The History of Buddhist Thought c25.30

c25.30

The Buddhist thinkers had without realizing it stumbled upon the fact that the terms of ordinary language do not express the real facts of existence. Words are static, but the objects to which they refer. The contradictions were attributed not to the defects of verbal expression, but to the nature of the experience. The discovery of antinomies has happened more than once in the history of philosophy. They are well known in the paradoxes of Zeno, the pupil of Parmenides.³ Parmenides had taught that the existent is one, it is imperishable, indivisible, and perfect. All plurality, variety, coming into being, and destruction are empty words. This itself is a remarkable parallel to the doctrine of the Void, and the paradoxes of Zeno are an illustration of the same kind of dialectic as we find in Mahāyāna. If existence is many, said Zeno, it must be infinitely great and infinitely small. Motion is impossible, and so on.¹ The philosophical geniuses who followed Zeno were able to start afresh from a sounder standpoint, but the Indian philosophers never doubted that words were an adequate expression of things. For the Buddhists words were the verbal statement of the facts, or rather of the data, of sense experience. Instead of trying to restate their position they went forward, but actual experience had to be accounted for. Hence their theory of two kinds of truth, veiled or conventional truth (*saṃvṛti*), and truth in the highest sense (*paramārtha*). Truth in the highest sense is *tathatā*, “suchness,” reality without any qualifications, the absolute. It cannot even be called existent, for existence implies relation to a possible non-existent. As it is beyond all relation it is inexpressible.