Madhyamaka and Prajnaparamita - Two truths, nirvana and conventional language

Conventional and ultimate truths

Conventional, or relative, truth concerns dependent everyday descriptions and practices: people learn, actions have consequences and a path can be taught. Ultimate truth concerns their emptiness of svabhava, independent own-being. The distinction prevents practical descriptions being mistaken for fixed essences while also preventing emptiness being mistaken for the absence of every conventional effect.

The two are not separate universes. A plant's growth is intelligible through conventional causal description; ultimate analysis finds no independent plant-nature outside conditions and designation. Its emptiness is not an extra invisible plant behind the ordinary one. Conventional truth also differs from any convenient lie: a correct account of watering differs from a false one because conventional conditions and effects constrain descriptions.

Nagarjuna's MMK chapter24 connects dependent arising, emptiness and dependent designation. It also explains that teaching the ultimate relies on conventional communication and that liberation depends on understanding the ultimate. Peter Della Santina's commentary develops that connection. These claims are paraphrased: dependence on language for instruction does not mean a word creates reality without constraints.

Recognition matters for liberation because appropriating a fixed self, object or attainment reinforces grasping. Merely functioning conventionally without questioning that appropriation leaves the mistake intact. Conversely, rejecting all convention leaves no meaningful way to distinguish harmful action from training or to communicate a path. A defensible middle account needs both effective guidance and freedom from reification.

Samsara and nirvana without own-being

Nagarjuna's claim that samsara and nirvana should not be understood as different things concerns their lack of intrinsic independent difference. MMK 25.19–20, discussed by Della Santina, denies an ultimate separation between them. It is not a claim that ordinary distress feels exactly like liberation or that no transformation is needed.

Samsara is experience organised through ignorance and grasping; nirvana is freedom from that appropriation. If they were two independently existing realms with fixed natures, a transition through changed conditions would be difficult to explain. Neither has own-being, so liberation is not migration of a permanent self into a separate eternal substance.

Consider a conflict in which someone clings to a fixed offended identity. Releasing that appropriation can transform the relation to the encounter without transporting the person to another physical universe. This illustrates a change of understanding within dependent experience; it does not reduce the traditional account of complete liberation to one calmer conversation.