The Active Truth
April 07, 2005
The Buddha had a very active sense of the truth. True things on the conditioned level, he said, don’t exist in isolation; they’re part of a causal chain. They come from previous and co-existing conditions, and they affect conditions that come after them or together with them. And as for the truths we talk about, the truths that can be taught, those are active, too. They have an impact on the person who talks about them, and on the person who listens; they lead to certain kinds of actions. Because of this, the Buddha said that something that was false could not be useful, in the genuine sense of the term. There’s a passage where he talks about different kinds of speech: speech that’s true but not useful; speech that’s true and useful. And then there’s the question of whether people like to hear it or not. But there’s no category for things that are useful and false.