A COMMENT ON "THE WAY OF THE DIALETHEIST: CONTRADICTIONS IN BUDDHISM,"

BY YASUO DEGUCHI, JAY L. GARFIELD, AND GRAHAM PRIEST

Author(s): Brook Ziporyn
Source: Philosophy East and West , JULY 2013, Vol. 63, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: BUDDHISM
AND CONTRADICTION (JULY 2013), pp. 344-352
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press

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 A COMMENT ON "THE WAY OF THE DIALETHEIST:

CONTRADICTIONS IN BUDDHISM," BY YASUO

DEGUCHI, JAY L. GARFIELD, AND GRAHAM PRIEST

Brook Ziporyn
Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion and Comparative Thought, Divinity
School, University of Chicago; Department of Philosophy, National University of
Singapore
ziporyn@uchicago.edu

The question at issue in "The Way of the Dialetheist: Contradictions in Buddhism" is

how we are to construe the very common occurrence of seemingly paradoxical
propositions in Mahâyâna Buddhist literature. Several suggestions are made. They
might be meant only as upâyas that are not themselves ultimately true but serve a
therapeutic function of undermining an attachment to non-contradictory conven-
tional truths, or to the law of non-contradictions as the canon of conventional truth,
mistakenly taken for the canon of all forms of truth. This could mean that these con-
tractions are a critique of conventional truth and its canons, and of the law of non-
contradiction, which would amount to a plea for a new definition of "truth." Another
suggestion is that these statements are themselves meant to be taken as true, but true
in a sense that is incomprehensible. Here, too, what is at issue is the suggestion of a
new canon of truth or a revised conception of what "truth" actually means. Deguchi,
Garfield, and Priest reject this suggestion, arguing that the contradictions in Mahâyâna
literature are neither mere metaphors nor mere therapeutic devices, nor again a re-
jection of rationality, asserting instead that the contradictory statements are meant to
be (1) rationally comprehensible and (2) descriptions of facts, and thus true state-
ments. In fact I agree with both of these conclusions, but in my opinion both remain
radically understated in the Deguchi, Garfield, and Priest discussion. In my view,
these claims become supportable only if we invoke a specifically Tiantai understand-
ing of the roles of upäya in Buddhism and the possible definitions of "truth." I believe
this will also enable us to answer the question of how reductio ad absurdum argu-
ments can be understood as having any force in spite of the acceptance of self-
contradiction as a characteristic of true statements.

What Is Truth ?

Actually, for a redefinition of truth that will resolve many of these worries we don't
need to go all the way to Tiantai. Already in the basic proto -upäya doctrine of early
Buddhism - for example in the parable of the raft and the parable of the arrow - we
have a strictly delimited sense of what it will mean to call statements true within the
context of Buddhist doctrine. Buddhism is, I claim, a thousand percent pragmatic
in its approach to truth, and the closest approximations in Western thought to the

344 Philosophy East & West Volume 63, Number 3 July 201 3 344-352
© 201 3 by University of Hawai'i Press

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Buddhist attitude are to be found in American Pragmatism on the one hand (and
perhaps the explicitly soteriological doctrine of truth and the range of the knowable
in Spinoza, often mistaken for a paradigmatic case of dogmatic correspondence-
theory rationalism) and in an unlikely bedfellow, the German Idealism of Schelling
and Hegel, on the other.1
The question of what kinds of statements may count as legitimate is the only
standard of truth in Buddhism, and this is thoroughly determined by the overriding
soteriological aims of the entire Buddhist tradition. Every statement and every prac-
tice are justified solely in terms of their utility for the goal of diminishing suffering.
That means that both Buddhist epistemology and Buddhist ethics are thoroughgo-
ingly pragmatic: what is true is what is conducive to ending suffering, and what is
good is action that is conducive to ending suffering. In Pali Buddhism, we may con-
ceive these along the lines delineated in the parable of the raft: what helps one get
across is good, is useful, is valid, is to be clung to for the duration of one's journey.
What is on the other shore is neither true nor untrue, neither good nor bad; all such
terms pertain only to the intermediate realm of what is relevant for the goal of ending
suffering - and of course this means mainly Buddhist doctrines and practices. This is
the realm where it is meaningful to speak of good and bad or true and false, and in
which one is pragmatically faced with a choice between them. True is different from
false, as clinging to the raft is different from sinking. But this has nothing to do with
contradiction; it has to do with utility in the goal of ending suffering, which is ac-
complished by ending attachment to desire and definitive views about reality.
It should be noted as well that the endeavor to end suffering is itself something
one may choose to embark upon or not; Buddhism is good and true only to the extent
that this is one's goal. It may be that all goals can be (not "must be") reduced to this
goal - all human activity can be seen (not "must be seen") as various attempts to re-
duce suffering in one way or another. But this is different from asserting that some-
thing that is useful for this goal is true or good outside the context of having adopted
this goal explicitly.
When this model develops in the hands of Nāgārjuna to the full-fledged Two
Truths model, we have the same structure expanded and articulated with greater
precision. Here, too, "conduciveness to ending suffering" is the sole criterion for
"truth." But in Conventional Truth, Nāgārjuna includes two things: ordinary speech
(I, you, cause, effect, world, time, entities, etc.) and specifically Buddhist doctrines
(no-self, nirvāna , suffering, dependent co-arising, etc.). The criterion for including
both of these under the heading of "truth" is exactly the same: nof that they correspond
to an external reality or can be consistently unpacked without self-contradiction, but
that speaking and acting in accordance with them is conducive to the ending of suf-
fering. Without ordinary language, it is impossible to give instructions on how to end
suffering, to point out the problem of suffering, to point out the doctrines and prac-
tices of Buddhism, even those that contradict them. Hence, Nāgārjuna tells us that
the Buddha preached both self and not-self, both for the same reason: they are neces-
sary for giving instructions on how to end suffering, and are skillfully deployed in
such a way as to lead one to do so.

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 Then there is ultimate truth. Ultimate truth cannot be spoken or conceptualized;
it can only be experienced: it is the end of suffering itself, liberation of mind, rather
than any cognitive information about the world. Liberation of mind is not allegiance
to any picture of how the world is. In fact, it is described only negatively, precisely as
the lack of any identifiable predicates. The possibility of a definitive right view about
reality, the bare "being so" of any state of affairs, falls with the belief in self-nature.
For "being-so" would have to be something that is warranted by the state of affairs
itself, acting as a single cause, and this is just what the denial of self-nature denies.
The state of affairs would be the cause; the fact that the state of affairs is thus and so,
is unambiguously one way or another, would be the effect - a one-to-one causality
that is definitely excluded by all Buddhist theory from the Abidhamma on. "This cup
is red" means "this cup alone is the cause of the redness attributed to the cup."
Emptiness really means simply ontological ambiguity - not the usual epistemo-
logica! ambiguity, where we assume that in itself each thing is simply what it is but
our perception of it is vague or admits of multiple readings, but, rather, ontological
ambiguity, where any possible something is in and of itself incapable of simply being
one way or another to the exclusion of other ways, where to be is to be ambiguous.
Definitive views about reality - that any given thing simply is one way or another, is
this or that, in isolation from a relation to other things - are shown to be incoherent
and actually meaningless. We are told not to "cling to" the view of Emptiness, that to
regard Emptiness as a view describing how things really are is worse than self-views
as vast as Mt. Sumeru. Those who cling to the view of Emptiness are declared incur-
able. Emptiness is the ultimate truth, but "emptiness" is only the highest (i.e., most
powerfully effective) conventional truth. Emptiness is itself not a description of any
facts, and regarded as a description it is merely a conventional truth. Ultimate truth
is neither "emptiness" nor "not-emptiness." (InTiantai, it will be both.)
These are, as they say, mere "concepts." But a concept is precisely what we nor-
mally call a truth-, a proposition about what predicates actually, unambiguously in all
contexts, from all perspectives, apply to a particular entity - the essence or marks of
that thing, which it alone, simply by being what it is, makes so. This is what "objec-
tive" means: that things are so on their own, without the participation of some other,
some observer, some perspective. To regard the cup as red, or as empty, is clinging,
is delusion. Redness is something that emerges momentarily through the cooperation
of the cup and my cognitive apparatus. Emptiness is also something that emerges
momentarily through the cooperation of the world and my cognitive apparatus. To
regard reality as contradictory, or non-contradictory, is delusion. Clinging to empti-
ness, attachment to emptiness means no more and no less than regarding emptiness
as objectively true. "Clinging" and "assuming something to be objectively true" are
synonyms. There is, of course, an obvious self-contradiction here, the usual relativ-
ism paradox: is it true that there is no truth? The answer is: it is true only in the way
in which truth is defined in Buddhism: saying so is conducive to the liberation from
suffering of living beings. Contradiction is no objection to this kind of truth. Another
contradiction: is it always true that this way of talking and viewing is conducive to

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ending suffering? This is where, as we shall see shortly, Tiantai provides a further
insight.
This gives us a crucial further criterion for conventional truth. Conventional truth
is what is conducive to the end of suffering. The end of suffering is the end of all state-
ments and views. So conventional truth is precisely those views that are conducive
to ending all views. Like the raft, they are self-transcending, and this alone is the
criterion of what makes any statement count as a truth at all. If it did not contradict
itself, it would not be a truth. That is, if, when taken literally and fully unpacked, it
allowed one to continue to cling to it as a consistent statement about how the world
really is, it would, ipso facto, notbe a truth - that is, a conventional truth, a statement
or belief that leads to its own overcoming. And conventional truth is the only kind of
truth that is describable or speakable at all. Hence, only those statements and beliefs
that lead to their own self-cancellation are true. Only self-contradictions are true.
Note that not all statements are included in conventional truth. What is excluded
is cosmological theories, statements meant to be taken literally about how the world is,
how the world began, what the world is made of. These are not conventional truths,
much less ultimate truths, because they do not lead to their own self-overcoming,
they do not encode their own demise. They claim to be literal representations of how
the world really is, without qualification. Precisely because they do not contradict
themselves, they cannot be truths.
Tiantai Buddhism takes its clue from Nāgārjuna, but as read through the lens
of the upâya theory of the Lotus Sūtra. This changes things decisively, and in ways
that are quite relevant to our current discussion. Simply stated, if we assume this
Nāgārjunian model of truth, the distinction between the three categories of
Nāgārjuna's Two Truth system falls apart. Again, these three are: (1) just plain false
statements, like the metaphysical and religious theories of non-Buddhists, absolutist
claims of science, et cetera - all theory, in short; (2) untheorized commonsensical
everyday language, which says I and you and cause and effect but without claiming
a theory or systematic objective worldview to unpack them consistently - fuzzy
around the edges; and (3) Buddhist rhetoric. The criterion of truth, recall, was "what
is conducive to liberation from suffering" - which means what will, if given full play,
contradict and cancel itself, serving as a vehicle by which to pass beyond itself, like
a raft. So (2) and (3) are both truths (Conventional Truth), while (1) is just false. Ulti-
mate Truth, on the other hand, is the end of suffering, and thus also given, honorifi-
cai ly as it were, the name of truth, though it has no propositional content.
So it stands for Nāgārjuna. In Tiantai, however, this same criterion is now applied
across the board. Category (1) also can serve as a raft - and, in fact, all purported
metaphysical systems, while claiming to arrive at a consistent, nonself-contradictory
complete objective view of the universe, can all be shown to fail on their own terms:
they can be shown to contradict themselves when taken absolutely seriously and
when their key theoretical terms are absolutized. Tiantai theory uses the Nāgārjunian
method to perform these reductio ad absurdums on all existing theories. But these
are not to show that they are false; this is precisely what shows that they are truel For

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 "true," as we've seen, means simply, "capable of leading beyond itself, capable of
destroying itself, conducive to the move beyond all clinging to fixed views, condu-
cive to ending suffering." When a metaphysical view is shown to involve contra-
dictions, it is shown to be a conventional truth rather than a mere falsehood: it serves
as a raft to the abandoning of views. Furthermore, categories (2) and (3) are also not
always effective as rafts. There are infinite sentient beings with infinite differing needs,
and in some circumstances one view will work (to transcend itself and all views)
while in other circumstances others will work. Even "ordinary speech" and "Empti-
ness" are not always true (for true means only "conducive to. . ZO-
AII three categories can serve as rafts leading beyond themselves, while none of
them always does so. So the Buddha preaches self and nonself, not because one is
conventional and the other is ultimate truth: both are conventional truths, meaning
both can, in given circumstances, lead to the dropping of both views. Neither is in-
trinsically more true than the other (for to be "intrinsically" anything would be to
have a self-nature). Hence we have the other enormous change in Tiantai: ultimate
truth is no longer "beyond" conventional truth, no longer a "higher" truth. They are
equal, and in fact the very idea of "ultimate truth" is itself a conventional truth. How-
ever, they are not only equal. The most radical Tiantai move is that conventional and
ultimate truth are identical. They have exactly the same content. Whatever is conven-
tional truth is also ultimate truth, and vice versa. And this is the only kind of truth
there is.
This point is illustrated nicely in Zhiyi's interpretation of the story of the lost son
from the Lotus Sūtra (chapter 4). In this story, Šāriputra compares himself, and the
other šrāvakas, to a son who, while still a youth, had been separated from his father,
went off on his own, and became lost. The father searches all over for him, but fi-
nally gives up in despair; he can find him nowhere. Instead he settles in a certain
town and becomes very rich. Meanwhile the son has to fend for himself, and lives
hand-to-mouth in extreme poverty, taking whatever odd jobs come his way. In his
wanderings, quite by chance, he eventually comes to the gate of his father's opulent
mansion. He is greatly intimidated by the splendor of this palatial estate, seeing noth-
ing there that seems remotely relatable to his own condition; this is someone as
different from himself as imaginable, someone with whom he has nothing at all in
common. Indeed, he fears this must be a king of some sort, a person of great author-
ity and might who will force him into military service or corvée labor if he doesn't
flee as quickly as possible. The father, instantly recognizing this broken impoverished
man at the gate as his own long-lost son, is overjoyed. He sends his servants to ap-
prehend him - but the son is terrified, and falls into a faint. Realizing that his son has
forgotten his own identity and is in no condition to take in the news, he devises a
"skillful means": the son is allowed to return to the poor part of town, and two ragged
looking messengers are sent, pretending to be looking randomly for cheap day laborers,
paid at the minimum wage. This the son can accept; it accords with his own concept
of himself and his worth. He takes the job, and works shoveling shit for twenty years.
The father, of course, represents the Buddha. The son represents Šāriputra and the
other šrāvakas. Though the text is a little vague on this point, it makes sense to as-

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sume that the father was not yet rich at the time of the estrangement: the Buddha and
all sentient beings began together as sentient beings, bound by consanguinity, in the
same state of samsāra. During their separation, the father gets rich - the Buddha
becomes enlightened. But his bond with all beings from before that time, as one
deluded suffering being among them, remains. Shoveling shit is a metaphor for the
practice of the šrāvaka path: cleaning out delusion, just trying to get pure, with no
greater purpose or positive goal beyond that - a rather shocking critique of earlier
Buddhism!

Sometimes the father himself dresses in ragged clothes, impersonating a fore-

man, and goads the son to work hard, or compliments his diligence. Sometime later,
the father tells the son that, because he's been such a good laborer, he's being pro-
moted to a "house" servant, no longer having to labor in the muck.
The irony here, of course, is that the real reason the son gets promoted has noth-
ing to do with the quality of his work. He was a blood son from the beginning; he is
only gradually coming into his own patrimony. Similarly, the srāvakas think that their
progress on the path is due to their good work, that they have attained something
new, that their state of relative peace and small enlightenment is achieved by their
practices; actually, it is a meager first taste of what was always already theirs, which
they are only gradually getting mentally prepared to accept as their own.
In fact, the son is made treasurer of the estate. His job will be to oversee all the
business transactions, to know exactly what the father owns, and all his expenditures
and income.

This is a metaphor for the šrāvakas' knowledge of the Bodhisattva Way and the
glory of the Buddhas, and even their retelling of it to others: they were "counting
someone else's treasure"; they could enumerate all these qualities but thought that it
all pertained to another, not realizing they were enumerating things about them-
selves, about their own possessions, their own destiny!
The father tells his trusty accountant that he is "like a son" to him - just as the
Buddha "metaphorically" describes his students as his children. But then, on his
deathbed, the father calls a meeting of all sorts of kings and dignitaries and officially
announces the truth: this man is my own blood son, and always has been. All that I
have, I leave to him: all these treasures he's been counting belong to him! And
always have!
The key point to note here, in the context of our present discussion, is, as Zhiyi
points out, that the status of the "skillful means" is configured here very differently
than it is in the Two Truths schema of Emptiness theory, the "raft" model, where the
means are transcended and discarded once the goal is reached. The resources of the
estate are what the father uses as a skillful means to draw his son to the final recogni-
tion of his own status, to his final enlightenment - the servants, the buildings, the
treasury. But these are not abandoned when the son finally does come into his in-
heritance. On the contrary, these are the inheritance! This means that what one is
enlightened to when one is enlightened is not the dropping away of all skillful means,
the letting go of the raft, the transcendence of all determinate phenomenal concepts,
ideas, practices, forms. Rather, these things are the very content of enlightenment.

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 Enlightenment is not the renunciation of skillful means. Enlightenment is the mastery
of all skillful means, the integration of skillful means, the more thorough possession
of them rather than the discarding or elimination of them. Conventional truth is not
what you renounce when you reach Ultimate Truth, as in the parable of the raft and
the Two Truths theory. Conventional Truth is what you get when you reach Ultimate
Truth. The content of the two is the same. Ultimate Truth is simply a name for the
totality of conventional truths, and the virtuosic mastery of being able to move from
one conventional truth to another unobstructedly, as the situation demands, the com-
prehension of the way they fit together or can function together, or the way in which
they are each, as it were, "versions" of each other. Ultimate truth is the non-obstruction
between conventional truths, the fact that they all interpenetrate, that in their non-
absoluteness each is simply a different way of saying what the others say. Ultimate
truth is the free flow of conventional truths, their copresence in spite of their apparent
oppositeness (e.g., you are a worker, you are a son).
Here we finally get to our conclusion. ForTiantai, "conventional truth" means
"anything that can be conducive to the elimination of suffering - which is clinging,
attachment, desire, and fixed views of objectivity." Not "will" or "must," but "can."
For no idea, not even "Emptiness," always conduces thereto. It is situational, and this
is the sole criterion and meaning of truth. Now, given this definition, anything and
everything is a conventional truth: anything can , under the right conditions, dislodge
an attachment and lead to reduced suffering. Nothing always does so, but everything
without exception, in the right context, can do so. Everything without exception is
therefore a conventional truth. But conventional truth, as we just saw, is in Tiantai not
merely a means to ultimate truth, but is ultimate truth itself. Ultimate truth is just the
coexistence and maximally skillful application of any and all conventional truths.
Since everything is conventional truth, everything is ultimate truth. But they are ulti-
mate truth because of their interpénétration and mutual non-obstruction, because
what would be mutually exclusive if taken as "truths" in the sense of "corresponding
to how things really are, simpliciter, independently of any other factors including
experiencers of them as such" are now seen to be true in the sense of "conducive to
liberation from suffering sometimes." This renders their coexistence not only possi-
ble, but necessary for ultimate truth.
Ultimate truth is the copresence of what would, on the naive "objective" defini-
tion of truth, be contradictory (self/nonself, son/worker, suffering/bliss, permanence/
impermanence, samsāra/nirvāņa, etc.), the interchangeability of the two apparently
contradictory forms of conventional truth. I conclude, then, that the question about
whether the contradictory statements in Mahãyâna literature are meant to be true
statements or are meant merely as therapeutic upâya to undermine attachments
while making no claims about reality is, from a Tiantai point of view, wrongly con-
structed. For these two alternatives are synonymous. Truth means nothing but "under-
mining attachments," and conventional truths are ultimate truths. Put otherwise,
therapeutic measures are our only descriptions of "how the world is." For truth
in Tiantai is always truth about delusion, for it is only delusion that provides any

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determinate content to experience. (As Dõgen says, in his usual, very Hantai
way, "Enlightenment is enlightenment about delusion, delusion is delusion about
enlightenment.")
Enlightened experience ("truth") is also full of content and differentiations, but
only because it builds upon and reconfigures a prior existing delusion and delusion-
derived determinacies and differentiations, which are its sole raw material - not
some reality-as-it-is untouched by any (deluded) consciousness. And, of course, this
point is encoded emphatically in the main textbook slogans of Tiantai tradition: the
Three Truths and inherent entailment (or the Three Thousand as Each Moment of
Experience, - The Three Truths are provisional positing, emptiness and the
mean (^f^cf3)- Provisional positing is conventional truth. It means that any determi-
nate thing is determinate, is what it is, only locally, only due to its particular causal
antecedents, constituent parts, and conceptual context. It is locally coherent. Empti-
ness is the lack of any self-warranted determinacy - nothing is what it is just because
it is what it is; it is so only in dependence on its cooperation with at least one "other"
thing - again, causal antecedents, constituent parts, and conceptual context.
But if we examine the boundary between "it" and "these others" that make it so,
we find them to be incoherent as long as we assume that this "it" simply is what it is
to the exclusion of the not-it. This being the case, it is neither it nor not it nor anything
else - it is ontologica! ly ambiguous. It is, in fact, globally incoherent: when all fac-
tors are taken into account, its original identity vanishes.
It is obvious, however, that these two apparently opposed and contradictory
claims (X is coherent as X, X is not coherent as X) are not two separate facts about X,
but are just two alternate ways of stating one and the same fact, the dependent co-
arisen nature of its X-ness, its identity-derived-from-relation. This is both its (local)
coherence and (global) incoherence. Any (local) coherence, examined closely, turns
out to be (globally) incoherent. Hence, all conventional truths turn out to be ultimate
truths, leading beyond themselves. But the Mean, the third truth, is precisely the in-
tersubsumption of these two truths, their synonymity. And that is the truth about
things: that for any X to exist simply means for its X-ness to be another word for its
non-X-ness. Not only are contradictions possible in reality. They are the sole mark of
reality. Whatever is is its own self-contradiction, and this alone makes it real - not
merely conventionally real, but intrinsically and absolutely real: the absolute, the
Mean. As Zhiyi says, "Each and every scent and sight is none other than the Middle
Way (the Mean) itself." That is, each and every particular thing, because it is its own
contradiction, is absolutely real, is the absolute itself, which transcends all finite cat-
egories and is therefore unconditional , presenced under any and all conditions, even
the condition of its own absence, like space. This is why all Three Thousand possible
states are always present, inherently entailed, in any moment of experience ( yinian
sanqian - ^Hť)- Each of them is absolute, each of them is unconditional, each of
them pervades all times and places, like space. Because it is self-contradictory, it is
unconditional and cannot be eradicated from reality no matter what happens. For
this reason it is permanent, cannot be lost, cannot be undermined by the presence of

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 anything alien to it, cannot be dislodged by any event or thing, cannot cease to be
what it is. For this reason, each and every entity is absolute truth, is nirvāna, is the
end of suffering.
The Tiantai view, then, is not mere dialetheism, "the view that some contradic-
tions are true," as Deguchi, Garfield, and Priest put it. It claims that all statements,
claims, experiences, and entities are (implicitly) contradictions, and that therefore
they are all true.

Note

1 - I refer here to the claims about the copula in Schelling and the expansion upon
this point in Hegel's Logic: in both cases, the law of identity and its derivative,
the law of contradiction, are exposed as frauds through the simple point that
seemingly analytic propositions such as A is A always presuppose both sameness
and difference, that the copula can never meaningfully denote sameness, that
every meaningful proposition is in some sense a contradiction. For "A is A," says
Schelling, means to assert that "A as subject" is "A as predicate," and subject is
not predicate - subjecthood as such excludes predicatehood as such. If it were,
the statement would have no meaning. In Hegel's more refined version of the
same point, the very meaning of "sameness" is shown to presuppose "sameness
between" something and something else, hence presupposing difference. Simi-
larly, difference presupposes sameness, for the very relation of contrast or dis-
tinction requires a shared medium or characteristic. To distance themselves from
each other the two terms must be in the same space. So all claims about same-
ness and difference are really claims involving both sameness and difference; no
absolute sameness or difference to the exclusion of the other is possible, and
therefore every statement is in some sense a contradiction and in some sense not.
For "is" itself only means "necessarily relates to."

352 Philosophy East & West

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