The claim
The Mahāyāna hermeneutical framework — specifically the Two Truths (saṃvṛti / paramārtha) and the provisional/definitive (neyārtha / nītārtha) distinction — is not a later Mahāyāna overlay read back onto a framework-innocent canon. Its structural antecedents are already present in the Buddha’s discourses. The proof is convergent evolution. A tradition with no Mahāyāna commitments, the Theravāda, drew the same two-truths and nītattha/neyyattha apparatus out of the same suttas when it built the Abhidhamma, and did so independently.
Evidence for
- karunadasa-theravada-abhidhamma-2010 (Ch 3): the Theravāda sammuti-sacca / paramattha-sacca distinction is “an Abhidhammic innovation” but “not completely dissociated from the early Buddhist teachings”; its antecedents are the Aṅguttara nītattha / neyyattha pair and the Saṅgīti Sutta’s sammuti-ñāṇa / paricchede-ñāṇa.
- The tradition’s own exegetes drew the connection: the Aṅguttara commentary “seeks to establish a correspondence between the original sutta passage [on nītattha/neyyattha] and the Theravāda version of the two truths” (Karunadasa, Ch 3 p. 64). This is internal evidence — the Theravāda did not need Mahāyāna prompting to read the two truths out of the suttas.
- Provisional and Definitive — the Pāli locus is canonical: Aṅguttara II.60, neyyattha / nītattha, with the warning that confusing them “misrepresents the Tathāgata.”
- Living Theravāda practice (tenpa-personal-notes-2025): Thai Forest Tradition fieldwork (Ajahn Teera) shows present-day Theravāda practitioners operating a two-truth pedagogy. The Padmakara “systematic expression of the Buddha’s silence” reading pushes the catuṣkoṭi’s root back to the Pāli Vacchagotta avyākata set.
- The graded teaching is canonical: MMK 18:6–8 — Nāgārjuna’s own statement of the graded self/no-self teaching — is itself a restatement of a sutta-level pedagogy. Siderits reaches the same device independently on BCA 8/9.
Evidence against / objections
- Karunadasa is an apologist. His reading is the commentarial-tradition reading of the canon, produced partly to defend the Theravāda against the Mahāyāna reification charge. “Antecedent trends in the suttas” is a weaker claim than “the framework is stated in the suttas,” and Karunadasa concedes the gap: the two truths are an Abhidhammic innovation, and “in the early Buddhist discourses we do not see such a distinction explicitly stated” (karunadasa-theravada-abhidhamma-2010 Ch 1 p. 26).
- The calibration difference cuts both ways. Following Edgerton, Karunadasa notes that Pāli prefers neither nītattha nor neyyattha, whereas Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit does prefer nītārtha. So the evaluative ranking that carries the framework-as-pedagogy weight in the Mahāyāna is precisely what is absent from the Pāli. An opponent could argue that this shows the Mahāyāna framework doing something genuinely new, rather than merely drawing out the canonical structure.
- Scope difference. On the Theravāda reading, suññatā is anchored to anattā (empty of self); it is not extended to a universal niḥsvabhāva of all phenomena (see Emptiness, karunadasa-theravada-abhidhamma-2010). The Mahāyāna’s distinctive extension of emptiness to all dharmas is not canonically antecedent in the way the two-truths structure is.
- Walser’s strategic-publication thesis offers a sociological rather than doctrinal explanation of the framework’s emergence — a rival account this claim does not address.