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The Four Noble Truths
After realizing complete, perfect awakening , the Buddha had to find words to share his insight. He [had found] the water, but he had to discover jars like the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path to hold it. The Four Noble Truths are the cream of the Buddha’s teaching. [He helps us see that] our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don’t, it isn’t holy at all. We just drown in the ocean of suffering.
The root meaning of the Chinese character for suffering is “bitter”. We all suffer to some extent. We have some malaise in our body and our mind. We have to recognize and acknowledge the presence of this suffering and touch it. To do so, we may need the help of a teacher and a Sangha, friends in the practice.
Suffering has an origin, roots, nature, and creation or arising. After we touch it, we need to look deeply to see how it came to be. We need to recognize and identify the spiritual and material foods we have ingested that are causing us to suffer.
The Buddha did not deny the existence of suffering, but he also did not deny the existence of joy and happiness. If you think that Buddhism says, “Everything is suffering and we cannot do anything about it,” that is the opposite of the Buddha’s message. If there were no possibility of cessation, then what is the use of practicing? The Third Truth is that healing is possible.
This is the path we need the most. The Buddha called it the Noble Eightfold Path. The Chinese translate it as the “Path of Eight Right Practices”: Right View, Right Thinking, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. The Pali word for “Right” is samma, as adverb that literally means “in the right way.” Right Mindfulness, for example, means that there are ways of being mindful that are right, straight, and beneficial. Wrong mindfulness means that there are ways to practice that are wrong, crooked, and unbeneficial. Right and wrong are not neither moral judgments nor arbitrary standards imposed from the outside. Through our own awareness and practice, we discover what is beneficial and what is not beneficial.
