Four Noble Truths

The four

The first is dukkha: that birth, ageing, sickness, death, separation from what is liked and union with what is not are unsatisfactory, and that this extends to conditioned existence as a whole. The word is often rendered as suffering, which is too narrow; unsatisfactoriness or unease is closer, since the claim is not that everything hurts but that nothing conditioned can finally satisfy.

The second is the origin: craving, which reaches for sense pleasure, for existence, and for non-existence, and which sustains the process of rebirth.

The third is cessation: that with the ending of craving, dukkha ends. This is nirvana.

The fourth is the path: the eightfold way of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.

Structure

The four are traditionally compared to a physician's procedure — diagnosis, cause, prognosis, treatment — and the comparison is old, appearing in Indian sources. It captures the practical orientation: the teaching is presented as a solution to a problem rather than as an account of the world.

Each truth is said to carry a task. Dukkha is to be understood; craving is to be abandoned; cessation is to be realised; the path is to be developed. The scheme is therefore prescriptive rather than merely descriptive.

Position in the tradition

The Four Noble Truths are presented in the canon as the content of the Buddha's first discourse at Sarnath, the setting in motion of the wheel of Dharma. Every Buddhist school accepts them, which makes them among the very few doctrinal formulations common to the whole tradition.

Later developments qualify rather than displace them. Mahayana texts describe them as provisional teaching for those at an earlier stage, and Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka argues that they are to be understood in the light of emptiness — but they are not rejected, and Madhyamaka takes considerable trouble to show that emptiness does not undermine them.