The Four Noble Truths

If a man is observant of the insecurity and pain in the world, and if he is not forgetful, he cannot but be impelled to put questions about the world and his relation to it. The Buddha shows him where to look for himself and what to do. Giving is pleasant in itself and encourages renunciation. Virtue provides the safety of non-remorse. The happiness of heaven or the purest worldly happiness attainable comes through good acts done out of non-greed and non-hate and knowingly. Sensual pleasures last a short time and are costly, but not so the pleasure of renunciation. This is how the ground is prepared for the foundation of Buddha’s teaching. A mind capable of seeing that should be capable of glimpsing what the four Truths are about. The inexorable impermanence of experience is already felt.

If it is asked what is the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching, the answer is: the Four Noble Truths. They formed the subject of his first sermon of all, which was preached at Benares. Here is how they were stated on that occasion.

‘There is this Noble Truth of Suffering: birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering, association with what is disliked is suffering, dissociation from what is loved is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering, in short, the five aggregates (of experience) as objects of clinging are suffering’.

‘There is this Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering: it is craving, which produces future becoming, is accompanied by delight and greed, delighting in this and that, that is to say, craving for sense-desires, craving for being, craving for non-being’.

‘There is this Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering: it is the remainderless fading and cessation of that same craving, denying it, relinquishing it, leaving it behind, rejecting it’.

‘There is this Noble Truth of the Way Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: it is just this Noble Eightfold Path, that is to say, right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration’.

This foundation is unshakable because it rests, not upon metaphysical theory or speculation or dogma, but upon actual experience stripped of unverifiable hypotheses. It is upon this sure foundation that the whole structure of Buddhist ethics rests. It is the perfected vision of the Buddha that sees how a man and the world in which he lives interact the one upon the other. Sufficient of this vision is directly perceivable by a thoughtful man to compel him to lead a moral life if he would avoid suffering, just as the knowledge acquired by a child of how fire burns keeps him from putting his hand in it And he will also be incited and urged on to spiritual development and the attainment of the goal of final bliss by the testimony of those who have attained it.

As theistic religion enjoins the living of a moral life by commandments, and by threats and the principal argument advanced for obeying them is that man owes obedience out of gratitude to his Creator. From this it is often argued that a good and moral life is inconceivable without a Creator-God. How fallacious this assumption is has been clearly shown by the Buddha.

Again, attempts to build a system of ethics on the basis of modern science, independent of the concept of a God, creator of the universe, are obliged, since true scientific data are neither moral nor immoral, to invoke some extraneous doctrine such as a Categorical Imperative, a postulated subjective faculty sup­posed directly to perceive an objective duty as to-be-done, without need of justification. Again the unsurmountable difficul­ties inherent in such an unverifiable thesis are avoided by the clear and complete vision of the Buddha, which shows that there is no need of hypothetical perceptive faculties and per­cepts to recommend living the Good Life.

The Four Noble Truths, we said, are the foundation of the Buddhist ethical structure. It is thus based, not on divine revelation, not on dogma, not on hypothesis, but upon the verifiable facts of experience, objective and subjective.

The world of experience (no matter whether heavenly or this-worldly) is, the Buddha found, unsatisfactory because nothing really permanent can be found in it to which to cling as a refuge in the universal flux of change and becoming. This is the first Truth. Then the subjective act of craving snatches at and rejects the various aspects or modes of the five aggre­gates of experience that constitute the Truth of Suffering (craving itself coming within the formations aggregate). It manifests itself in the forms of lust and hate, greed and nausea, acting as the kamma that maintains the five aggregates of expe­rience in the dynamic process of change and continuity that is called ‘life’. This is the second Truth, Objective experience, the Truth of Suffering, is like the stills of a cinema reel: craving animates it like the running of the reel through the projector onto the screen; and the whole five-aggregate process of formed experience is like the moving film seen by a conscious audience.

The ceasing of that same craving, with the consequent ceasing of the five-aggregate process at the termination of the Arahant’s life, is the unformed Nibbāna. It is the cessation of all suffering, the highest of all possible bliss, which by com­parison makes the bliss of any kind of heaven (even the immate­rial arūpaheavens) appear worthless since they do not last forever. It can only be known by personal realization through development of the path that leads to it. The realization of it irrevocably transforms and purifies the character. This is the third Truth. The way in which the ordinary man can interpret his experience, organize his life and compose his mental attitude in order to realize that cessation and that unshakable bliss and make them a fact is the Noble Eightfold Path. This is the fourth Truth.

It is sometimes asked whether the attainment of Arahantship is not a selfish goal. If Arahantship meant some kind of superior heaven where a man continued to live his personal life in the pursuit of pleasure however refined, the answer would be, yes. But Arahantship in the final attainment of nibbāna is not that it is the elimination of the concept of self, the ending of selfish ‘self-becoming’ and the abolition of the conceit ‘I am’.

Upasīva asked:

‘Then when he the Arahant has gone out does he no longer exist? Or is he made invulnerable for eternity ?

And the Buddha replied:

‘There is no measure of one who has gone out, Upasīva;
There is nothing of him whereby he could be described;
When all ideas have been abolished, all ways of describing have been abolished’.

The Noble Eightfold Path is the Buddhist code of morals and ethics. If a man chooses that path, then his duty, if we speak in terms of duty, is primarily to himself, and it takes the form of inflexible sincerity of purpose. His success in reaching the goal is the true encouragement and sole and only true hope for others in the world still caught in the wheel of becoming, the repeating cycle of birth, ageing and death. The man who attains Arahantship keeps the way open for others. He is the most unselfish of all.

Here is the Path briefly explained. RIGHT VIEW (the understanding of the four Truths) and RIGHT THINKING (thoughts of renunciation, non-ill-will, and non-cruelty) comprise Understanding. RIGHT SPEECH (abstention from lies, slander, abuse, and gossip). RIGHT ACTION (abstention from killing, stealing and sexual misconduct) and RIGHT LIVELIHOOD (there are five trades no layman should engage in: trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, and poison) comprise Virtue. Then RIGHT EFFORT (not arousing unarisen evil, abandoning arisen evil, arousing unarisen good, and developing, maintaining and perfecting arisen good), RIGHT MINDFULNESS contemplation of experience as it is, that is to say, contemplation of the body as a body, of feelings as feel­ings, of the mind as mind, and of mental objects (ideas) as mental objects, and RIGHT CONCENTRATION (the four kinds of absorption) or mental unification lastly comprise Concentration.

As a tetrapod always stands firm on the ground however it falls, so the standard of the Four Truths is always applicable as a guide to the evaluation of any experience. It is a standard by which a man can, inany walk of life and in any circumstances, judge the better course and make his choice. Even if circum­stances are beyond his control, he is still free to choose his attitude towards them, to exercise the responsibility, and so diminish his own suffering as well as that of others.

Nanamoli Thera

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Dr. Jayatilleke, in the second essay, represents logic. This is evident from the way he turns the Four Noble Truths into propositions, or statements of fact. That they are not facts but things (of a particular kind) can be seen from the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (Vinaya Mahāvagga I: Vin. i,10; Sacca Samy. 11: v,421-24), where dukkha is pariññeyya, 'to be known absolutely', samudaya is pahātabba, 'to be abandoned', nirodha is sacchikātabba, 'to be realized', and magga, the fourth Truth, is bhāvetabba, 'to be developed'. A fact, however, is just a fact, and one cannot do anything to it, since as such it has no significance beyond itself (it does not imply any other fact not contained in itself)—it just is (and even whether it is is doubtful).

But things are significant; that is to say, they are imperatives, they call for action (like the bottle in Alice in Wonderland labelled 'Drink Me!'). Heidegger, and Sartre after him, describe the world as a world of tasks to be performed, and say that a man at every moment of his life is engaged in performing tasks (whether he specifically pays attention to them or not). Seen in this light the Four Noble Truths are the ultimate tasks for a man's performance—Suffering commands 'Know me absolutely!', Arising commands 'Abandon me!', Cessation commands 'Realize me!', and the Path commands 'Develop me!'.

But by transforming things into facts (and the Four Noble Truths, which are descriptions of things, into propositions) I automatically transform myself into logic—that is to say, I destroy my situation as an existing individual engaged in performing tasks in the world, I cease to be in concreto (in Kierkegaard's terminology) and become sub specie aeterni. (By regarding the Four Noble Truths as propositions, not as instructions, I automatically exempt myself from doing anything about them.) The world (if it can still be called a world) becomes a logician's world—quite static and totally uninhabited. (It is significant that Wittgenstein, in his celebrated Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which helped to establish modern logical positivism, starts off by declaring: '1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.' Compare, in this connexion, the note in the Preface to Notes where it is said 'Things, not facts, make up my world'.)

Kierkegaard would be more severe on Dr. Jayatilleke than on Professor Wijesekera:

It is not denied that objective thought has validity; but in connection with all thinking where subjectivity must be accentuated, it is a misunderstanding. If a man occupied himself, all his life through, solely with logic, he would nevertheless not become logic; he must therefore himself exist in different categories. Now if he finds that this is not worth thinking about, the choice must be his responsibility. But it will scarcely be pleasant for him to learn, that existence itself mocks everyone who is engaged in becoming purely objective. (CUP, pp. 85-6)

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Actually, when I first read the book, it was not so much the ageing of the characters that affected me as the ultimate meaninglessness and futility of all their actions and aspirations. They are busy, all of them, seeking their immediate satisfactions and avoiding their immediate discomforts; and everything that they do—whether it is making money, making music, making love, or simply making water—is quite pointless—in terms, that is to say, of an ultimate purpose or meaning in life.

At the time I read it—when I was about twenty—I had already suspected (from my reading of Huxley and others) that there is no point in life, but this was still all rather abstract and theoretical. But Ulysses gets down to details, and I found I recognized myself, mutatis mutandis, in the futile occupations that fill the days of Joyce's characters. And so I came to understand that all our actions, from the most deliberate to the most thoughtless, and without exception, are determined by present pleasure and present pain. Even what we pompously call our 'duty' is included in this law—if we do our duty, that is only because we should feel uncomfortable if we neglected it, and we seek to avoid discomfort. Even the wise man, who renounces a present pleasure for the sake of a greater pleasure in the future, obeys this law—he enjoys the presentpleasure of knowing (or believing) that he is providing for his future pleasure, whereas the foolish man, preferring the present pleasure to his future pleasure, is perpetually gnawed with apprehension about his future. And when I had understood this, the Buddha's statement, Pubbe cāham bhikkhave etarahi ca dukkhañ c'eva paññāpemi dukkhassa ca nirodham ('Both now and formerly, monks, it is just suffering that I make known and the ceasing of suffering') (M. 22: i,140), came to seem (when eventually I heard it) the most obvious thing in the world—'What else' I exclaimed 'could the Buddha possibly teach?' Nanavira Thera 

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On one occasion a number of elder bhikkhus were dwelling among the Cetiyans at Sahajāti. Now on that occasion when the elder bhikkhus had returned from their alms round, after their meal they had assembled in the pavilion and were sitting together when this conversation arose: “Friend, does one who sees suffering also see the origin of suffering, also see the cessation of suffering, also see the way leading to the cessation of suffering?” When this was said, the Venerable Gavampati said to the elder bhikkhus: “Friends, in the presence of the Blessed One I have heard and learnt this: [437] ‘Bhikkhus, one who sees suffering also sees the origin of suffering, also sees the cessation of suffering, also sees the way leading to the cessation of suffering. One who sees the origin of suffering also sees suffering, also sees the cessation of suffering, also sees the way leading to the cessation of suffering. One who sees the cessation of suffering also sees suffering, also sees the origin of suffering, also sees the way leading to the cessation of suffering. One who sees the way leading to the cessation of suffering also sees suffering, also sees the origin of suffering, also sees the cessation of suffering.’” SN 56: 30

“Bhikkhus, suppose there were a man with a life span of a hundred years, who could live a hundred years. Someone would say to him: ‘Come, good man, in the morning they will strike you with a hundred spears; at noon they will strike you with a hundred spears; in the evening they will strike you with a hundred spears.396 And you, good man, being struck day after day by three hundred spears will have a life span of a hundred years, will live a hundred years; and then, after a hundred years have passed, you will make the breakthrough to the Four Noble Truths, to which you had not broken through earlier.’ [441] “It is fitting, bhikkhus, for a clansman intent on his good to accept the offer. For what reason? Because this saṃsāra is without discoverable beginning; a first point cannot be discerned of blows by spears, blows by swords, blows by axes. And even though this may be so, bhikkhus, I do not say that the breakthrough to the Four Noble Truths is accompanied by suffering or displeasure. Rather, the breakthrough to the Four Noble Truths is accompanied only by happiness and joy. What four? The noble truth of suffering … the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering. “Therefore, bhikkhus, an exertion should be made to understand: ‘This is suffering.’… An exertion should be made to understand: ‘This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering.’” SN 56:35

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Suffering is dependently arisen 

Nisargadatta Maharaj on suffering