Buddhism’s ‘Two Truths’ doctrine sounds like a summation of its highest-level insights – a realisation reserved for the end of a life spent in practice, perhaps. Yet, the doctrine is introduced very early on, almost as a foundational teaching, not a final or ultimate one. There is a profound irony here: the doctrine teaches us that the ‘starting point’ and the ‘end goal’ are essentially intertwined. One truth is functional and ordinary, while the other is unbounded and ultimate. Both are equally true.
Buddhism’s two truths are not separate, but different ways of seeing. Conventional truth is conceptual; it is the language of labels and utility that allows us to navigate daily life. However, concepts can distort reality because they are inherently incomplete. Ultimate truth, by contrast, is perceptual and unfiltered – an experience of reality as it is, both ordinary and profound. Wisdom lies in seeing no incompatibility between the two. We may speak of ‘two truths’ to help our understanding, but in the end, there is only one reality.
To understand how these two perspectives coexist without cancelling each other out, we can look to the ‘Middle Way’ (Mādhyamaka) proposed by the second-century philosopher Nāgārjuna. He suggested that the appearance of the conventional world isn’t to be discarded, but rather is the very medium through which the ultimate is revealed. In other words, you don’t find the sacred by looking away from the mundane, but by looking more deeply into it.
Buddhism provides a pragmatic scaffold for engaging with the world. As the two truths progressively converge (for they must, because the distinction is pedagogical, not ontological), more and more falls away. This is perhaps the ultimate application of the parable of the raft used to cross the river. You leave it on the shore once you have crossed, lest it become a burden as you journey onwards into the high mountains. The metaphor stretches, but so must our concepts when we point toward the unbounded.
So when you arrive, you have left all of Buddhism’s doctrines behind. Convergence is a stripping away. Unbounded reality perhaps only begins where the ability to say anything about it at all runs out of steam. And yet it can be known directly, and an ordinary mind is all that you need. Critically, we need to let go of the hubris and closed-mindedness of ‘expertise’ and see reality with our original beginner’s mind (shoshin).
Different traditions circle this same insight in their own ways. Buddhism speaks of the collapse of the two truths into a single, unfiltered reality. Christian writers often describe something similar, though in a different idiom. C. S. Lewis (writing in the early 1940s), for instance, returns repeatedly to the idea that the divine is not distant but quietly present in the ordinary. In The Screwtape Letters, the senior demon (Screwtape) complains bitterly that the ‘Enemy’ keeps slipping into the patient’s everyday life – in small kindnesses, in simple pleasures, in moments of unguarded attention. The presence is always there, always available, and the tragedy (for Screwtape) is that humans keep stumbling into it despite themselves.
I see a parallel in universalism in its simplest form: not the claim that all doctrines are identical, but that when any tradition touches truth, it begins to rhyme with the others. The language differs, the metaphysics differ, the stories differ – but the recognition is the same. Not ‘Who are you?’ but a familiar recognition, ‘So it was you all the time.’ The ultimate is not elsewhere. It is what has been quietly shining through the ordinary from the beginning.
The ultimate reality, emptiness (śūnyatā), was never meant to imply a void. It doesn’t mean that nothing exists, but that nothing exists in the fixed, self-contained way we imagine. Everything – including ourselves – is contingent, relational, dependently arisen. And yet the world still appears, vivid and ordinary; what falls away is not the world, but our insistence that it be more solid than it is.
And whatever progress we imagine ourselves making, whatever glimpses or insights arise, they only ever point us back to this same immediacy. There is nowhere else to stand. Awakening isn’t a distant summit but a deepening into the present, a recognition that the sacred was never hidden. All traditions that touch truth converge here, not in abstraction but in directness – the quiet realisation that it was ‘you all the time,’ and that the only place reality ever reveals itself is right where we already are.
Two – Reflections
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