Two Plus One Equals One: A Response to Brook Ziporyn

Brook Ziporyn argues that our dialetheism is too tame, at least with respect to Tiantai Buddhism. He argues first that from the standpoint of Tiantai no assertions are meant to be true at all, that all use of language is nothing but upāya. He then argues that in Tiantai not only some but all contradictions are true. He grounds both of these claims on the further claim that in Tiantai the relation between the two truths is identity. We reject all of these claims, arguing that the relation of round fusion between the two truths is not that of identity, that some claims, even in Tiantai, are meant to be truth-evaluable, and that even in Tiantai there are some claims that are simply false, that not all contradictions are true.