Four Noble Truths

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Four Noble Truths sit at the heart of how Buddhism describes the way things really are when seen correctly. In Pali they are the cattāri ariyasaccāni, sometimes rendered as the truths of the noble one, the Buddha. Four short formulas carry them: dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, and marga. They are traditionally identified as the first teaching the Buddha gave after his awakening. Yet that traditional status hides a more tangled story. The truths appear in many grammatical forms across the ancient texts. The most commonly used version contains grammatical errors. Some scholars argue they were not part of the earliest layer of Buddhist teaching at all. So what do these four truths actually claim about existence? Why do they carry both a symbolic and a propositional weight? And how did a formula that academic scholars place at a slightly later period come to be presented in the west as the central teaching of Buddhism?

• 2. The Fourfold Diagnosis

  ›

  Dukkha is named first, an innate characteristic of transient existence. Nothing is forever, and this is painful. The word is most commonly translated as suffering, but according to Khantipalo that translation is incorrect. It refers to the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of temporary states and things, including pleasant but temporary experiences. According to Emmanuel, dukkha is the opposite of sukha, non-transient pleasure, and is better translated as pain. The term traces to dush-stha, standing unstable.

  Samudaya names the origin or arising. Together with this transient world and its pain, there is also thirst, the craving for and attachment to an unsatisfactory existence. Brazier and Batchelor point to the wider sense of samudaya as coming into existence together. On this reading craving does not cause dukkha but arises alongside it. The craving has three forms in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta: kama-tanha for sense-pleasures, bhava-tanha for becoming, and vibhava-tanha for not experiencing the world.

  Nirodha names cessation, ending, confinement. The attachment to this transient world and its pain can be severed or contained by letting go of craving. When craving is confined, nirvana is attained. Marga names the road or path. The Noble Eightfold Path leads to the confinement of desire and the release from dukkha. Kondañña grasped the lesson at the close of the first discourse with a single phrase: whatever arises ceases.

• 3. Symbol And Proposition

  ›

  Carol S. Anderson argues the four truths are set apart not because they are by definition sacred, but because they are both a symbol and a doctrine. As a symbol they evoke the possibility of enlightenment, representing the awakening and liberation of the Buddha and the potential for his followers to reach the same freedom. Where they appear as a religious symbol in the Sutta-pitaka and the Vinaya-pitaka, they stand for the enlightenment experience itself and for the possibility of enlightenment for all Buddhists within the cosmos.

  As propositions, the truths defy exact definition. They sit inside what Anderson calls a network of teachings, the entire dhamma matrix, which must be taken together. Within that network the four noble truths are one doctrine among others and are not particularly central. A long recognized feature of the Theravada canon is that it lacks an overarching and comprehensive structure of the path to nibbana. So one teaching may explain another in one passage, and the relationship may be reversed in another talk. There is, in Anderson's words, no single way of understanding the teachings.

• 4. Naming The Noble Ones

  ›

  The Pali phrase ariya sacca, in Sanskrit arya satya, is usually translated as noble truths, a convention started by the earliest translators of Buddhist texts into English. Paul Williams insists there is no particular reason it should be rendered that way. It could equally mean the nobles' truths, the truths for nobles, the nobilising truths, or the truths possessed by the noble ones. The Pali commentators themselves rank the noble truths reading as the least important.

  The term arya was later added to the four truths, and it can be translated as noble, not ordinary, valuable, precious, or pure. The aryas, Williams writes, are the noble ones, the saints, those who have attained the fruits of the path. The term sacca, Sanskrit satya, is a central term in Indian thought. It means truth, but also that which is in accord with reality. Rupert Gethin describes the four truths as four true things or realities whose nature the Buddha finally understood on the night of his awakening. K. R. Norman judges the best translation to be the truth of the noble one, the Buddha: a statement of how things really are when seen correctly.

• 5. Forms Of The Formula

  ›

  The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma, gives the best-known presentation, and it contains two sets of the four truths. The full set used in modern expositions carries grammatical errors that point to multiple sources and to translation problems within the ancient Buddhist community. The Pali tradition considered them correct and did not correct them. K. R. Norman records a basic set running idaṃ dukkhaṃ, this is pain, through to the path leading to the cessation of pain.

  Norman also identifies a mnemonic set, intended to remind the hearer of the full form. Its earliest version was dukkham samudayo nirodho marga, without the terms sacca or arya, which were added later. According to L. S. Cousins the four truths are not restricted to the form where dukkha is the subject. Other forms take the world, the arising of the world, or the āsavas as their subject. The well-known form, Cousins says, is simply shorthand for all of the forms. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta also lays out three stages for understanding each truth, sacca-ñāṇa, kicca-ñāṇa, and kata-ñāṇa, for a total of twelve insights.

• 6. A Teaching That Grew

  ›

  As early as 1935, Caroline Rhys Davids observed that for a teaching so central to Theravada Buddhism, the four truths were missing from critical passages in the Pali canon. Gethin notes that the four truths and the eightfold path are only two lists among literally hundreds of similar lists covering ancient Buddhism. According to Anderson, only by the time of the commentaries in the fifth century CE did the truths come to be identified in the Theravada tradition as the central teaching of the Buddha.

  According to Feer and Anderson, the four truths probably entered the Sutta Pitaka from the Vinaya, the rules for monastic order. They were first added to enlightenment-stories containing the four jhanas, replacing terms for liberating insight. According to Vetter and Bronkhorst, the earliest Buddhist path consisted of practices culminating in dhyana, a calm of mind that Vetter regards as the liberation being sought. Later, liberating insight came to be regarded as equally liberating, a response to other religious groups in India who held such insight indispensable for moksha. Bronkhorst points to an inconsistency: the four truths name the eightfold path as the means to liberation, yet insight into the truths is portrayed as liberating in itself.

• 7. Tradition Against Tradition

  ›

  By about the fifth century CE the four truths grew to central importance in the Theravada tradition, which holds that insight into them is liberating in itself. Walpola Rahula writes that when the truth is seen, all the forces that feverishly produce the continuity of samsara become calm. This liberation can be attained in a single moment, when the four truths are understood together. The Ekavyāvahārika sect held the words of the Buddha carried one transcendent meaning, and that the truths are understood simultaneously in one moment of insight.

  In the Mahayana traditions the truths are less prominent, which emphasize insight into Śūnyatā, emptiness, and the Bodhisattva path. According to Makransky the Bodhisattva ideal created tensions, since a fully enlightened Buddha does not leave samsara but remains in the world out of compassion. The truths, aimed at ending samsara, had to be reinterpreted to explain how a liberated being can still be pervasively operative in this world. Nichiren Buddhism, based on the Japanese priest Nichiren, treats the four truths as a provisional teaching, while holding the Lotus Sutra to be the most wonderful, unsurpassed great Dharma.

• 8. The Western Reinvention

  ›

  Beginning in the 19th century, British missionaries studied Buddhism to be more effective in their efforts, and the four truths were discovered by reading the texts. According to Harris, the Buddha was de-mystified and reduced from a superhuman to a compassionate, heroic human, situated firmly below the divine. Anderson links the simplification of the truths to the colonial project of gaining control over Buddhism. Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught uses the four truths as a framework, and Gimello calls it an example of so-called Protestant Buddhism, created in nearly diametrical opposition to Buddhism as actually practised in traditional Theravada.

  In 1882 Hendrik Kern proposed the four truths might be an analogy with classical Indian medicine, with the Buddha as physician and the truths as diagnosis. The analogy became popular, though there is not sufficient historical evidence that the Buddha deliberately drew on a medical model. For many western Buddhists the rebirth doctrine is a problematic notion. Some interpreters have proposed a naturalized Buddhism, stripped of rebirth, karma, and nirvana. Melford Spiro warns this approach leaves unanswered the existential question of why live, and not hasten the end of dukkha. The same B. R. Ambedkar who built the Navayana around social action dismissed the four truths as the invention of wrong-headed monks.