Origins of the "double-truth"

[Steve Farmer]

Stephen Hodge writes:

> But the Buddhist concept of the two truths, certainly in its earlier
> forms, does not concern "reality" but rather modes of perception /
> conception and only very tangentially "reality".  To me it seems
> intrinsically different from the kind of "two truths" models you
> allude to.  Generally speaking, the Mahayana strategy for dealing with
> contradictions is dealt, rather with the terms "neyaartha"
> (provisional "truth") and niitaartha (definitive "truth").  Buddhists,
> on the whole are more concerned with epistemology tha[n] ontology
> although that did not stop some schools from dabbling in ontology and
> were severely criticized for such.

None of this is relevant to the main point of my post, which was
that scholastic bifurcations of concepts -- in this case,
pertinent to countless Eurasian variations of the "double-truth"
-- were driven by exegetical processes. This was true whether the
thousands of commentators from premodern Europe to Japan who
applied "double-truth" strategies to harmonize traditions claimed
that the dualistic concepts that those methods generated were
epistemological or ontological or something in between. The
exegetical processes that led to such distinctions were similar
cross-culturally in all scholastic traditions.

I wrote:

> You can find uses of the double-truth for similar reconciliative
> purposes in the Three-Treatise (San-lun) School of Chinese
> Buddhism....

S. Hodge responded:

> FYI:  Much of Chinese Buddhist interpretation can be seen as aberrant
> from an mainstream Indian Mahayana Buddhist perspective.

Although you snipped them out, my original post also pointed to
extensive examples from Islamic and European thought, in which
Buddhist contact could hardly be a factor. Many other examples
could also be given from Daoist or Shinto or Jewish scholastic
traditions. The point is that there is no need to point to a
privileged tradition (e.g., Buddhism) to explain the "double
truth," which existed in countless variant forms in Eurasian
manuscript traditions.

Nor is there much mystery why such devices were used all over the
premodern world as reconciliative devices. The brain has only so
many ways to "harmonize" or "reconcile" conflicting concepts; the
invention of different conceptual levels (of reality or
perception -- your choice) for these conflicts to inhabit was one
of the most common of those strategies. We in fact know quite a
bit about how conflicting data like this are processed in
neocortex -- ending in the generation of "higher" and "lower"
concepts related in some analogical fashion.

To put this another way -- along the way hijacking a famous
phrase from E.R. Dodds: There are only so many methods "to
reconcile irreconcilable texts." The repeated use of these
methods in harmonizing manuscript traditions had critical
religious and philosophical implications. To generalize Patricia
Mumme's point about Indian metaphysics (in Timm 1992): In
premodern thought, there is a lot to be said about hermeneutical
horses preceding metaphysical carts.

saf