Higher Truth?

In his account of the Buddhist teachings of totality, Garma C.C. Chang describes a distinction between the practical truths of daily life and a 'higher truth'. While practical truths refer to the everyday conventions we ascribe to (such as names of things, habitual ways of seeing), Chang describes higher truth as "an observation that is not bound by any particular realm or frame of reference; it rises above all frames of reference and all positions." (p.83) Does this higher truth refer to a neutral experience, or some kind of theoretical objective position? I don't think this is what the chapter is referring to. In fact, I tend to think that the higher truth that Chang refers to is direct experience itself, which somehow goes beyond categorizing. With emptiness (shunyata), the idea is not about trying to drain all experiences of their meaning or arrive at a kind of proposed 'neutral' position. In fact, it is the way of seeing that suggests that there is no final position, and that any reference point is only relative to the way an experience is framed.
   I have a feeling after reading this chapter in The Buddhist Teaching of Totality, that it's simply impossible to know emptiness only through a book, or even from reflecting on a concept. The reason is that emptiness, paradoxically, is about the fullness of experience itself. It is a kind of deeply lived, moment-to-moment appreciation of experience as it is lived in community with other beings. If emptiness were about 'null' then it would simply be opposed to anything that has ever been. On the other hand, if emptiness were about fixed essences, there would be no change in the universe, and no novelty. Both views are incorrect because they try to reduce lived, impermanent experience into something static, fixed and abstract. It is as though one were to try to funnel all of experience into a tiny paper cup. And the reason is quite understandable: after all, experience can be incredibly unrewarding and overwhelming at times. And during those times, a tendency that many people have is to try to simplify and even eliminate complexity.
    This true emptiness, on the other hand, is more like seeing all the turmoil of life with very open and courageous eyes. It's not so easy to realize this, and very easy to confuse it with a kind of apathy. But when a person is really embracing emptiness, she or he is able to entertain every possibility that arises in mind without becoming attached to it or giving into the tendency to want to reduce it to something else. This is a very different view of emptiness from simply reading in a book that emptiness is about no-self or 'not having attachments'. The nature of emptiness is so inclusive that even talking about it is somehow conceptually limiting it. Even thinking of emptiness as a 'thing' is limiting as well!
     What is the outcome of all this reading? I think it means that one could try to practice refraining from reducing one's life to a set of predefined problems/solutions. It is best achieved by getting out of one's head and working in a community or just helping others in some way. I have found that tutoring is one way to get out of attachment to thoughts, because it gives me room to focus on something besides categories or habitual patterns of thinking. When I am tutoring or working in some community, the world no longer revolves around having to resolve or eliminate what I consider to be problematic. Rather, those problems are seen as one way of seeing among many others, where some things get pushed to the foreground and others to the background. It's then that I can also observe how these same pictures can be reconfigured into completely new foregrounds/backgrounds. In other words, there is a three dimensional space I am working with that allows for the objects to turn and reveal new facets to them.
    When I think in this three dimensional space, I find that life is less about problem solving and more about teasing out the complex threads that makes up one's story and connections with others. Isn't life much more interesting when a person can drop their idea that life is something that needs to be 'solved'? Would it not lead to the higher truth that life is complex and never-ending interconnection?

Chang, Garma C.C (1977). The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University