The Case for the Conventional

Humanity is in a crisis, quite a few, in fact: global inequality, racial and ethnic conflict, the alarming rate of climate change, and a pervasive mistrust of the institutions that inform and organize our lives. On top of these multiple social, political, and spiritual crises, we face a deep epistemological crisis, doubting our ability to distinguish valid knowledge from fantasy and false imagination.

We might see our way through this, though, if we approach it from the point of view of a popular 1967 Donovan song lyric: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” This phrase—attributed to a famous 8th-century Chan teacher, Qingyuan Xingsi, but dating from turn-of-the-millennium Buddhist India—epitomizes the transition from simple forms of realism, or articulate kinds of essentialism, into a thoroughgoing deconstructive stage, from which one may emerge older and wiser, leaving the extremes of essentialism and nihilism behind and realizing and appreciating the conventional nature of “truth.” In short, a truth is not the Truth but is a “truth.” How does this apply to our contemporary condition?

Most of humanity has long been stuck in an untenable and ultimately incoherent view that the world is populated by independent entities—subjects and objects—each possessing inherent characteristics. We have gradually come—belatedly and uncomfortably—to recognize how unworkable essentialism is on many levels and have at least conceptually deconstructed some of its most egregious manifestations. But it is easy to get stuck at this point, in thrall to the thrill of negation and left on the brink of nihilistic despair: If there are no absolutes, we fear, then there is no truth, meaning, or morals. As Dostoevsky poignantly asked in his novel The Brothers Karamazov: If God is dead, is everything permitted? The Buddhists respond with a resounding “No!” In lieu of all these untenable absolutes, what we need are conventional remedies. It is possible, indeed imperative, Buddhists argue, to recognize conventional cause and effect in the conventional world to solve conventional problems with conventional tools that are appropriate and applicable to the problems at hand.

This is not just an “academic” question. Essentialist notions are not only logically incoherent, but the environmental, social, and emotional turmoil that grasping onto essentialized identities instigates in our interconnected world has become a continuing source of suffering and strife. Arguably, such thinking permeates the multiple crises we face. A century and a half after Darwin, many of us still see ourselves as a species set apart from all others, indeed set apart from the rest of the biological world. We are sojourners in a fallen, disenchanted world—or so our therapists report. We think we can interfere with ecological systems at every level without harmful consequences—or so our industrial and agricultural practices suggest. We imagine we possess inherent racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural identities, hermetically set apart from one another—or so our social practices indicate. All this is simply unsustainable.

In response to these incoherencies and their deleterious consequences, modern disciplines, both the sciences and the humanities, have over the last century or so been engaged in a multipronged critique of essentialism. We see this in biology, in the shift from Aristotle’s fixed species essences to Darwin’s evolutionary biology. We see it in economics and ecology, where analyses of interconnected, dynamic networks replace static models of centralized command and control. We see it in psychology and neuroscience, where experts agree that there is no essential entity we could call a “self,” nor any neurological locale for such a thing. Identities, they agree, are constructs from start to finish. And we see this in the social sciences, where one of the most liberating—and often unwelcome—insights has been the recognition that all social categories are also constructs, forged to provide benefits and belonging to some but imposed by threats or violence on others. Last, the trenchant analyses of historicism, applied to religion and its claims to absolute truth, have torn back the veil, revealing it as yet another human construct—necessary, perhaps, useful, no doubt, but a construct nonetheless. The truth, we now realize, is not the Truth we imagined it to be.

But if we stop at the deconstruction of all the constructs that have given so many a sense of order and security (albeit often on the backs of those who have neither), if we merely deconstruct all the idealizations we have worked so hard to construct, we may be left in a nihilistic lurch, unsure what is real or true, or whom or what to believe. We cannot just stop at the liberating insight that a truth is not a Truth, for then it would be tempting to conclude, à la Ivan Karamazov, that if something is constructed, this necessarily entails that it is invalid or untrue. This is the fatal misstep: It is not logical to say that the moon is not real just because we now see that the finger pointing to the moon is constructed.

Mahayana Buddhists have been down this long and winding road before and have much to say about the next step: the affirmation of conventional truth, of conventional teachings. Mahayana philosophers clearly saw not only that the ultimate truth cannot be taught without conventional truth but also that a one-sided emphasis on the deconstructive power of emptiness can strip us of reliable tools for analyzing and understanding our complex world, leaving us stranded without the means to articulate and share such insights.

The lack of absolute, objective knowledge, they argue, need not lead to the moral nihilism or skepticism that Dostoevsky feared. Absolute objectivity in our postquantum age may be (to quote Emily Dickinson) a “sham.” But from the Mahayana perspective, since reality is ultimately inexpressible, all we ever have are conventional categories—some better or worse, some more or less effective than others, but none of them are ultimate categories. The challenge in our “post-everything” age, then, is to move through the ever-unfinished deconstructive moment and work to formulate whatever appropriate, rigorous tools and methods are necessary for the multiple tasks at hand. We need to be very intentional in the conventional categories we collectively construct. How so?

Keeping in check our propensities to essentialize is a collective endeavor, indeed a collective imperative, a kind of universal peer review, as it were.

First, we clearly need to keep exorcising the “ghost in the machine,” the specter of unchanging essences that continues to haunt our intellectual lives. While the various sciences and social sciences have been doing precisely this over the last century or so, on all accounts our innate propensities toward reification remain fully functioning (or so argue cognitive scientists Bloom, Gazzaniga, and Metzinger). And they continue to rear their multiple heads, Hydra-like, whenever we let our guard down. This is not Buddhist dogmatism; it is conceptual criticism: As their trenchant analyses made clear, unchanging essences do not denote anything functional in a world of causal flux. We can leave such notions to those who have given up on the world of the living and proceed to better understand the recurrent patterns of interaction (the dependent arising) in the world we actually live in—such as have been devised, revised, and disseminated in our modern disciplines. Keeping in check our propensities to essentialize is a collective endeavor, indeed a collective imperative, a kind of universal peer review, as it were.

Moreover, in our modern era, the traditional Mahayana idea of two truths—that while everything is ultimately “empty” of its own unchanging, essential nature, we still need conventional tools to alleviate the many kinds of afflictions plaguing us all—virtually calls out for multiple modes of conventional truth. And this is what we see in our modern disciplines: the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Despite having nearly unanimously rejected notions of absolute truth or unchanging essences—once considered the very definition of truth—each discipline has nevertheless developed its own methods for producing knowledge, its own rigorous criteria for assessing its validity, and verify that validity through application and adjudication by experts in their respective fields. These provide functional, pragmatic kinds of conventional knowledge that remain open to critical revision and reformulation without making untenable, specious claims to absolute truth. As the great philosopher of science Karl Popper concluded, “You don’t have to have finality to have knowledge.”

This may be a hard pill to swallow for the absolutists who abound in our world, but in another light—in a Mahayana light—it is their saving grace. The affirmation of conventional truths may help us more deeply appreciate the living truths of our inherited cultural and religious traditions, without accepting their now untenable and exclusive claims to authority. As a global community, we need to find a way between the two “extremes” of assuming, on the one hand, that religious ideas and symbols are literally and timelessly true—despite being expressed in metaphorical language and prescientific world-views—and on the other hand, the conviction that if these ancient teachings are not literally true according to contemporary criteria, then they must be literally false, as if these two extremes—both wedded to the same narrow, univocal understanding of language, truth, and symbol—were the only possibilities. To slightly oversimplify, the fundamentalists and scientific materialists are both stuck in the same literalist fallacy. This impasse is also unsustainable.

What would our Mahayanists, or even most Buddhists, suggest? That we seek a middle way between these two extremes and employ the multitude of conventional truths we already have in abundance. This requires recognizing the relative validity and utility of multiple disciplines, traditions, and cultures, each with its own standards, norms, and practices, couched in compelling modes of expression that require effort to understand deeply. We know better than to read a repair manual, a book of poetry, or a blurb on a cereal box with the same expectations or criteria of truth, beauty, or utility. We need to bring such basic intuitions to bear when reading religious texts as well.

Poetry, literature, and art all convey recurrent human truths, albeit expressed in constantly changing forms, that we seldom mistake for universally valid scientific formulas. Religious languages, too, convey the distilled wisdom and compassion of human experience through the centuries, yet are often couched in symbolic images and stories that require their own distinctive modes of interpretation, more akin to poetry and art than to science or mathematics. And these continue to serve incalculable human needs, ever undetectable by Sir Francis Bacon’s calculus of mass in motion. It is both foolish and self-defeating for us to read such texts as if they were simply outdated scientific treatises, thereby sacrificing our vital inherited traditions at the altar of the jealous god of quantification.

We see a similar conceptual cul-de-sac in our search for singular personal and group identities. The crucial—and liberating—insight that identities are constructed also threatens to undermine all the positive functions that personal and group identities provide in our complex, confusing world. A common response to the existential facts of impermanence and lack of essence is to try to forge a fixed locus of identity that, we imagine, provides coherence and security. Ironically, this generates further insecurity as we fail to recognize that all such identities are cobbled together—like the conjured images at a magic show—out of bits and pieces by the side of the road and are thus bound to fall apart sooner or later.

Maintaining such precarious constructs requires constant care and attention—as well as aversion toward contradictory facts, feelings, and ideas. Accordingly, anxieties about “others” permeate the conscious and unconscious minds of both individuals and groups. Since we are all social, cultural, and linguistic beings, our underlying assumptions and anxieties are widely shared even when, especially when, they remain unacknowledged. In response, we reinforce the belief that our tradition, our culture, our religion, is the one “true” tradition, which must be protected against all others. Belief is “a beautiful armor but makes for the heaviest sword,” John Mayer sings, but “we’re never gonna stop the war if belief is what we’re fighting for.” No one makes these critical points more clearly than the Buddhists: Protecting constructed identities as if they were immutable realities is not only futile—it is a recipe for endless conflict. This, too, is unsustainable.

Yet the idea that we all ought to jettison our cultural and social bearings for some rootless cosmopolitanism has never been a viable option for most people. If cultural pluralism means that no culture has any truth or value whatsoever—if it stops at the stage of deconstruction—then most will reject that pluralism and opt for a tragic return to their imagined communities—and to endless strife. Fundamentalism and ethnonationalism, we see, have the same midwife.

Protecting constructed identities as if they were immutable realities is not only futile—it is a recipe for endless conflict.

All this is avoidable. The Mahayana sutras state that the taste of emptiness—that all phenomena ultimately lack unchanging essences—pervades all Buddhist teachings whatsoever, despite being formulated differently for different levels of receptivity and understanding. In this vein, we might say that our modern sciences also tell us—if we could hear them clearly—that our understanding is richer, more robust, and more functional when we recognize the constructed, conditioned nature of all phenomena and channel our acute awareness of each other’s angst, along with our analytic abilities and empathetic impulses, toward the alleviation of all suffering. Most importantly, this also suggests that the same spiritual core underlies the coded messages of love and wisdom in all our multiple traditions, if we have the nuanced ears to hear them, liberated from our self-imposed shackles of dry literalism and a narrow locus of self-concern. As my biblicist colleague says, “The Garden of Eden is true, but it didn’t happen.”

In this Mahayana affirmation of the conventional validity of all traditions and cultures—shorn of their essentialism and exclusivity—is the ongoing expression of the “mundane wisdom acquired after our nonconceptual” apprehension that reality is beyond all definitive formulation. At that point, it is said that bodhisattvas return to the world expressing themselves through conventional means, using the plurality of our conventional discourses and shared constructs, to lead others to the perfect realization of that inexpressible, ever-present, resplendent reality underlying all phenomena—like the next Buddha, Maitreya the Loving One, who sits so patiently waiting for us—calling on us—to lose our last bonds of selfhood.

As Mahayana repeatedly emphasizes, our entire social and cultural lives depend on such shared constructs—for we are always “mutually influencing each other” in the ongoing construction of our collective worlds, whether we are aware of it or not. And it is these lives, these traditions, these cultures, here and now, that we need to continually clarify, rectify, and revivify. Our challenge, then, is not to lament the loss of some imagined objectivity we never had—which in our postquantum world is past plausibility—but to intentionally and compassionately construct the worlds we need for the benefit of all beings. How we do this is an open-ended invitation: The Buddha is said to have taught 84,000 teachings to ameliorate the 84,000 afflictions from which we suffer. We have choices.

♦

Adapted from Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters. © 2023 by William S. Waldron, reprinted with permission from Wisdom Publications.