The Four Noble Truths were the first teachings given by the Buddha after he attained enlightenment 2600 years ago. These foundational teachings form the bedrock of Buddhism and are universally agreed upon by all the various schools of Buddhism. Most of the Buddhas other teachings (dharmas) are based on the Four Noble Truths or are logical extensions of them.
While The Four Noble Truths are quite sophisticated and can be understood from various points of view, they can only be fully understood from within the context of the Buddhist worldview. This Buddhist worldview is very much at odds with most other worldviews, in that it considers mind to be fundamental and the physical world to be an emergent phenomenon of mind. Look the the first two entries of the Dhammapada, early quotes from the Buddha himself:
- Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
- Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
The Buddha was unequivocal about this relationship between mind, action and result.
Let us first look at The Four Noble Truths and take them at face value.
The First Noble Truth is the Truth of Suffering or dukkha, the inherent dissatisfaction with life we all deal with.
The Second Noble Truth is the that there are Causes of this Suffering.
The Third Noble Truth says that if we remove these causes (Cessation) we end the resulting suffering.
The Fourth Noble Truth is that there is a Path to removing these causes, which results in Nirvana, the cessation of suffering. This path is called the Eightfold Path.
Taken at face value The Four Noble Truths can be summed up as “Suffering arises from causes, therefore removing those causes removes the suffering.” Undeniable logic. It all sounds very modern and scientific with causes and results, nothing deeper going on here. This is the western or scientific understanding, and is often how the Four Noble Truths is portrayed in the west, even by Buddhist teachers and writers. It is a view based on the idea that physical reality is fundamental and that mind is an emergent (and therefore impermanent) phenomenon. This seemingly iron-clad paradigm has ruled the west for centuries. However, inspection, through meditation and logic in ancient times, and physics and psychology in modern times, reveals cracks in many of its underlying assumptions. Exploring this concept lies outside the scope of this essay, it is enough for now to know there are valid arguments against it.
Lets take a deeper dive into these Truths from a more Buddhist perspective.
The First Noble Truth – Suffering
The Buddha began his teachings with the Truth of Suffering because suffering is ubiquitous. It is a universal starting point that all sentient beings can all relate to and agree upon. A dictionary definition of suffering is “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship”. The desire to escape suffering is shared by all sentient beings regardless of status, sex, race or wealth.
The Buddha broke suffering down into three categories:
1) The Suffering of Suffering – our day to day experiences with physical and mental pain such as skinned knees and broken hearts.
2) The Suffering of Change – this points to the inherent impermanence of all things and that suffering exists even in things we enjoy and don’t normally associate with suffering. There is the seed of suffering even in the things we love and enjoy. The last bite of our favorite food is an example and the tummy ache from eating too much of our favorite food is another. Its only because we love someone that we hurt if we then lose that person.
3) The Suffering of Conditioned Existence – This is the most subtle aspect of suffering and can take one down a deep rabbit hole on the very nature of existence. It is the background anxiety that permeates everything we do. Conditioned Existence is tantamount to Perceptual Existence, ie… how we perceive things to exist, not necessarily how they actually exist. Our perceptions, or rather the mind that both creates and experiences those perceptions, is the central focus of Buddhism.
The modern paradigm of mind is that our suffering ends when we die because our mind is created by the body and therefore dies with our body. However, in Buddhism, death is not the end of mind (nor is birth its beginning!). In Buddhism, we don’t have a mind, instead, we are a mind. A non-physical mind that is said have a beginning-less beginning and an infinite existence. Therefore our suffering doesn’t end either. Suffering continues to haunt us as this mind traverses endless cycles of existence (Samsara). As you can see, suffering is a bigger problem in a Buddhism than it is the western mind.
The Second Noble Truth – Causes
Some causes of suffering are obvious such as stepping on a nail or losing a loved one. Other causes are not so obvious because there is a chain of causation which must be followed, ie… X causes Y which causes Z. However, even long and complex chains of causation are still superficial causes in Buddhist understanding. The reason so many people fail to understand the Four Noble Truths fully, especially in the west, is because ==what is actually being referred to as the causes of suffering is… Karma==.
Karma is a Sankrit word that means “action” and refers to our intentional actions as cause and the corresponding results. In Buddhism all actions of your body, speech and mind, which is to say, everything you do (body), say (speech) and think (mind), are stored in the mind as mental imprints or karmic seeds. These seeds eventually manifest as negative or positive experiences similar to the one that caused it. Think of a young child who watches a scary movie and then experiences a nightmare as a result. This is a simple example of karma. Karma is more like law of physics for the mind. It is not a reward or punishment system by a God or something outside your mind nor is it a means to teach lessons. These karmic seeds, once formed, persist even between lives and do not wane with time – the seeds must sprout (as an experience) in order to be exhausted. Karma is obviously a fundamental concept and one that misrepresents the Four Noble Truths if not included in its understanding.
The Third Noble Truth – Cessation
While the first two Noble Truths were about the Arising of Suffering, the third and fourth Noble Truths are about the Cessation of Suffering. If the causes of suffering is Karma, it behooves us to prevent accumulating the Karma in the first place. That’s a deeper question about karma that will be explained later. The important point now is that the Cessation of suffering is possible through working with karma, the cause of the suffering. Also note that the cessation of suffering isn’t actually happiness, rather it is the natural, uncaused contentedness that is the natural state of our existence, free of karmic tinting.
The Fourth Noble Truth – The Path
The fourth teaches that the Cessation of Suffering can be achieved through following the Eight-fold Path. This Path focuses on living in such a way that the actions of our body, speech, and mind do not generate the karmas that cause suffering but rather generate the karmas that lead to contentment, positive experiences and eventually Nirvana.
A Contextual Understanding:
Karma
Karma can be referred to as either a noun, ie… the mental imprints in the mind or as a verb, ie… our actions and their consequences. Both concepts are correct.
All karmas are not the same. Karma is commonly divided into negative or black karma and positive or white karma. Negative karma result from actions related to self or ego clinging and attachment, ie… negative thinking in the form of anger, jealousy, greed, and pride. Unfortunately this negative behavior also tends to be our default behavior, meaning we tend to go about our day creating piles of negative karma – and thus experience the piles of negative results. This is why karma and negative karma are basically synonyms.
Merit
Because our default reactive mental conditioning is so pervasive, positive karma rarely happens spontaneously. You must be vigilantly mindful of the actions of your body, speech and mind, on guard for self-clinging emotions and egoistic thoughts and the speech and actions that flow from those thoughts. Intentionally having a calm, loving, and altruistic mindset naturally leads to the altruistic speech and actions that create positive karmic seeds, seeds that will produce desirable and beneficial experiences now and in future lives. These actions are so special they have their own name, Merit. The distinction between merit and good karma is a bit vague because unintentional altruistic behavior IS good karma and it is meritorious, but as a verb merit generally refers to the intentional actions of body, speech and mind that result in purification of the mind and spiritual growth.
Merit is also often associated with rituals and practices that are designed to generate this good karma.
Rituals, Practices and Habitual Patterns
An important aspect of karma is that actions that we repeat create habitual patterns in the mind. Every time you strum a chord on a guitar, your aren’t just strengthening your fingers, you also strengthen the connections between neurons in that brain that control the finger movements (neurons that fire together wire together). These habitual patterns are self-reinforcing. For example, the more time we spend ruminating on how we have been wronged, the more we strengthen the accompanying “victimhood” neural pathway in our brain. This leads to even more ruminating which only strengthens the neural pathway more and round and round we go in a tailspin of self-reinforcing suffering. This our default predicament.
The role of ritual and practice and mindfulness is to interrupt the old habitual patterns that create problems and to intentionally create new habitual patterns by design. A practice is an activity that generates merit, a ritual is doing that practice repeatedly and regularly. The effect is to build up desired habitual patterns that create merit. In a sense we brainwashing ourselves, but in a way that WE choose instead of haphazardly.
