The important Buddhist doctrine of the two truths--conventional truths and
ultimate truths--is the subject of this book. It examines how the doctrine
evolved within early Buddhism from efforts to make sense of contradictions
within the collected sayings of the Buddha. The two truths, however, came to
refer not primarily to statements or language, but to the realities to which
statements or language referred. As such, the doctrine of the two truths became
one through which Buddhist philosophers focused their efforts to elaborate an
abhidharma, a higher teaching which allowed them to explain how the mind
apprehends and misapprehends the world, how it attaches itself to objects that
do