called relative or provisional truth, is the level at which ordinary claims about tables, persons and events hold good, the shared, workable account of the world that everyday language and experience present. Ultimate truth is what remains once that conventional picture is analyzed down to its foundations, and different schools describe what is found there differently. The distinction, associated above all with the philosopher Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka school he founded in the early centuries of the common era, is not meant to declare conventional truth simply false or illusory. A table is genuinely useful to sit at and genuinely serves the purpose a table serves, and Buddhist teachers have generally insisted that conventional truth must be respected on its own level rather than dismissed. What ultimate truth denies is that the table, or any other conventionally real thing, possesses a fixed, independent essence underneath its conventional existence. The two truths are therefore presented as two ways of speaking about one world rather than as two separate worlds, a distinction meant to let Buddhist philosophy affirm the reality of ordinary experience while still teaching that nothing within it exists independently.