The two truths · saṃvṛti & paramārtha

Nāgārjuna's device for saying two incompatible things without lying: there is conventional truth (the chariot exists, the road is long, your mother is your mother) and ultimate truth (no chariot exists independently of its parts and their relations). Neither cancels the other; the ultimate is not a hidden replacement for the conventional but a correct account of what the conventional is. Confuse the levels in either direction and you fall — into nihilism one way, into reification the other. The Kabbalah's PaRDeS holds four levels at once by exactly the same discipline: peshat, the plain sense, is never destroyed by sod, the secret; the deepest reading must leave the surface standing. Both traditions built a technology for holding levels simultaneously, and both warn that the failure mode is not error but arrogance — the student who has learned one true thing and uses it to demolish everything else.