Buddhist Communication Center

  ..:: Vandana Quarterly ::..

The Four Noble Truths is the central and fundamental Buddhist teaching. It is the first sermon that the Buddha preached after his enlightenment. Although easy to understand, its application grows richer and more thoughtful.

The Four Noble Truths are
1. Life is suffering; 
2. Suffering is due to attachment; 
3. Attachment can be overcome; 
4. There is a path for accomplishing this. 

1. Suffering is perhaps the most common translation for the Sanskrit word dukha, which can also be translated as imperfect, stressful, or filled with anguish. Although dukha usually is translated as suffering, it is often found imperfection to be more appropriate. Other effective definitions of dukha are unsatisfactory, insubstantial and impermanence.
Contributing to the anguish is anitya - the fact that all things are impermanent, including living things like ourselves. 
Furthermore, there is the concept of anatma - literally, "no soul". Anatma means that all things are interconnected and interdependent, so that nothing 
including ourselves has a separate existence. 

2. Attachment is a general translation for the word trishna, which literally means thirst and is also translated as desire, clinging, greed, craving, or lust. Because we and the world are imperfect, impermanent, and not separate, we are forever "clinging" to things, each other, and ourselves, in a mistaken effort at permanence. We suffer because we are constantly struggling to survive. We are constantly trying to prove our existence. We may be extremely humble and self-deprecating, but even that is an attempt to define ourselves. We are defined by our humility. The harder we struggle to establish ourselves and our relationships, the more painful our experience becomes.
Besides trishna, there is dvesha, which means avoidance or hatred. Hatred is its own kind of clinging. 
And finally there is avidya, ignorance or the refusal to see. Not fully understanding the impermanence of things is what leads us to cling in the first place. 

3. Perhaps the most misunderstood term in Buddhism is the one which refers to the overcoming of attachment: nirvana. It literally means "blowing out," but is often thought to refer to either a Buddhist heaven or complete nothingness. Actually, it refers to the letting go of clinging, hatred, and ignorance, and the full acceptance of imperfection, impermanence, and interconnectedness. 
Our struggle to survive, our effort to prove ourselves and solidify our relationships is unnecessary. We, and the world, can get along quite comfortably without all our unnecessary posturing. We could just be a simple, direct and straight-forward person. We could form a simple relationship with our world, our coffee, spouse and friend. We do this by abandoning our expectations about how we think things should be.

4. And then there is the path, called dharma. Buddha called it the middle way, which is understood as meaning the middle way between such competing philosophies as materialism and idealism, or hedonism and asceticism. This path, this middle way, is elaborated as the eightfold path. 
The central theme of this way is meditation. Meditation, here, means the practice of mindfulness/awareness, shamata / vipashyana in Sanskrit. We practice being mindful of all the things that we use to torture ourselves with. We become mindful by abandoning our expectations about the way we think things should be and, out of our mindfulness, we begin to develop awareness about the way things really are. We begin to develop the insight that things are really quite simple, that we can handle ourselves, and our relationships, very well as soon as we stop being so manipulative and complex.