The difficulty arises because parallelist thinkers tend to interpret conventional
statements about interrelations as ultimate truths. When this happens, all sorts of
inconsistencies arise; as Nāgārjuna demonstrated, any attempt to characterize ultimate
reality conceptually will eventually reduce to absurdity. Thus, if the internal relation
between a and b were an ultimate truth, and their identities depended upon this relation so
that, as parallelists claim, a and b cannot be conceived of independently, then we would
not be able to say anything about them at all. If a represents humanity and b the
environment, and we cannot conceive of one without the other, all the beliefs of deep
ecologists—regarding, say, the effects of humanity‘s activities on the environment, our
feelings of separateness, and whether we are ―a part of‖ or ―apart from‖ nature—all of
these statements and questions would be impossible to formulate. Indeed, we would not
even be able to say, ―Let a stand for humanity and b for nature.‖ Clearly one cannot grasp
at the final truth of the statement ―everything is internally related to everything,‖ for if we
do, then we cannot account for conventional difference, and we cannot say anything
about individual things. Instead, reality becomes an undifferentiated block, where
everything is exactly the same as everything else.
Conversely, if we took a and b to be ultimately different entities then we could
not explain how things are related, which, clearly, they are ―at least in some way.‖ When
we think of objects and individuals as being separate, each having their own identity, this
is just our ordinary way of perceiving reality, which in Buddhism, amounts to
ignorance—namely, grasping at svabhāva. Buddha, Nāgārjuna, as well as Capra and
other parallelists agree that to conceive of things this way is a mistaken, though
conventional, or traditional view of the world. Under this view, we can account for
difference, yet we are mistaken if we take this difference or view to be ultimately true. As
Nāgārjuna showed in MMK, if we take difference to be ultimately true, then we cannot
explain how it is possible for things to relate to each other. If things are ultimately
separate, then of course, they cannot be related. Garfield sums up the argument as
follows: ―it makes no sense‖ he says, ―to think of [the] relations between entities...as any
kind of relation between independent entities at all.‖ Rather, for Buddhism, ―these
phenomena cannot be understood as the same, as different, or as neither‖ (Garfield 1995,
217).
148
The difficulty arises because parallelist thinkers tend to interpret conventional
statements about interrelations as ultimate truths. When this happens, all sorts of
inconsistencies arise; as Nāgārjuna demonstrated, any attempt to characterize ultimate
reality conceptually will eventually reduce to absurdity. Thus, if the internal relation
between a and b were an ultimate truth, and their identities depended upon this relation so
that, as parallelists claim, a and b cannot be conceived of independently, then we would
not be able to say anything about them at all. If a represents humanity and b the
environment, and we cannot conceive of one without the other, all the beliefs of deep
ecologists—regarding, say, the effects of humanity‘s activities on the environment, our
feelings of separateness, and whether we are ―a part of‖ or ―apart from‖ nature—all of
these statements and questions would be impossible to formulate. Indeed, we would not
even be able to say, ―Let a stand for humanity and b for nature.‖ Clearly one cannot grasp
at the final truth of the statement ―everything is internally related to everything,‖ for if we
do, then we cannot account for conventional difference, and we cannot say anything
about individual things. Instead, reality becomes an undifferentiated block, where
everything is exactly the same as everything else.
Conversely, if we took a and b to be ultimately different entities then we could
not explain how things are related, which, clearly, they are ―at least in some way.‖ When
we think of objects and individuals as being separate, each having their own identity, this
is just our ordinary way of perceiving reality, which in Buddhism, amounts to
ignorance—namely, grasping at svabhāva. Buddha, Nāgārjuna, as well as Capra and
other parallelists agree that to conceive of things this way is a mistaken, though
conventional, or traditional view of the world. Under this view, we can account for
difference, yet we are mistaken if we take this difference or view to be ultimately true. As
Nāgārjuna showed in MMK, if we take difference to be ultimately true, then we cannot
explain how it is possible for things to relate to each other. If things are ultimately
separate, then of course, they cannot be related. Garfield sums up the argument as
follows: ―it makes no sense‖ he says, ―to think of [the] relations between entities...as any
kind of relation between independent entities at all.‖ Rather, for Buddhism, ―these
phenomena cannot be understood as the same, as different, or as neither‖ (Garfield 1995,
217).
148
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