Two Truths or Two Distractions?

A druidic critique of Mahāyāna’s metaphysical overreach

By Bodhangkur Mahathero

1. Framing the Dispute: Therapy vs. Metaphysics

The druid Finn’s contention targets a precise historical and conceptual shift within Buddhism: the transition from Śākyamuni’s pragmatically therapeutic diagnosis of suffering to Mahāyāna’s elaboration of a meta-level philosophical architecture, beginning with Nāgārjuna’s Two Truths doctrine. The dispute is not whether Mahāyāna is internally coherent or intellectually subtle; it is whether it is functionally necessary or epistemically legitimate (and not just scholiastic slop) given the original problem Buddhism set out to solve—namely, the elimination of dukkha in naturally embodied organisms.

Early Buddhism is parsimoniously construed as a non-metaphysical, operational framework:

· Problem: Dukkha arises from craving, clinging, and reification within transient, conditioned processes.

· Mechanism: Cognitive-affective engagement reifies impermanent processes into stable “things,” selves, and meanings.

· Remedy: Disengagement and cessation (nirodha) interrupt reification; nirvāṇa functions as standby/termination.

· Epistemic posture: Metaphysical speculation is bracketed as irrelevant to problem-solving.

This constitutes a form of naturalistic therapy: the Shakyamuni Buddha addresses how organisms suffer and how that suffering can be attenuated or extinguished, without positing any ontology of ultimate being, cosmic origin, or metaphysical substrate.

Against this backdrop, the druid’s claim is that Mahāyāna—despite its protestations of non-metaphysical intent—reinstalls a metaphysical register that is both procedurally redundant and institutionally self-serving.

2. Metaphysics as Vacuous Placeholder: The General Thesis

The core of the druid’s critique rests on a general theory of metaphysics: metaphysical constructs function as vacuous placeholders. They stabilise discourse, coordinate communities, and license authority, but they do not disclose generative structure beyond what is accessible through empirical and systems-level investigation of nature.

In this sense, metaphysical terms—Brahman, Dao, Substance, Emptiness—are not false descriptions of reality; they are empty coordination tokens (i.e. top-down G & C slop). They name the unknown in ways that allow institutions to operate and practitioners to orient themselves under radical uncertainty. However, they add no new operational constraints to how phenomena emerge, interact, or dissolve.

Applied to Mahāyāna, this yields a sharp diagnosis: Nāgārjuna’s “ultimate truth” does not discover anything beyond the natural facts of transience and conditionality. It names, in a refined conceptual idiom, the absence of intrinsic essence. This absence, however, was already implicit in the Buddha’s refusal to posit any enduring substrate and/or define ‘atta’, and in his emphasis on dependent conditional transient origination. The metaphysical grammar of emptiness adds a symbolic superstructure without adding explanatory or therapeutic power.

Example:
An early Buddhist practitioner can observe directly that sensations, emotions, intentions, and identities arise and pass conditionally. No appeal to “ultimate emptiness” is required to notice that clinging to these transient processes generates distress. The Mahāyāna move reframes this same observation in a meta-ontological register (“all dharmas are empty”), which may be intellectually sophisticated and personally satisfying but is operationally redundant for reducing dukkha.

3. Nāgārjuna as Superfluous Repair Technician

The druid’s second objection is historical and technical: Nāgārjuna’s intervention is a repair job necessitated by scholastic error, not by any deficiency in the Shakyamuni Buddha’s original framework. The Abhidharma traditions had reified dharmas into quasi-ontological building blocks of reality. Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness and Two Truths functions as a corrective against this drift (as Geistige Fehlleistung).

However, from the druid’s perspective, this entire episode exemplifies a familiar failure mode of religious-philosophical systems:

1. A pragmatic teaching (such as the teaching of the Nazarene) is institutionalised.

2. Scholastic elaboration reifies its analytic categories.

3. A meta-theory is introduced to undo the reification.

4. The meta-theory itself becomes canonical and reified.

Thus, Mahāyāna does not deepen the Shakyamuni’s insight; it adds a second-order placeholder to repair a first-order placeholder mistake. The clean solution would have been to revert to Śākyamuni’s original operational stance: attend to transience and conditionality; refuse ontological hypostatisation. Instead, Mahāyāna introduces a new layer of doctrinal complexity that requires specialist literacy to navigate.

Example:
Rather than teaching, “Do not treat dharmas as real entities; they are analytic conveniences,” Mahāyāna teaches, “Dharmas are empty according to ultimate truth.” The former is a direct operational instruction; the latter is a meta-metaphysical formulation that invites further scholastic elaboration and interpretive authority.

4. Two Truths as Ontological Privilege in Practice

Even if Nāgārjuna’s Two Truths is framed theoretically as anti-metaphysical, the druid’s critique targets actual use rather than textual disclaimers. In Mahāyāna practice and pedagogy, “ultimate truth” functions as:

· a privileged standpoint,

· a higher-order insight,

· an achievement reserved for advanced (and well paid) practitioners,

· a mark of spiritual and epistemic superiority.

This practical privileging reinstates precisely what the Bhagwan Gautama dismantled: a hierarchy of realities and knowers. The “ultimate” becomes a sacred register, analogous in function to Platonic Forms or Vedāntic Brahman. It authorises a two-tier world: ordinary beings inhabit conventional truth; the enlightened apprehend ultimate truth.

From the druid’s perspective, this is structurally indistinguishable from classical metaphysics. Regardless of philosophical caveats, the Two Truths doctrine behaves as a dual-storey ontology in lived religious culture.

Example:
Meditative traditions that speak of “abiding in emptiness” or “realising ultimate truth” implicitly treat emptiness as an experiential object with privileged status. This reintroduces a metaphysical attractor—something to be attained, inhabited, or taught—thereby reifying what was supposed to dissolve reification.

5. Mahāyāna as Sophisticated Diversion from Natural Observation

The druid’s final objection situates Mahāyāna within a broader critique of metaphysics as cultural diversion. Like Greek metaphysics, Mahāyāna philosophy generates refined conceptual puzzles, dialectical virtuosity, and contemplative prestige-games that distract from the brute, observable facts of natural existence:

· organisms are driven by survival imperatives,

· experiences are transient,

· interactions are conditional,

· reification generates distress.

The Mahāyāna intellectual (indeed academic, scholastic) edifice becomes an aesthetic of complexity layered over simple, observable constraints. It professionalises insight, converting direct observation into scholastic simulation. The result is a culture of interpretation that distances practitioners from the raw operational facts accessible to any attentive organism.

Example:
A villager observing that anger arises when expectations are frustrated and fades when attention disengages already grasps the operative mechanism of dukkha. The Mahāyāna scholastic who analyses this in terms of the emptiness of dharmas across two truth registers has not accessed a deeper natural fact; they have accessed a more elaborate conceptual representation of the same mechanism.

6. Final Conclusions: The Druid’s Verdict

The integrated conclusions can be stated as follows:

1. Metaphysics, including Mahāyāna metaphysics, is a vacuous placeholder.
It stabilises discourse and institutions but discloses no generative structure beyond what naturalistic observation and systems analysis already provide.

2. Nāgārjuna’s Two Truths is a superfluous repair layer.
It corrects a scholastic pathology (reification of dharmas) by adding a meta-placeholder instead of deleting the faulty abstraction. This increases doctrinal complexity without increasing operational efficacy.

3. In practice, Two Truths functions as ontological privilege.
“Ultimate truth” becomes a sacred register, reinstating hierarchical metaphysics and epistemic elites.

4. Mahāyāna metaphysics serves as sophisticated diversion.
Like Greek metaphysics, it redirects attention from direct observation of transience and conditionality into refined conceptual play, thereby professionalising what was originally a universal, natural insight.

Druidic compression:

The Shakyamuni Buddha offered a natural therapy for suffering grounded in transience and conditionality.
Mahāyāna did not deepen this therapy; it scholasticised and monetised it.
Nāgārjuna did not uncover a deeper layer of reality; he installed a higher-order placeholder to manage doctrinal drift.
The result is a sophisticated metaphysical diversion from the only truths that matter operationally: that phenomena arise conditionally, pass transiently, and that suffering ceases when reification ceases.

Metaphysics as vacuous placeholder

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