Is that object in front of you a book, or is it paper? In most cases, we would accept that the object is both 100% a book, and 100% paper. Yet “paper” and “book” are not synonymous terms. There seems to be something paradoxical happening here.

How can an object be fully A and fully B simultaneously? Doesn’t this contradict Aristotle’s “Laws of Thought”?

Essence and Form

I would like to lean on John David Reynolds’ explanation (note: Reynolds does not actually agree with this explanation) in his essay Notes on Mysticism (with Respect to Ven. Ñāṇavīra). “We have two different levels of reality involved here—the level of essence and the level of form”. The paper is the essence of the book, and the book is the form of the paper. “They are the same in a sense and different in a sense, but this is not pernicious doublethink as the sense is not the same; there are two senses which are not mutually exclusive”.

What is happening here is our day-to-day dualistic terminology is forcing us to try to understand these instances on a 2-dimensional plane. The truth, however, seems to be 3-dimensional (or more).

Reynolds explains further, “at the experiential level, consciousness is the essence of mental states (and experience as a whole), while mental states are the form of consciousness (and experience as a whole). These levels of truth are “simultaneous, and superimposed”

In other words, what we experience is simultaneously 100% consciousness, and 100% mental states. This is not monism (where consciousness and mental states are synonymous) or dualism (where consciousness and mental states are two separate things), but rather non-dualism.

The Buddhist Challenge

Before you assume this is a nice, neat explanation, things aren’t so simple.

In Buddhism, this causes quite the issue, which Reynolds is acutely aware of, but does not explain in much detail in his essay.

Buddhapālita, in his commentary on Nagārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, says:

“What is the reality of things just as it is? It is the absence of essence. Unskilled persons whose eye of intelligence is obscured by the darkness of delusion conceive of an essence of things and then generate attachment and hostility with regard to them.”

Essentially (pun intended), Ultimate Truth is not a 3-dimensional set of “in one sense it’s this, in another sense it’s that”. All phenomena lacks essence. This is a strongly anti-essentialist viewpoint, and any non-dualist attempt at explaining away the problem is overcomplicating a matter which can be solved by acknowledging the absence of essence.

The other planes (essence, form) through which we understand the world are merely delusions. Conventionally useful delusions granted, until those conventions cease to be needed.

Beyond Rationalism

In the Theravada tradition, an overly rationalist approach to understanding this “emptiness” is usually not required. Instead, it comes as a realization when one is at a certain point on the path to liberation: an insight that does not necessarily call for rationalization using language that is (as we have seen) obviously limited.

Semantics can only get us so far. The Western philosophical toolkit of categories and definitions may be precisely what obscures understanding here.