The Fact of Mystery

The “two truths” of Buddhism are usually translated as relative and absolute, or conventional and ultimate truth. The Tibetan terms are kun rdzob bden pa and don dam bden pa. Ken McLeod is dissatisfied with the usual English translations of these. Looking again at the Tibetan word bden pa, usually translated as “truth,” he found its key sense to be not misleading, and that led him to a very different formulation.

Ken McLeod in conversation with Stuart Goodnick and Robert Schmidt, The Mystical Positivist, 11 July, 2026.

I just did the final edits on an article for Tricycle which sprung out of a dissatisfaction with the usual translation of the two truths in Mahayana Buddhism, what are usually called absolute and relative truth. I’ve always had a problem with absolute and relative because I think they’re deeply misleading, and I usually used ultimate and apparent—what is apparently true and what is ultimately true.

But when I was revisiting this—and it was for some work I was doing on Unfettered Mind’s website—I realized that the word truth was also a problem, that there were ideas in the word truth, especially in English, that simply weren’t present in the use of the corresponding word in Tibetan. And so I did some research on what is the key idea or meaning in the word in Tibetan, and it was the idea of not misleading.

Shortly after I came up with that, I had a conversation with Stephen Batchelor, and I mentioned that I was thinking about this, and before I could even finish, he said, “Yeah, I translate that word as fact.” And I went, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Until very recently, a fact was something that was just a fact. Now we’ve got the business of “alternative facts,” which is a whole other problem.

So now, in what I’ve written in this article, and what I would use in the future, is: the Mahayana outlook—or the Mahayana philosophy, if you prefer—is the two facts. One is the fact of mystery. That is, we do not know what awareness is. We do not know what this life is, what it is. We could be dreaming. We cannot say. We live in mystery, period. That’s a fact. We cannot know it. Nobody’s ever figured it out over ten thousand years, or whatever.

And the other fact is the fact of life. We are in a life. We experience being in the world as being a being in the world that is perceiving the world, and the world acting on it and it acting on the world. And that’s also a fact.

And the analogy I use is like waves and water. The water is the mystery, and the waves, which are simply motion of water, are analogous to life. And it actually works rather well. But it’s a very different kind of way of looking at it from the usual two truths, absolute and relative.

“Absolute” and “relative” truth can easily be misconstrued as pointing to different levels of reality, but the fact of life and the fact of mystery land quite differently. Ken hasn't simply replaced “truth” with “fact.” He has reframed what the two truths point to: the undeniable fact that we are living this life, and the equally undeniable fact that we cannot finally say what it is. The image of waves and water helps make the difference clear. Mystery is not separate from life, just as waves are the motion of water.

Later in the conversation Ken describes faith as “the ability to stand in and meet the mystery.” For me, that points to the practice of meeting experience, meeting life, without pinning it down.

Ken in conversation with Stuart Goodnick, Robert Schmidt, and others on The Mystical Positivist

Related posts:
Truth or Experience?
The Door of Faith

Let the World Show Itself

It's my 7th year as a volunteer life story writer for our local hospice. I spend time with people who are approaching the end of their lives and listen as they tell me their stories.

This work has taught me that I don't know what matters for someone else. Something that seems significant to me may warrant only a passing mention, or they may unfold what seems like an apparently inconsequential detail into something much larger. I can ask questions and return to something that seems unfinished, but ultimately I am there to help someone who wants to tell their story, not to interpret what I'm hearing, or tell them what their story is.

This seems obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to cross the boundary. We hear something and immediately begin to make sense of it. We decide what is important, what caused what, what it means. Instead of listening to what is being revealed, we start telling the whole world what it is.

James Low often speaks about this habit of ours. We fill experience with our concepts, judgments, explanations, and interpretations, rather than allowing it to show itself. Many hours of listening to others describing moments from their lives has made me much more aware of how frequently I do this.

And it isn't confined to listening to other people. I often do the same thing with my own experience. Something happens and almost immediately I know what it is: good or bad, important or unimportant, something I want or don't want, something that shouldn't have happened.

Practice offers another possibility: to remain present long enough for experience to show itself before I tell it what it is. And now here's James Low on this very topic...

From Working with Life and Death, 2018, James Low

We imagine that we see trees and motor cars and other people. But what do we actually see? If I allow myself to receive the world before I tell the world what it is, everything is there and there's nothing for me to do with it.

Once I get into concepts, then I can make a judgment. "Oh, someone's parked their car not very well, now that car can't get out," and so on. "Well, that tree looks as if it could fall over in a storm. If that happened, it could fall on the roof here. I hope they've got insurance."

Our mind can run and run and run with all sorts of thoughts and elaborations, but that's talking about the world. We fill the world with our concepts and, of course, that's a never-ending task. Once you commit yourself to being a stream of thoughts, you can't stop thinking, because then who would you be? So the function of meditation is to relax our addiction to thought and to enter into another domain. It's not an altered state of consciousness. It is exactly what has always been here, but it's as if it's a paradigm shift. By not filling the world with our concepts what is the immediate presentation of the phenomena? We see the tree. When the thought starts to arise in the mind, just relax into the out-breath as if you were focusing on the breath. Take the same focus onto the tree.

Something is there, or something is appearing. Even before we think of it, and grammar is very difficult here because we always insert thing into everything. Something is there, but certainly appearance manifests, appearance shows. Stay with that.

The empty mind receives the world as it is. The conceptual mind tells the world what it is. So this is a major kind of fulcrum point or turning point, and if we open to the world as it is, the whole process of being sick, of getting limited, and moving towards death is just that. Now this may be rather annoying for other people...

Related posts

• How to Interact Around Practice
• How Meaning Reveals Itself
• The Rocky Path of Not Knowing