Buddhist Basics: the Four Noble Truths

The Four Noble Truths lay out the basic beliefs of Buddhism: that unenlightened life will never be fully satisfactory, that we keep suffering because we keep grasping at things and situations outside ourselves, and that there’s a way out of this mess.

But you might not know the story behind the Four Noble Truths, which is the story of the Buddha – and of each of us as spiritual seekers in the 21st century.

This video tells the story of how Prince Siddhartha renounced worldly life and became the Buddha. (In other words, the Buddha’s origin story!) The Four Noble Truths were the first teaching he gave after becoming enlightened, that is, after he woke up to the true nature of the world and of us as living beings.

“Life is suffering,” right? Actually, Buddhism’s message is that it doesn’t have to be. In this teaching on the first of the Four Noble Truths, we’ll talk about what the truth of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness) really means.

The second Noble Truth expresses Buddha’s teaching that the suffering we experience in life isn’t “just how things are”; it’s caused by our misunderstanding the world around us, which leads us to try to grasp onto pleasant circumstances and push away what we don’t like.

The meditation to go with this teaching explores a major cause of suffering: the (inaccurate) sense that there's a "me" in my body and mind. It's our sense that we need to protect this self -- by getting what we want and avoiding what we don't -- that leads to a lot of the grasping and aversion that drive our suffering.

If, as the second Noble Truth, suffering has a cause, what happens if we stop putting that cause in motion? According to Buddha’s teachings, all suffering ends, even the most subtle wish for things to be better than they are. The third Noble Truth is called the “truth of cessation,” but it’s also a description of awakening or enlightenment.