Background for Understanding Bodhichitta

The Two Truths

To develop a bodhichitta aim, the first thing that we need to know and be clear about is to have some idea of what bodhichitta is. There are actually two aspects of bodhichitta and this is in accordance with the two truths. The two truths about anything are the relative appearance of things, so that’s called “relative” or “conventional truth.” We can translate it more literally as “superficial truth,” so superficially what things appear to be like, how they appear to us. Then the deepest truth about things, how they actually exist, in other words voidness (emptiness) of various things, and their absence of existing in impossible ways. Both of them are true; it is not that one is absolute or ultimate truth and the other one is less true. We’re not talking about some transcendental truth that’s totally removed from our ordinary world, although sometimes the vocabulary that’s used in European languages suggests that, but that is not the actual meaning.

In Mahayana, when we speak about the two truths, we are talking about the two truths of anything. They are true facts about things. When we talk about the relative or conventional truth of things, we’re talking about as I said the appearance of things, so the appearance of what they are. When we speak about an appearance, things don’t have an appearance just by themselves. When we talk about an appearance, an appearance is to a mind. The appearance of the sink in the kitchen – is it appearing now? Well, we don’t know, I mean it is not just appearing. The only way that we can talk about the appearance of the sink in the kitchen is if we walk into the kitchen and look at it. Then it appears to us. It’s not just appearing by itself, sitting in there with nobody in the kitchen. In that way, the type of appearance that we experience, that our mind experiences, depends very much on the state of that mind, the condition of that mind.

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