Ultimate Truth and Conventional Truth

Through the Buddhist teachings we learn that what we take for “self”, for “our mind” and for “our body”, consists of changing phenomena. That part of the Buddhist teachings which is the “ Abhidhamma” enumerates and classifies all phenomena of our life: mental phenomena or nāma and physical phenomena or rūpa. Seeing is nāma, it experiences visible object through the eye-door. Visible object or colour is rūpa, it does not experience anything. The eyesense, that functions as the eye-door through which visible object is experienced, is also rūpa. The rūpas that are sense objects, namely, visible object, sound, smell, flavour and tangible object, and also the rūpas that are the sense organs of eyes, ears, nose, tongue and bodysense, are conditions for the nāmas to experience objects. Nāma and rūpa are interrelated. Nāma and rūpa are ultimate realities. We should know the difference between ultimate truth, paramattha sacca, and conventional truth, sammutti sacca. Ultimate truth is not abstract. Ultimate realities, in Pāli: paramattha dhammas, have each their own characteristic which cannot be changed. We may change the name, but the characteristic remains the same. Seeing is an ultimate reality, it experiences visible object which appears through the eyes; it is real for everyone, it has its own unalterable characteristic. Anger has its own characteristic, it is real for everyone, no matter how we name it. Ultimate realities can be directly experienced when they appear through eyes, ears, nose, tongue, bodysense or mind. They arise because of their appropriate conditions. Conventional truth is the world of concepts such as person, tree or animal. Before we learnt about Buddhism, conventional truth, the world of concepts, was the only truth we knew. It is useful to examine the meaning of concept, in Pāli: paññatti. The word concept can stand for the name or term that conveys an idea and it can also stand for the idea itself conveyed by a term. Thus, the name “tree” is a concept, and also the idea we form up of “tree” is a concept. We can think of concepts, but they are not realities that can be directly experienced, without having to name them.