Two Subtle Realities

Buddhism offers practical guidance for everyday living, showing how to move through each day with joy and inner calm. It also provides deeper methods for loosening the mind's hold on grasping and clinging, the attachments that generate a tangle of troubling thoughts and emotions.

The way out of that tangle is a powerful counterforce: a thorough, penetrating wisdom that perceives reality as it truly is, rather than as we habitually and mistakenly take it to be. Reality has two aspects that remain valid across all times, places and circumstances, namely impermanence and emptiness. Only by fully understanding and experiencing both can the mind be freed from clinging and grasping, which the book treats as two persistent inner afflictions.

This book explains subtle impermanence and emptiness in plain language, without relying on technical philosophical vocabulary, so that a modern reader can grasp the essential meaning of what the Buddha taught on these subjects. It presents that teaching as his final message, given out of compassion for all beings.