The Unspeakable Truth

In Buddhist philosophy one finds two or three levels of truth. The first level is the conventional truth, which is expressible in language. The second level is the ultimate truth or reality, which is not expressible in language. At most one can point to the ultimate reality by denoting it with the term "suchness" or possibly have an experience of it. The third truth is that these two truths are just aspects of a single encompassing, interpenetrating truth, though I will not be dealing with this possibility in this paper. I will, however, argue that the claim that the ultimate truth cannot be expressed in language or concepts is quite plausible and show how we encounter this problem of inexpressibility in many ordinary everyday experiences.

I will lay out the paper in the following manner. First, I will give a preliminary idea of what the conventional and ultimate truth are considered to be. Second, I will explicate the important role experience plays with regards to truth in order to understand how the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth arises. Lastly, I will briefly discuss further the ideas of convention, language and suchness.

The Two Truths

Conventional truth has to do with the truths of our everyday dealings with the world. These truths are usually provisional and practically specific depending on the situations we find ourselves in. Conventional truths depend on our interests, intentions and concepts.

Ultimate truth, on the contrary, is claimed to be the truth as reality is in itself. It is also commonly referred to as ultimate reality and one should take these terms as interchangeable. This may have to do with the role experience plays with attaining truth in Buddhism. The ultimate reality is described in the following way in The Awakening of Faith: "all things from the beginning transcend all forms of verbalization, description, and conceptualization and are, in the final analysis, undifferentiated, free from alteration, and indestructible"(447). So, the ultimate truth does not depend on our activities or conceptualizations and is undifferentiated or lacking in characteristics. If the ultimate reality had characteristics it would be differentiated and then concepts could be used to describe it, violating the claim that it is independent of our conceptualizations.

Additionally, this has the consequence that the ultimate truth cannot be expressed in language since concepts cannot be applied to what is undifferentiated. How can the ultimate reality be referred to? The term "suchness" comes into play here. This term does not describe, discriminate, or pick out any single aspect in any particular way. The term is used more like a label or name.

Experience and Truth

Having this backdrop, we can come to the role of experience in the originating of the two truths. Buddhists put a lot of emphasis on experiencing truths for oneself. One should not take things on authority, based on logical reasoning or because an eminent teacher tells you something is the case.

One of these experiences does seem to be what many today describe as a "mystical" state. This is a state of timelessness, vast expansiveness and undifferentiation. This experience seems to be what Buddhists have spoken about when they attempted to convey the notion of ultimate reality. It might be questionable whether the particular experience of the mystical state should be privileged as the only true experience of ultimate reality, but I will not be dealing with that here. It is important to realize that the inability to describe and communicate these experiences to those who have not had them also arises with our everyday experiences, which seems to make the claim that the ultimate truth is inexpressible in language more plausible.

We initially experience the world as a world filled with separated objects. We then come up with concepts and use words to name and describe these objects. It does not seem like concepts and language comes first. Although this is the case, we can also come up with new concepts and new ways to distinguish the reality we experience in accordance with our intentions and interests. In this sense, we can see reality in ways we previously did not see it as being before; this reveals the malleability of ordinary experience.

Even if we admit that we have little control over what objects we initially experience, we can use our knowledge of modern physics to see how we do not necessarily have to group objects the way we do. Why do we see certain objects as separate from ourselves? The immediate reason is because our nervous system does this for us, and even then we can create illusions so that we think we feel an inanimate plastic hand as belonging to us and other similar types of things.

Also, we experience objects as being relatively independent of ourselves because they do not come along with us. They are not hooked on to us. They are basically electro-magnetically neutral or not strong enough to attach themselves to us. We feel ourselves as being independent from the earth because gravity is weak and we can move around easily across the surface of the earth. Now that we have the knowledge that all that is keeping certain objects together is forces arranged in a certain way there is no reason for us to believe that they have any kind of intrinsic existence to be the way they are and we realize that we can group them any way we so choose.
Furthermore, even our physical conventions at least point to the idea of the ultimate emptiness of everything. With the quantum revolution the idea that all is ultimately interconnected seems to really have come into the mainstream of western physics. We see that we can no longer separate observation apparatus and observed because of the very way we now conceive the workings of the universe. Dualisms such as that between matter and energy have been broken down in relativity and with field theory we have an even more amorphously connected view of the relation of forces and particles. Lastly, we see an emergence of results detailing how the universe would have been vastly different if certain physical constants were slightly altered.

There are also ways in which we can alter our own perceptions of reality by either becoming aware of further distinctions or hiding certain distinctions. This becomes evident in vision like when we might find someone attractive we previously did not before or notice something in a text we never focused on before or in music. These experiences indicate that we have some control over what we perceive, and maybe that the "mystical" state of experiencing undifferentiation comes about by a greater degree of control through practicing mediation techniques or being suddenly knocked out of the ordinary mode of perception.

Take music for example. When you first hear a piece of music there might be several aspects you miss such as a slight harmonization or a subtle rhythm guitar in the background, but as you listen to the piece more you begin to hear more come out. It could also be the case that you're listening to a highly skilled piece of music and can only come to hear nuances and appreciate the music when an expert points them out to you.

Finally, we often come upon situations where we need to explain our experiences yet find it really tough to convey them to those who have never had such experiences. This could happen when attempting to explain the workings of a clock to someone who has never encountered one, with the foods that we eat or with the following example of ice.

Try imagining how you would explain what ice is to a person who has lived in a warm climate and has never had any experiences with any ice. To have any chance of conveying what ice is you would have to attempt to do it by appealing to experiences that the person who has never experienced ice has had. You could tell them that it was somewhat hard like a stone and yet wet like water on touch. You could attempt to say that it was cold like at nighttime in their coldest season, but try to get them to imagine it being colder than that. You might attempt explaining to them that ice is actually water and appeal to their experiences with grease congealing. No matter how many experiences they have had that you appeal to, there seems to be some ineffable character about experiences.

What one can take from all of these examples is that our ordinary experience of reality is somewhat malleable, depending on our intentions and focus. We create our conventions and truths based on these intentions and focal points. It is also interesting that as physicists have probed ever deeper into nature, they have been revealing an interconnected reality ever closer to the ultimate reality people have attempted to convey over the millennia. With meditation techniques such as one-pointedness or perception shattering techniques such as paradoxical sayings, koans or the good old fashioned Zen beating technique, people have been able to experience what is considered to be ultimate reality. They have a hard time describing this experience and often use negating words such as undifferentiated, indestructible, emptiness, etc.... It turns out that we also have the same problem when speaking about ordinary experiences, which seems to indicate that it's not a stretch to say that the ultimate truth cannot be expressed in words but must be experienced.

Conventions, Language and Suchness

One thing we notice about our conventions and the language we use is that they are constantly shifting over time and so is what we consider to be truth based on those conventions. This is put nicely in The Awakening of Faith: "All explanations by words are provisional and without validity, for they are merely used in accordance with illusions and are incapable of denoting suchness." The ultimate reality is supposed to be the pure undifferentiated, unchanging ground of existence and cannot be grasped with words because there is no differentiation for words to attach to.

At most we can use one word to point it out this oneness, this term being "suchness." The word is not really telling us anything substantial that we can grasp. There is no reason to look deeper into the meaning of this word. One will fail if one tried because this word is used to put an end to our conceptualization and verbalization as mentioned in The Awakening of Faith: "The term suchness is, so to speak, the limit of verbalization wherein a word is used to put an end to words.".

To conclude, putting an end to conceptualization is a way to have an experience of ultimate reality or realize the ultimate truth. Now that it seems plausible that the ultimate reality cannot be said in words, this essay seems to me to be an obstacle on the way to experiencing the ultimate truth. I shall end with saying "suchness."