My Argument With the Four Noble Truths

Recently a friend asked me to provide a summary statement of the Four Noble Truths for a publication. I was immediately reluctant. I thought of the fact that the Four Truths have only in modern times become the normative statement of Buddhist wisdom. I also was concerned with how easily they can be misunderstood. So, after fretting a bit, this is what I provided:

The Four Truths (Using Sanskrit terms. Pali is the other major language of sacred texts)

1) Dukkha: Human suffering, anguish, angst. It is not having what we want, and not wanting what we have. The sense of dis-ease that shadows human life.

2) Samudaya: We are composed of parts in constant motion. Our human minds perceive this motion as if it were substantive. When we try to hold tightly onto that which is changing we experience dukkha. (Classically this is expressed through the Three Marks of Existence: Anitya, the impermanence of things, Anatman, the insubstantiality of ego identity, and Dukkha, pervasive anxiety.)

3) Nirodha: The Good News. We need not suffer this way.

4) Marga: The Middle Way, or Eight-fold Path of Liberation

Right, correct, profitable View, Resolve, Speech, Conduct, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfullness, Concentration (Often helpful to divide these eight aspects into three parts: Wisdom, Morality and Meditation)

My friend wrote back and asked if it were possible to provide something more “declarative.” Certainly this is a reasonable request, particularly for an editor seeking pithy points for what would be a sidebar to something larger. But it opened real problems.

The Oxford Dictionary of Buddhism’s article on the Four Noble Truths contains what are almost certainly the Buddha’s comments which are repeated in various suttas (sacred texts in the Pali).
I. But what, O Monks, is the Noble Truth of Suffering? Birth is suffering, sickness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering; pain, grief, sorrow, lamentation, and despair are suffering. Association with what is unpleasant is suffering; disassociation from what is pleasant is suffering. In short, the five factors of individuality are suffering. II. This, O Monks, is the Truth of the Arising of Suffering. It is this thirst or craving which gives rise to rebirth, which is bound up with passionate delight and which seeks fresh pleasure now here and now there in the form of thirst for sensual pleasure, thirst for existence, and thirst for non-existence. III. This, O Monks, is the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. It is the utter cessation of that craving, the withdrawal from it, the renouncing of it, the rejection of it, liberation from it, non-attachment to it. IV. This, O Monks, is the Truth of the Path that leads to the cessation of suffering. It is this Noble Eightfold Path, which consists of (1) Right View, (2) Right Resolve, (3) Right Speech, (4) Right Action, (5) Right Livelihood, (6) Right Effort, (7) Right Mindfulness, (8) Right Meditation.

For me the difficulty which goes right to the heart of the Buddha’s presentation and which is found in most short bullet-point summations of the Four Truths is this can easily be understood as asserting life is suffering, suffering comes about from clinging, and the solution is to not cling. I’ve met Buddhists who think this is in fact the point of the Four Truths, including an occasional monastic. The slightest unpacking however, reveals something different.

Here we find a world in motion. Everything and everyone are/is created through a confluence of events. But nothing has substance in the sense of standing outside the flow of causality. Rather what we perceive as a person or a thing is a snapshot of a moment. Everything is in motion. Dukkha, which has classically been translated as suffering, is the hurt, the anxiety, the anguish, the unsatisfactoriness that human beings experience throughout our lives. And it comes about as a side effect of our wonderful human ability to notice and distinguish. The side effect is to reify, to make what we’ve perceived and distinguished something “permanent.” When, of course, nothing and no one is ever permanent. Hence what follows our grasping and holding too tightly that which of its nature is in motion is hurt. Can’t be done, and therefore that hurt, and a pervasive anxiousness that spoils our lives.

The good news is not a list of how to not care, but rather a middle way between thinking only motion exists or that things and people have eternal substance that invites us to a larger and healing view. I can never hold the eight steps in my mind, but I can understand when they’re divided into three aspects of awakening: 1) wisdom, that is our nondual insight. 2) morality, that is our walking a path of harmony. And 3) meditation, those practices of presence that allow us to see our sense of separateness is useful but not ultimately true.

Sadly, it’s taken over eight hundred words to even begin to explain this. And to really get to the heart of the matter we would need to unpack even more.

Or, here’s a thought: return to the pillow, sit down, shut up, and pay attention for a moment or two.