Does Ultimate Reality Matter?

There’s a sharp objection to any philosophy built on emptiness as ultimate reality: we don’t live in emptiness. We live here, in conventional reality – in relationships, responsibilities, and deadlines. So what does it matter that reality is ultimately empty, that phenomena arise without intrinsic existence, or that the self is a convenient fiction? None of that pays the bills or maintains relationships.

The objection above is correct. Conventional reality is all there is for practical purposes. But conceding this costs nothing.

What emptiness offers isn’t an escape from conventional reality or even a grander perspective on it. It’s simpler than that: seeing things clearly makes them easier to navigate. Not because the difficulties disappear, but because most of the friction we experience isn’t with reality itself – it’s with our misreading of it. We suffer the gap between what is and what we’ve insisted should be. We reify moments, relationships, and selves into things more solid and permanent than they are, then feel betrayed when they behave otherwise.

Clearly seeing reality as ultimately empty, as things arising dependently, offers a therapeutic effect. However, that effect doesn’t come from the explanation. It comes entirely from the seeing. For me, everything since that seeing has been translation work – finding language for something that arrived complete, building bridges toward something that can only be arrived at directly.

So no, ultimate reality doesn’t matter in day to day life. But understanding it turns out to make conventional reality – the only reality anyone actually inhabits – significantly easier to live in. That’s not a consolation prize. It’s the whole point.