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