The Four Noble Truths

1. All life is suffering (dukkha)

2. All suffering is caused by desire (samudaya)

3. The end to suffering is to understand desire (nirodha)

4. The means to do this – the eight-fold-path (marga).

The four noble truths # 1

Let us examine these in turn. All life is suffering. This sounds harsh, even pessimistic. However, the first noble truth does not refer to suffering in the way. It is not suffering in the way Christianity has taught it. Suffering is not glorified, it is not made a means to salvation. The world is not a ‘vale of tears’, in fact, and this is an important point, neither the world, nor anything in it creates suffering. We do. The only suffering that exists is the suffering we bring to things. It is our minds and our attitudes to things that create suffering. And for the most part we do this unconsciously and automatically. Obviously some people create quite a lot of suffering. So the Zen master could rightfully say, ‘all life is suffering, there is no suffering’. In the first noble truth suffering, or trial, refers to living itself. There is pain in birth and in death, and even our greatest joys contain the seed of sadness, because those joys cannot last. Nothing you see or know will last. In that there is a certain existential sorrow.

Suppose at this moment you’re enjoying a wonderful holiday, say, with the person you love, surrounded by all the good things in life. However happy you are you know it will come to an end and you must go back to your job, to the more mundane aspects of life. You’re not going to dwell on this fact but it’s there in the background. Or, supposing your whole life is one unending pleasure trip (and I hope it is!) say you won the lottery or you’ve amassed millions though your business and you’re free to do what you like every day, there will still come a time when you’ll have to leave it all behind. Death resides in all things. The first of the four noble truths reminds us of Poussin’s masterpiece Et in Arcadia Ego, even in paradise death walks. This is not a suffering that implies punishment or condemnation, it is the inevitability of all things. Nothing lasts, neither joy nor sorrow. That is what the Buddha meant when he said in all life there is suffering. He was talking about impermanence.

Impermanence and the four noble truths

By introducing impermanence the Buddha challenged and ultimately rejected the concept of the self (atman). This is an idea that frightens some people and is misunderstood by others. When you really think about it, what is the ‘self’? Is it your mind, your brain, your personality, is it your body? Or is it none of these things, is it something else? We cannot say our arm or leg or our senses are ‘us’, because we would continue to exist if any of these were removed. And what about psychological aspects, our beliefs, feelings, thoughts, the dreams we have while we sleep, memory? Are these too part of this fugacious self? Some people identify so much with their job, career, status, that this becomes their idea of self. Their self identity is what they call themselves.

The greatest form of suffering is death itself, contained in all things, but by dropping the concept of the self even death’s power is diminished. For if there is nothing to desire, nothing to gain, nothing to lose then death too becomes meaningless.

The four noble truths # 2

The second noble truth states that all suffering is caused by desire. This basically says that it’s our thought about life that creates suffering, therefore we have a choice whether to be miserable or joyful. Desire is about attitude, about how we see ourselves, about how we gage how much we have, and the meaning we give to this. It’s about our expectation, and our calibration of that to what we believe others have, what society expects of us, and a range of other factors.

Let's say you seek a better lifestyle, more money, greater freedom to do the things you want, but you feel this is a long way off and you have to struggle and work in a job you don’t like. Any of these factors can contribute to your suffering. Even if your desire motivates you to get up and create that life, a positive response, but one driven nonetheless by the original suffering. Most people spent a lot of time trying to avoid suffering, or trying to fix something that’s not working. The whole ‘self improvement’ industry is built around precisely that.

Or, suppose you want something to be a certain way, and it’s not, then you’re sad. You get to thinking life’s not fair, if only things were so-so then you’d be happy. But what if you could take away the desire in the first place? What if you could be so peaceful in your mind that you didn’t really want anything? Then you would have put an end to suffering. And this is really what the four noble truths teaches. The great freedom, I find, in the four noble truths is that we have choice. Suffering is not predetermined. You can actually be happy in any moment, anywhere, provided you uncouple your happiness from a fixed outcome, or from wanting life to be a certain way.

The four noble truths # 3

The third noble truth is to give up, contain, or in some way manage our desires. Now, as soon as there is talk of giving up our desires this activates people in all kinds of ways. They start thinking, ‘this means I can’t have any fun! I can’t have things’. It’s about something being taken off us. This mixed in with the notion of sacrifice. A huge amount of resistance is suddenly created. Our idea of desire is often locked into the appetites, and is sometimes equated to not liking ourselves. This goes back to the idea of self identity, that we have aligned our idea of self with the things we own, or want to own. But in fact you don’t have to give up anything! If we’re talking about ending suffering, and to ‘give up’ stuff will create some inner sense of anxiety, then by doing so you’ll only add to your suffering. So it isn’t about the giving up, it’s more about the desire behind what we think we have to give up. Actually the Buddha’s not really saying to give up your desires. It simplifies matters for us to explain it this way. What he’s really saying is that they don’t exist in the first place.

You can’t ever really give up desire, that would be to die. At an autonomic level you desire your heart to beat, your liver to secrete waste and so forth. Every moment as we move forward is a form of desiring. Rather it’s the attachment to our desire that causes suffering. It might be more apt to say give up the attachment and we give up the suffering.

The deeper meaning to the four noble truths

The Buddha wasn’t making desire personal. He wasn’t talking about sensual pleasures, or saying that the curtailment of same would somehow make us morally better. This kind of petty thinking has no place in Buddhist philosophy. Instead the Buddha was talking about the perpetuation of this thing called ‘self’. That which isn’t real is what ultimately causes suffering. (Think if you’re having a dream of being chased by some monster and you couldn’t wake up, you’d feel terrified, even though it wasn’t real.)

Of course along the way we will meet the other pleasures, wants and needs, and they will lure us into reinforcing our idea of the self. It feels good when I swim, that sunset looks beautiful, and so on. And we can expend an inordinate amount of time and energy seeking those things we ‘must have’. But these are not really the issue, instead it’s the desire to continuously recreate the self.

My own approach to this question involves the idea of ‘accepting what is’. If something just is, and you can accept if for what it is, then your suffering around it ceases. Now there is a very thin line between this acceptance and resignation. And I know some people mistake the two. I am not talking about resignation, that’s closer to apathy, that’s when you feel ‘there’s nothing I can do about this situation so I may as well put up with it’. That’s not acceptance. Acceptance is welcoming life just as it is, welcoming and appreciating it. I talked about this before in attitude of gratitude if we can appreciate life, then nothing is a problem. Indeed, paradoxically, people who can do this have far more success in changing things than those who don’t, who just resign to life. Resignation is another form of complaining, of disapproving of life. Being disappointed is another way of saying life should always conform to your personal expectations and demands of it. It is the exhibit of an insane mind.

This is not the argument of the ‘greatest good’, which runs that in order to find happiness you do that which will give you the greatest good, make you healthier, live longer, and so on, even if you’re thoroughly miserable while doing it! For example a person may give up a high cholesterol diet on his doctor’s instructions. Will his health benefit as a result? Yes, undoubtedly. Will he suffer? Yes, undoubtedly. The four noble truths isn’t talking about what’s ‘good’ for you, nor is it setting out new moral precepts.

The four noble truths # 4

The fourth noble truth is the Buddha’s method of how people achieve this desireless state, it’s called the Eight-Fold Path. This is really a set of instructions on how to live the four noble truths until one attains enlightenment. The eight ‘paths’ are correct vision, correct speech, correct livelihood, correct state of mind, correct thought, correct action, correct effort, and correct mental development. It follows a middle way between twin extremes of ascetic denial and indulgence. As a young man Siddhartha experimented with forms of fasting and self sacrifice but ended up rejecting these. As the Enlightened One he knew they lead only to more suffering. As Buddhism spread (it is also a religion) others added more extreme forms; vegetarianism, total abstinence from alcohol and so on, but these weren’t in the Buddha’s original thought system.

For a discussion on the Buddha's concept of the self and other matters, go to Rupa, Karma and Dharma


or, Return from the four noble truths to Zen Buddhism


alternatively, return from the four noble truths to the Home Page