The Four Noble Truths

Transcription from online discourse recorded Aug 1 2015

The four noble truths are the basic statement of the Buddha's teachings. These four truths are included in the content of the 1st discourse of the Buddha after his awakening and the subsequent 45 years of his teaching career is basically filling in the details (commentary) on the four noble truths, it's all in the four noble truths. After the Buddha's awakening under the Bodhi tree at first he was not inclined to teach. His mind was inclined towards just enjoying the bliss of enlightenment sitting under the tree. He thought it would be “a weariness and a fixation for me, this generation of beings are attached to their sense pleasures, they will not want to hear this teaching, this teaching will be difficult for them to hear”. But then a powerful being, Brahma Sahāmpati (one of the Brahma deities, a very refined level of being) appeared before the Buddha on bended knee and begged him to teach for the sake of those with little dust in their eyes. So the Buddha consented and he turned his mind to seeing who in this world be a suitable recipient for these teachings in the first instance and he thought of his teachers during his early years (there had been 2 yogis who had taught him various meditation techniques) that started him on his path. He decided at the time when he was studying with them he decided his teachings were incomplete so he went on to his own search. But we should always have respect and veneration to our teachers and the Buddha thought of them as the first worthy recipients but when he turned his mind to find where they were he realised they had both died in the interim. So he next thought of his companions in the years of his austerities (he had spent 6 years wondering and practicing austerities) and he had five companions at that time and he saw that they were in the deer park at Isophatina near Varanasi (this Sarnath in modern India - Saraswathi). He then headed that direction and when he arrived at the deer park the five ascetic (his companions) they saw him coming and they said "here comes that backslider Gautoma" - because they had been practicing extreme fasting and at the end he decided that was counterproductive and he had taken a bowl of milk rice before his final meditation. They thought that was scandalous (that he had been indulging in such luxuries) so they agreed amongst themselves "don't show any respect, don't get up to greet him, he's a backslider". But as he approached closer they saw the radiance of his face and the nobility of his bearing. They couldn't help themselves, they got up and prepared a seat for him and they brought him a water drink and water to wash his feet.

The Buddha then sat down and he gave the first sermon (the dhamma chawakana Sutta) to the five ascetics in the deer park. This sermon is very beloved in the Theravada tradition, it's often chanted as a recistation in the Pali. He began by teaching briefly on the idea of a middle path between hedonism and asceticism. He said that there these two paths in the world that don't lead anywhere - 1 is the path of sensual indulgence which he called the low path of the village and the other path that leads nowhere is the path of self mortification (extreme asceticism) -so one should neither seek pleasure nor pain but practice the middle way.

After this introduction he then launched into the main theme of his talk which is the four noble truths. The structure of the four noble truths is the truth of Dukkha (or suffering), the truth of the origin of Dukkha, the truth of the ending of Dukkha, and the truth of the path leading to the ending of Dukkha. The structure follows a scheme that would have been familiar to any reasonably educated person in India at the time. It follows the pattern of the medical texts of the day. This is something that the Buddha often did in his teaching career, was that he would take structures and forms from the existing culture and give them a new angle. The idea with these medical texts was they would deal with a disease first by describing the symptoms, then the cause of the disease, then the prognoses (whether it could be cured or not), then finally laid out a course of treatment. So the primordial disease of beings is Dukkha (the disease that covers all others).

We need to talk a bit about this word Dukkha because usually if you see English translations of the four noble truths it will be the 1st noble truth is the truth of suffering. Sometimes expressed in English summaries as life is suffering. This is somewhat misleading and unfortunate and tends to give Buddhist teaching the reputation of being gloomy or pessimistic. I was asked once at a talk somebody said "how come you Buddhist always talk about suffering all the time" and I said "that's not fair we don't talk just about suffering, we also talk about pain, grief, lamentation and despair". That was my sort of flip first answer. What we really need to do is look at this word Dukkha. The English word suffering is really too narrow to cover the range of Dukkha. Yes suffering is Dukkha but not all Dukkha is suffering. Every moment of our existence as in samsara, every conditioned experience we have, everything that arises through the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body is Dukkha, but it's not all suffering. In this human existence we have a mixture of painful sensation, pleasurable sensations and a great mass of just neutral boring in the middle neither pleasure nor pain. And even the pleasurable sensations are Dukkha. And Dukkha is not just subjective reactions, but it's an integral objective part of the fabric of reality. It means that the things which arise in conditioned phenomena, manifestation in the broader sense, everything is to some degree deficient, imperfect, provisional, nothing is absolutely perfect, ideal, completely satisfying. And as I said this is not just a problem of a subjective attitude, which sometimes people seem to think that's what the teachings mean (is that we are just looking at it wrongly). It's not just that it's also that reality itself is flawed. Manifestation is itself an imperfection and will never be perfect. There's a line I come across once in a book about Tibeten Buddhism that put forth an interesting argument, it said that "if there were 1 object in anywhere in Samsaric conditioned cosmos that were perfect and absolutely satisfying, the universe would have ceased ages ago because consciousness would light upon that object and never move again. There's no reason for a consciousness to move or flip from object to object as it does except for the unsatisfying nature of the objects. This is built into the fabric of reality, this is the inherent basis of manifestation and conscious existence. The mind is trying to become satisfied with objects, the mind taking an object and it is never satisfied and it moves onto the next one, the next shiny thing. This is the primordial addiction of mind - taking of objects.

This is explained in the second noble truth, which is the truth of the origin of Dukkha (Dukkha Samudaya) which is tanha, craving or desire. There are 3 aspects or kinds of tanha. There is the craving of sense pleasure, which is easy enough to understand, the mind wants pleasant objects of the eye, ear, nose, tongue and the body. This is a primary motivating factor in the psychology of all beings at our level of existence which is the sense desire realm. Primarily driven (unless we are very conscious and mindful) by the desire to experience pleasant sensations and to avoid unpleasant sensations.

The second form of craving (tanha) is the craving for being (bhava-tanha - craving for being or becoming). In its most primal form this is simply the desire to exist but it manifests as the desire to be greater than we are. To be more perfect, to be smarter, prettier, thinner, stronger, more famous, more wealthy, holyer, better meditator, whatever - is desire to be. As I say, in its most primal form it's simply the desire to exist.

Then there is the third kind of tanha is the desire to not be. In its most primal form it's the desire for annihilation. It manifests in a milder way for everyone all the time alternatively with the desire to be. Whenever you try to throttle down consciousness through oversleeping, vegging out in front of the TV, taking drink or drugs, over eating. There's many different strategies beings use to make themselves less conscious because consciousness is perceived as a burden and you want to dull it down (that's vibhava tanha - the desire for not being). So in its most extreme form it's the desire for annihilation, in a milder form it's just a desire to be less and curl up into a ball and be less than you, experience less, feel less acutely. These three forms of tanha are the driving engine, the motor of conditioned existence (of Samsara). This is what keeps us in being. We are chasing our own tails, we are like hamsters in a wheel in this existence. The samsaric project is inherently endless, it's inherently pointless, it's an unwinnable game. It's like playing solitaire with a deck of 51. There's an old song like about that, playing solitaire till dawn with a deck of 51. This sums up the samsaric existence.

The third noble truth is the good news, the hopeful aspect and is what keeps Buddhist philosophy from being ultimately pessimistic. If we just stop at the second noble truth we have something like existentialism. Buddhism doesn't say that "life sucks, just deal with it", it says that there is a way out, there is something other than this. There is an end of Dukkha. In his first sermon the Buddha didn't really go into detail about this, he didn't explain it very much. He just said that when tanha is ended then suffering is ended. But in the course of later teachings it is explained somewhat more, he is talking about Nibhanna, the unconditioned. All this realm we experience (our human ordinary existence) is conditioned. Everything arises according to causes and conditions and this is part of why it is Dukkha, because everything is contingent dependent on other things. There is no self standing self sufficient entity anywhere to be found. And it is an endless circle, an endless cycling and recycling and there's no beginning or end to it. And while this cannot be made perfect, while there cannot be found any ultimate happiness or ultimate satisfaction within the conditioned there is an ending to it, there is an alternate, there is the unconditioned, unmanifest, the unborn, the unmade. Nibhanna or Nirvana in Sanskrit.

Now Nibhanna is impossible to define or express in ordinary language. There is another instance of the Buddha using forms from the culture in 1 discourse he was in conversation with an ascetic who asked him a question phrased this way "does the Tathagata exist after death". The Tathagata in this context is a synonym for an enlightened being, the one who has experienced nibhana. So he is trying in this way to pin down the nature of Nibhanna. He says "does the Tathagata exist after death" and the Budhha said "no that does not fit the case", so he said ok "well then does the tagatha not exist after death" and the Budhha said "no that does not fit the case", alright then "does the tagatha both exist and not exist after death", and the Budhha said "no that does not fit the case", well there's 1 left "does the Tathagata neither exist nor exist after death" and the Budhha said "no that does not fit the case". Now that passage is using the system of Indian formal logic, mathematical logic in ancient India was different than the logic developed in the Western world by the Greeks which was a binary system expressed formally either A or not A. In India the tertiary system expressed as A, not A, both A and not A, and neither A nor not A. So there's a more subtle system but it was one that was recognised and educated person would have seen what the Buddha was doing. He was expressing the concept that Nibhanna can't fit into your logical categories. So this left the poor guy quite baffled and so the Buddha as he often did gave a simile, they were sitting by a fire and he said "if this fire were to go out and I asked you the question has the fire gone to the north" I'd say "well that doesn't fit the case, that doesn't make any sense. Or if I said it went to the South, the East, the West you would say the same. The question is meaningless. The fire hasn't either gone to either north, south, east or west and the Tathagata you can't say of him after death that he either exists, or not or both or neither. It just doesn't fit the categories.

Talking about Nibhanna, we are talking about something that is beyond ordinary conceptualisation. There is a hint of this in that 1st sermon, when the Buddha talked about Dukkha in the 1st truth he said "this truth must be understood". He used the Pali verb "Parigarati" which means to understand, to grasp fully. So the truth of Dukkha which is the truth of our ordinary existence is something that the ordinary human conceptual mind can grasp, or has the potential to grasp and understand. However when he talked about Nibhanna he didn't say this is to be understood, he said this is to be realised. He used the verb "sachikaroti" which means to experience for oneself. So it can't be understood or grasped with the conceptual mind but it can be experienced. That is within our potentiality. Human beings have the potential of realising Nibhanna. Experience of Nibhanna is what happens when we just stop doing Samsara. To think of Samsara not as a place or a process really but something that we do, something that we choose moment by moment. We want that next shiny thing. We are not ready to give it up yet, the desire is still driving us on. But it's very much easier said than done. The attachment we have to Samsaric manifestation and existence is the deep primordial addiction in the mind is very hard to break. Although in the end it's just that one simple movement of the mind as it says in one text - "the mind lights upon non occurrence". It just stops doing that, that's really all there is to it. But to find our way there usually is not an easy thing to do.

So the Buddha concludes the sermon with the fourth truth which is the truth of the path to the ending of suffering. The 8 fold noble path. He lays out a lifestyle or guide for bringing the mind into harmony with the unconditioned.

The first of the eight steps of the path is "sammaditthi", usually “right view”. Sama translated as "right" really means something like perfect or complete. To get away from the sense of right or wrong, think of it as perfected or completed or fulfilled. And ditthi is view, it's the way we understand and view the world. It's something more than just our beliefs or opinions, it's rather our underlying assumptions and the way we look at things. Right view can be and is defined in the suttas in different ways, but in this first sutta it is defined as having a view that is in accordance with the four noble truths. So it's a circular definition. If one views the world through the prism of the four noble truths then one has right view.

Samma Sankappa is "right thought or right intention". Which is having thoughts that are based on kindness, generosity, wisdom and renunciation. So if one has wrong intentions or thoughts based on greediness, acquisition, cruelty and ill will then these are wrong thoughts. In terms of what leads us closer to liberation and awakening and what brings us further away from it.

3. Samma Wacha is defined as "right speech". right speech is first of defined as speaking that which is true. There are also other definitions - avoiding harsh speech, avoiding slander and avoiding foolish babbling (defined as horizontal going "kuricha nagama" meaning speech like an animal - sort of mouth noise, a waste of time). There is a place where the Buddha talks about the speech that a Tathagata would utter and not utter as a definition of right speech. First of all whatever words that the Tathagata speaks are true and never untrue. Secondly they are always meaningful and not meaningless (the word in Pali is Ata, which means significant or important - it's one of those words that is very difficult to translate). In the Sanskrit tradition they pair Dharma and artah as two kinds of aspects of right living. Atah the Pali form is not used as much but it is used frequently and it means something has weight, significance, it's important, it has meaning. So the speech that is uttered by the Tathagata has significance, it is not insignificant. The third factor is that it's beneficial and not otherwise. The fourth one is interesting, it says that speech uttered by a Tathagata is always either pleasant to hear or spoken at the right time. So with a little contemplation you can figure what that means which is if you have something to say to somebody and it's true and it's meaningful and it's useful for him to hear but he's not going to like then it's best to wait for the right time (don't just blurt it out). Deciding on the right time can be defined a little closer. There is a passage in the vinaya which advises monks when to admonish another monk and this could be applied to anybody. First off, you should examine your own mind and if you are going to admonish somebody make sure you are free of that fault. If you’re doing the same damn thing you have no right to talk. You need to shut up until you have cleaned up your own act (that's number 1). The second thing is to examine your own mind and make sure you are free of anger, and if you are, wait till you have calmed down. Then you can criticize the person calmly and reasonably and point out what he has done wrong. The third one you need to use your best judgement to figure is this person ready to hear what I have to say. If you think they'll just get defensive and it won't do any good then you are better not to make matters worse, you're better to just hold your peace. So it's a pretty high standard for when you should criticize somebody.

The next factor is right action. Perfect action, complete action which is the factor of morality with the body. It's defined basically the same as the precepts. Not killing, not stealing and not committing sexual misconduct. This right action with the body.

The next one is right livelihood. Livelihood is how we feed our body, how we maintain our existence in the world. There must have been a reason for including this. Logically it's not really necessary to include it as a separate factor because everything we do in terms of livelihood is either with speech or body. So they are already covered by right action and right speech. But there must be emphasis here because how we maintain the body has a special powerful karmic significance. We should practice a livelihood that is beneficial, honest and fair to ourselves, to our clients, to employers, to our employees - all these social factors have to be considered. There are listed elsewhere livelihoods, specifically 5 livelihood trades that are considered inherently wrong and to be avoided by buddhist lay people. These are dealing in weapons, dealing in poisons, dealing in intoxicants, dealing in animals for slaughter and dealing in human slaves. These are considered the forbidden trades.

Then those factors (right thought, speech, action and livelihood) are considered factors of morality, sila or ethics. The last factors relate more to mental development, to meditation. These are the factors of right energy (right effort), right samadhi, and right mindfulness.

Right effort (samma vayamo) is the effort to purify the mind. It is defined as four factors. As the effort to raise up wholesome states that have not yet arison, to nourish and encourage those wholesome states which have already arisen, to prevent the arising of unwholesome states, and to work to diminish and reduce and finally eliminate unwholesome states that have already arisen in the mind.

Right mindfulness (Samma Sati) is mindfulness of the body, feelings, mental states and mental objects. These are the four foundations of mindfulness. The word Sati is pretty much translated as mindfulness. I have heard one Bhikku that I know who is a senior Bhikku, who does a lot of teaching, says that he no longer uses the word mindfulness or sati because it's been so messed up in the culture, people have so many ideas about what it means that don't really apply to sati. This is actually a general problem in Buddhism. Popular understanding of Buddhism is hindered by misunderstanding of English words that don't quite match the Pali originals. The word sati is actually closely related to the idea of memory and some older books translate sati as re-collectedness which is actually pretty good. The idea is that if you have sati you remember to be present and if you have sati you remember stuff. There is one simple application in daily life, if you always forgetting where you put your car keys or your pen or glasses or whatever that's because you weren't practicing sati when you put them down. If you put something down mindfully, you don't have to make an effort to remember where it is, you have registered it and it will come back when you need it. If you toss aside while you are thinking of something else you will never remember where you put it. This is a very small, immediate daily life application of the word sati. The way it works in the Buddhist psychology (called Abhidhamma) is that for a sequence of mind moments to register an object you must be fully conscious. If you are not fully conscious of that last step in the process, the registration of the object doesn't occur and it's lost to memory. So mindfulness and memory are closely related concepts.

When we practice formal meditation, one form of meditation that we do is vipassana meditation which is mindfulness meditation per say. There are different forms of doing vipassana but the underlying idea is to try to make yourself fully conscious of each object as it arises in the mind and there are different techniques for developing that. This is what finally gets you liberated from Samsara as I said that the process is the primordial addiction of going for the next shiny thing. If you make that fully conscious, that process runs itself down because you're no longer fooled by it, you see it as "oh yeah, just that again" and eventually it allows the mind to do the little sideways slip and not do that anymore and realise the unconditioned.

The final path factor in the list is Samma Samadhi and samadhi is really untranslatable. It's been often translated as concentration but I really want to get away from that, I think that's dead wrong. Samadhi is the stability of mind, stillness of mind and it's actually how it's defined in the commentaries as the non wavering of mind. Is the mind still with a single object, filled with a single object, not moving. The ordinary mind in daily life is sometimes called the monkey mind because it's like a monkey jumping from branch to branch, your mind is constantly flitting from this to that to the other thing. When you do a samadhi meditation you choose a single object such as the breath (which is a common object to choose). You choose the physical sensations of breathing and try to fill consciousness with that. Why I don't like the word concentration is because concentration implies a narrowing of the mind and the mind with good samadhi is far from narrow, it's vast and spacious but it's still. It's often said to put your mind on the breath, but a better way to approach it is to think tp fill the mind with the breath, keep the mind still, wide open and spacious but let all that vast space be filled with a single object and then this is samadhi, the mind is not moving.

So this is the 8 fold path which is the path that leads to the end of suffering. After the Buddha had given this sermon one of the 5 monks (and they are to be called monks now, they were the first followers of the Buddha, the beginning of the sangha) Kandanya he exclaimed "that which is subject to arising is subject to cessation" and the Buddha said "Kandanya knows, Kandanya knows" which in Pali is Anya Kandanya and after that his name was Anya Kandanya. This is a very concise statement in the text but it has a great power underlying meaning to it. What Anya Kandanya said is an interesting statement (although it's quite in accord with the Buddha's later teachings) because the Buddha did not say anything about that in the first sermon. So this was an independent penetration of reality by Kandanya. What he said doesn't follow logically from what the Buddha had said, so he had penetrated reality on his own during the sermon and now he uttered his own expression of Dhamma at the end of the sermon and the Buddha recognised it and said Kondanja knows. When the Buddha had said that, the local devas (the forest devas, the bumma devas, the lowest level of spiritual beings) set up a cry of rejoicing. They said here in the deer park at Varanasi the Buddha has turned the wheel of the Dhamma. This is why it's called the dhamma chakka pavattana sutta which means turning the wheel of the Dhamma. When this cry was set up by the bomma devas it was picked up by the devas of the lowest sensual heaven, the devas of the four great kings and they set up a cry "the wheel of Dhamma has been turned". That was heard by the devas of the 33, the Tawa Tingsha heaven devas at the top of Mount Sumeru and they set up to cry and it went up through all the other realms, all the sensual heavens and up to the Brahma heavens. Then the whole universe was filled with a brilliant light, 10,000 world systems were brilliantly illuminated. So this was a moment of great cosmic import, this is the most significant moment in the history of the world. It was not the Buddha's enlightenment under the bodhi tree but it was Kondanya’s realisation, his opening of the Dhamma eye, the attainment of stream entry, independent realisation of Nibhanna because this had meant that the Buddha had successfully transmitted the teaching. He had turned the wheel of the Dhamma. If he had not managed to successfully transmit the teaching we would not be here today talking about it, it would have been totally forgotten. So this was the moment that established the Dhamma had successfully been transmitted, the wheel was turning, no samana or brahma or mara or deva can stop it from turning once it's been turned.

So this is the four noble truths and some of the background and associations with it, the teaching of it and the significance of it.

Ajahn Punnadhammo