Just This
“Arguments and statements cannot take the place of an experience of the ultimate truth of things, and realising ultimate truths is a non-linguistic event”.
So writes Richard H. Jones of the ontological position of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Chandrakirti (circa 600-650). I have spent years trying to come up with as concise and lucid a statement as Jones gives. I’m a clunky minded wretch. I concede to the superior elucidator.
In brief, Madhyamaka philosophy teaches that everything without exception is empty of self-existence. Everything that appears, including both the subjective mind and the phenomena of the objective field, is ultimately unreal in the sense that only the continuous flow of appearances is real, and no single entity we might designate as an entity is anything except an abstraction (hence, illusory) from the flow.
That the nature of everything, of the ‘all’, is unchanging in that it is nothing but constant change, does not preclude the phenomena of determined change – a potato seed will develop into a potato and not a carrot. The order of change might be real, but what changes is in contrast, only an abstraction from the flow. The potato is something we identify for myriad reasons, but most prominently because it is food and we need food.
We identify things according to our interests, but in so identifying we abstract from the ceaseless flow of phenomena which alone, if anything can even be said to be, is real. To recognise the flow of phenomena from within the flow and as nothing ourselves apart from the flow is an activity of intuition, not intellect. Intuition grasps understanding of existence without recourse to the intellect which nevertheless works with intuition and analyses patterns and relationships between the phenomena presented through the sense fields.
The principle inherent in and as intuition and the world grasped by intuition, is a unifying principle. Unifying, not in the sense of the duality between the numerical one and many, or singular and plural, but unifying in the sense of the flow. The one as the many, the singular as the plural (and visa versa).
The implication of course is that every act of intuition or intellect is itself inseparable from the flow of phenomena. It is not that there is first a subject intuiting and then an objective world intuited. These divisions are the later impositions of the intellect, and as such they have practical and relative value, but are abstractions as much as they are impositions. Intuition is nearer to a pure understanding of the flow, within the flow, and as the flow.
Now. I’ve made what Mr Jones has succinctly stated unnecessarily and characteristically complicated.
My bad.