QUESTION
Venerable Robina,
I hope you remain well.
During a recent teaching we began exploring the nature of reality, trying to understand the difference between conventional reality and ultimate reality.
Am I on track in my thinking? Relative reality is based upon our perception of the world, via our senses and all of our previous lifetimes. As such, there is no “absolute” relative reality as all creatures experience the world in a unique way which is influenced by their unique afflictive emotions. Ultimate reality is not impacted by afflictive emotions.
Therefore, to glimpse ultimate reality we must be able to see, address, and eventually remove our afflictive emotions. Removal of afflictive emotions seems largely dependent upon our intention when thinking, acting or speaking as best illustrated by the story of the man Buddha murdered.
To remove afflictive emotions requires us to create causes and conditions that allow us to see our intentions, address and eventually remove negative intentions. This seems very much like your garden metaphor regarding weeds and vegetables. To create the necessary causes and conditions it seems we need to understand our intentions regarding how our thoughts, our speech and actions can be of benefit to others.
To understand what would be of benefit to others we need to be focused on their needs, not focused on ourselves. To help us be focused on others and not ourselves, we need mind training so that we can sustain focus on others. This is the purpose of meditation and the purpose of our work.
With profound gratitude and humility,
M
ANSWER
Dear M:
What you say sounds fine but you haven’t actually said what you think conventional and ultimate reality are.
Our work on the path to buddhahood, which you roughly outline, needs to be divided into two main approaches: wisdom and compassion: the two wings of the bird.
Investigating conventional and ultimate reality is the work of the wisdom wing: establishing what exists and how they exist. Then you have the compassion wing: bodhichitta etc.
So: conventional and ultimate:
We first must establish that a thing, a person, an event, etc., exists by defining it and then establishing that it fits its definition: that flat-bottomed clay container does indeed hold my tea. That’s the conventional reality of the cup. The shorthand for this level of existence of the cup: dependent arising: it exists in dependence upon various factors.
Then we have to use logic and analysis to investigate how it doesn’t exist as a cup from its own side. We have to discover that there is not one atom of any tea-holder there; not one atom of a cup that exists without depending upon various factors. That’s the ultimate reality of the cup. The shorthand for this level of existence of the cup: emptiness.
These are the two truths.
Right now we have the two extreme views: when we hear that the cup is empty, we throw the baby out with the bathwater and think there’s no cup at all: nihilism.
Then we hear that there is a conventional cup, we grasp at it as a real cup from its own side: eternalism.
These two extreme views are deep in the bones of our being.
What we need to understand is that these two don’t contradict: in fact, they are two ways of describing the reality of the cup.
We’re moving in the right direction when we can begin to understand, even intellectually, that when we think about the dependent-arising cup, we immediately know that means it’s empty of existing from its own side, and when we think about how the cup is empty of existing from its own side, we immediately know that means it exists conventionally, as a dependent-arising cup.
They exist together: you can’t have one without the other.
As Buddha says in the Heart Sutra: “Form is empty, emptiness is form; form is nothing other than emptiness and emptiness is nothing other than form.”
In other words, you can’t possibly have the emptiness of a cup without a dependent-arising cup; the emptiness of the cup exists right there on the conventional cup.
Finally, when we’re a buddha, we’ll cognize these simultaneously.
Love,
Robina