THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
The Buddha's teaching is called the Dhamma, a word that can signify both the truth transmitted by the teaching and the con-ceptual-verbal medium by which that truth is expressed in order that it can be communicated and made comprehensible. The
Dhamma is not a body of immutable dogmas or a system of speculative thought. It is essentially a means, a raft for crossing over from the "near shore" of ignorance, craving, and suffering to the "far shore" of transcendental peace and freedom (MN 22.13). Because his aim in setting forth his teaching is a pragmatic one - deliverance from suffering - the Buddha can dismiss the whole gamut of metaphysical speculation as a futile endeavour. Those committed to it he compares to a man struck by a poisoned arrow who refuses the surgeon's help until he knows the details about his assailant and his weaponry (MN 63.5). Being struck by the arrow of craving, afflicted by ageing and death, humanity is in urgent need of help. The remedy the Buddha brings as the surgeon for the world (MN 105.27) is the Dhamma, which discloses both the truth of our existential plight and the means by which we can heal our wounds.
The Dhamma that the Buddha discovered and taught consists at its core in Four Noble Truths:
the noble truth of suffering (dukkha)
the noble truth of the origin of suffering (dukkhasamudaya)
the noble truth of the cessation of suffering (dukkhanirodha)
the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering (dukkhanirodhagäminī patipadā)
It is these four truths that the Buddha awakened to on the night of his enlightenment (MN 4.31, MN 36.42), made known to the world when he set rolling the matchless Wheel of the Dhamma at Benares (MN 141.2), and held aloft through the forty-five years of his ministry as "the teaching special to the Buddhas" (MN 56.18). In the Majjhima Nikāya the Four Noble Truths are expounded concisely at MN 9.14-18 and in detail in MN 141, while in MN 28 the venerable Sāriputta develops an original exposition of the truths unique to that sutta. Yet, though they may be brought forth explicitly only on occasion, the Four Noble Truths structure the entire teaching of the Buddha, containing its many other principles just as the elephant's footprint contains the footprints of all other animals (MN 28.2).
The pivotal notion around which the truths revolve is that of dukkha, translated here as "suffering." The Pali word originally meant simply pain and suffering, a meaning it retains in the texts when it is used as a quality of feeling: in these cases it has been rendered as "pain" or "painful." As the first noble truth, however, dukkha has a far wider significance, reflective of a comprehensive philosophical vision. While it draws its affective colouring from its connection with pain and suffering, and certainly includes these, it points beyond such restrictive meanings to the inherent unsatisfactoriness of everything conditioned. This unsatisfactoriness of the conditioned is due to its impermanence, its vulnerability to pain, and its inability to provide complete and lasting satisfaction.
The notion of impermanence (aniccatā) forms the bedrock for the Buddha's teaching, having been the initial insight that impelled the Bodhisatta to leave the palace in search of a path to enlightenment. Impermanence, in the Buddhist view, comprises the totality of conditioned existence, ranging in scale from the cosmic to the microscopic. At the far end of the spectrum the Buddha's vision reveals a universe of immense dimensions evolving and disintegrating in repetitive cycles throughout beginningless time - "many aeons of world-contraction, many aeons of world-expansion, many aeons of world-contraction and expansion" (MN 4.27). In the middle range the mark of impermanence comes to manifestation in our inescapable mortality, our condition of being bound to ageing, sickness, and death (MN 26.5), of possessing a body that is subject "to being worn and rubbed away, to dissolution and disintegration" (MN 74.9). And at the close end of the spectrum, the Buddha's teaching discloses the radical impermanence uncovered only by sustained attention to experience in its living immediacy: the fact that all the constituents of our being, bodily and mental, are in constant process, arising and passing away in rapid succession from moment to moment without any persistent underlying substance. In the very act of observation they are undergoing "destruction, vanishing, fading away, and ceasing" (MN 74.11).
This characteristic of impermanence that marks everything conditioned leads directly to the recognition of the universality of dukkha or suffering. The Buddha underscores this allpervasive aspect of dukkha when, in his explanation of the first noble truth, he says, "In short, the five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering." The five aggregates affected by clinging (pañc'upādānakkhandh $\bar{a}$ ) are a classificatory scheme that the Buddha had devised for demonstrating the composite nature of personality. The scheme comprises every possible type of conditioned state, which it distributes into five categories - material form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The aggregate of material form (rūpa) includes the physical body with its sense faculties as well as external material objects. The aggregate of feeling (vedan $\bar{a}$ ) is the affective element in experience, either pleasant, painful, or neutral. Perception (sañ $\tilde{n} \bar{a}$ ), the third aggregate, is the factor responsible for noting the qualities of things and also accounts for recognition and memory. The formations aggregate (sankhārā) is an umbrella term that includes all volitional, emotive, and intellective aspects of mental life. And consciousness (viñ̃̃āna), the fifth aggregate, is the basic awareness of an object indispensable to all cognition. As the venerable Sāriputta shows in his masterly analysis of the first noble truth, representatives of all five aggregates are present on every occasion of experience, arising in connection with each of the six sense faculties and their objects (MN 28.28).
The Buddha's statement that the five aggregates are dukkha thus reveals that the very things we identify with and hold to as the basis for happiness, rightly seen, are the basis for the suffering that we dread. Even when we feel ourselves comfortable and secure, the instability of the aggregates is itself a source of oppression and keeps us perpetually exposed to suffering in its more blatant forms. The whole situation becomes multiplied further to dimensions beyond calculation when we take into account the Buddha's disclosure of the fact of rebirth. All beings in whom ignorance and craving remain present wander on in the cycle of repeated existence, samsāra, in which each turn brings them the suffering of new birth, ageing, illness, and death. All states of existence within samsāra, being necessarily transitory and subject to change, are incapable of providing lasting security. Life in any world is unstable, it is swept away, it has no shelter and protector, nothing of its own (MN 82.36).