The topic of today’s broadcast is: The appearance of conventional truth

There are two types of truth in Pali: sammuti sacca and pannatti sacca. Sammuti sacca translates to ‘conventional truth,’ while pannatti sacca translates as ‘ultimate truth’.

In practice conventional truth must be removed if we wish to reveal the ultimate truth.

If you want the moonlight to enter your room, switch off your electrical lights.

The truth comes to be known when ignorance disappears.

Sacca is one of the Ten Perfections.

In ‘Language, Truth and Logic’, Sir Alfred Ayer draws on ideas of the Vienna Circle and the British empirical tradition. Statements not based on fact or connected by logic were ‘nonsense’, in his view - without philosophical significance. He supported linguistic analysis as the method for clarifying empirical truth.

We may be judgemental with personality bias to arrive at conventional truth.

Here are some imagined examples of how a conventional truth could be arrived at whereas the ultimate truth would require a more elaborate data set. Persons would use their personality bias to reach a viewpoint of conventional truth.

Suppose a man brought home ten red roses and he gave them sheepishly to his wife.

The man had been to a strip club, at which one of the girls had lap-danced for him, and he then slept with her. The girl told him that due to legal reasons, the establishment could not offer prostitution services for cash, but he should pay her 200 dollars for her services, and she would give him ten red roses.

With that extra data on how the man obtained the roses to bring home might explain why he gave them sheepishly to his wife.

We may postulate prime causes about his actions.

For example, was he wishing his poor behavior to be exposed? In terms of memory the roses, being inanimate matter, have no memory of whence they came. So it is pointless to interrogate the roses in search of the truth.

Awakening persons like to hear a fuller story about causes for action. Persons who are seeking knowledge of how things really are interested in more complete data sets.

Many stories can be made up and circulate as rumours from these facts when there is no effect to use logic to connect the sequence.

Perhaps we ought to hear the full story for some reason as long as the rumours do not effect us in a direct manner. At times, we must wait to form a judgement.

The bare bones of the next story came from an American humourist.

Sixty years ago, a Chinese launderer in Hong Kong used to clean seven dinner shirts each week for one man. He developed an attachment for the man, thinking him to be a true gentleman. He diligently chewed starch and blew it onto the shirt before ironing it, as was the custom at that time. One day he began to notice that each shirt had a red mark on it. He became intrigued that the man was now having an affair. The lipstick marks continued for some time, until one day a shirt came in bearing a charred bullet hole. No shirt came in the next day. Greatly saddened, the Chinese man began to offer incense daily on his altar for the dead man.

So much for the conventional truth. If we add more data, it might give a better picture.

A man in Hong Kong was accustomed to wearing a dinner shirt on a daily basis. He began to drip red chilli sauce on his shirt each day eating at the office. His shirts were sent out to a Chinese laundry worker, who cleaned and starched his shirts. One day, the man dropped his cigar, not noticing he had burnt a hole into his shirt where he had dripped red port, burning around the port stain in the front of it. He sent the shirt to the Chinese laundry as usual. The Chinese man who blew starch onto his shirts was an habitual tobacco chewer. The gentleman had been unhappy with the situation for some time, as his shirts always reeked of tobacco, and from that day decided to contract a new laundry man.

In this case, one construct of the conventional truth dissolves into shadow to reveal another construct of conventional truth, and it is the pieces of data received later that tends to bias our judgement towards a different view.

At times, situations are teased out for deliberate humour and some of the world's greatest speeches have been based on this technique.

Will Rogers delivered a speech to the Alumni of Columbia University in New York on 4 December 1924 under topic Wealth and Education.

He said: “There are thirty-two hundred courses. You spend your first two years in deciding what course to take, the next two years finding the building that these courses are given in, and the rest of your life in wishing you had taken another course. And they have this wonderful society called the Alumni Association, a bunch of men who have gone to school and after they have come out formed a society to tell the school how to run it”.

Sometimes factual things happen in apparently surprising manners under great feats of exploration. Admiral Robert E. Peary, the American Arctic Explorer, spoke at the Lotus Club in New York City on 2 February 1907. His description was stark, some persons felt like laughing to break the tension of the unexpected hardship depicted.

The Admiral spoke thus:

Well we were safely over, so we camped for a while, and had a grand dinner-just of dog-and then we were ready again to keep on to the southward over ice that seemed almost impassable, and some of the pinnacles of which were the size of the dome of the Capitol in Washington, ranging from that down to a cobblestone.

For the next three marches the going was frightful, and then it began to improve. I made out summits of distant Greenland with my glass, and soon we were under the shelter of Cape Morris Jesup, and there was no longer any danger of drifting around it.

On 12 May we came out on the ice-foot at Cape Neumeyer, for I was familiar with this coast, and I knew that we were likely to find game there. Within an hour we had four arctic hares, weighing from nine to ten pounds each, and the meat was more than delicious.

Just before reaching the shore we crossed a fresh sledge-track, and for a moment I thought it was a party looking for me, but a closer inspection showed that it was a light sledge drawn by three weak dogs, and four weak men walking very slowly. As soon as we has slept a few hours I sent some of the Eskimos to find out, and the next day they came back with Clark and three Eskimos.

They had lost their way and were going away from the ship and would soon have perished. The addition of four men to my nearly starving party was an added burden, but we fortunately secured some ten more hares, and started for the ship.

It is hard to for most persons to hear a partial account without automatically forming a viewpoint about the expedition. It is hard to exercise forbearance of producing premature views. It is better to wait and read the complete account.

We wish to make it clear that viewing “ultimate truth” does not come from collecting more data.

It comes from a clear awake mind viewing a problem with dispassion. There are persons with such mental skills alive today in many countries.

To come to terms with conventional truth, it may be considered to be such operations as we perform with mathematical reasoning.

Because of the amount of information persons receive nowadays for work and pleasure and hobbies, there are some suggestions that many persons reach information overload easily in the day and by evening they seek to skip or only skim through information.

As “infocommericals” are designed to sell product, they repeat small points.

These small points as facts are then treated as conventional truth and drawn together with many persons saying how they liked the product to make the “close” to buy the product.

The ability to study new information in depth in the evenings may be attenuated by the lack of suitable rest periods at our common work patterns.

Many persons who may have become satiated with conventional truth in the home or the workplace and build or plan their lifestyle to reject more formal study may find it satisfactory to learn the small points as facts and follow the buying track in buying the telemarketed produce.

This is equivalent to playing the commercial game called ‘Trivial Pursuit’.

We are interested in breaking this nexus by providing methods where persons become refreshed in the mental sense and become more prepared for serious learning.

Our training methods include use of samatha breathing practice to quieten the mind, and by providing a pleasant garden to allow persons to acclimatise to the four seasons.

Modern city living with controlled lighting and air conditioning tends to blur the signals that nature gives to our senses. In essence, we become confused, as if jet lagged.

When trained in the working of kamma, it is found the proximate cause of equanimity is the understanding that all beings are the result of their actions.

With equanimity, the selling script method and triggers to buy may be seen as an interesting process but it is unlikely persons with equanimity seeing the process would buy as much product as those without equanimity who skim over and absorb the processes.

In saying this, we are not intending to disparage the intellect or motives of those who produce “infocommericals”.

Shantideva writes in Bodhicaryavatara:

“Who master is self, will ever bear
A smiling face; he puts away all frowns,
Is first to greet another, and to share
His all. This friend of all the world, Truth crowns.”

May you have a clear mind so you may understand how conventional truth appears in your world.

May you seek the path of knowledge of how things really are.

May you be well and happy.

The authors of this script are: John D. Hughes, Julian Bamford, Leanne Eames, Evelin Halls, Isabella Hobbs, Lisa Nelson and Pennie White.

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References

Brown, L. (ed.) (1993) The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 501, 809, 841, 1915.

Davids, R & Stede, W (eds.) (1979) The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary, Henry and Boston, London, pp. 662, 668.

Encyclopedia Britannica, (1987) Micropedia, Vol.1, p. 749.

Writings of Piyadassi, (1991) The Spectrum of Buddhism, The Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation, Taiwan ROC.

Nyanatiloka, (1980) Buddhist Dictionary-Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, Taiwan: The Corporate Body of the Buddhist Educational Foundation.

Copeland, L. & Lamm L. (Eds), (1958) The World's Great Speeches, Dover Publications Inc., New York, pp. 710, 713, 729, 730.

Document Statistics

Total:
Words: 1731
Sentences: 90
Paragraphs: 57
Syllables: 2476

Averages:
Words per sentence: 19.2
Sentences per paragraph: 1.6

Percentages:

Passive Sentences: 17

Readability Statistics
Flesch Grade Level: 8.6
Coleman-Liau Grade Level: 10.0
Bormuth Grade Level: 9.7
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 64.4
Flesch-Kincaid Score: 8.8

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May You Be Well And Happy

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