In my experience, I have found that in some key Buddhist works that the apparent contradiction is a literary device for learning. I don't think that contradictions are intended to persist and represent a "finished" philosophy.
Hm. I've seen some of that, for sure. But for me the contradictions also point out the long-term weakness of taking conceptual frameworks too seriously. Our conceptual models of the world, like our software models, are temporary structures that we use for particular purposes. Eventually, we throw them all away. The map is not the territory, and there is no perfect map, just the right one for the moment.
