The Four Noble Truths

The teaching of the Four Noble Truths was called the first turning of the Wheel of Dharma. This was the first teaching Shakyamuni Buddha gave after fully realizing the non-dual state. He sat for seven weeks under the bodhi tree and then walked to the deer park, where he proclaimed the Dammacakkapavattana Sutra to five sages. The Four Noble Truths areas follows:

1. The truth of unsatisfactoriness

The First Noble Truth is awareness of the universality of the feeling of unsatisfactoriness, and the way in which it eventually undermines every achievement. The Sanskrit word mostly translated as 'suffering' is 'dukkha'. 'Du' means worthless, and 'kha' means hollow. So 'dukkha' actually encompasses much more than the misery of life not going well, the experience of pain and personal catastrophe. It points to the illusory nature of the dukkha itself. In some way we create the unsatisfactoriness. It is not self-existent.

Shakyamuni Buddha said that where there is dualism change is perceived as dukkha. We don't like the good things in our life to go away, but everything changes. Always. The apparent existence of all phenomena slips away from us, especially if we try to grasp at permanence. We have to have had some success within the social context of dualism (samsara) to really understand this. If our whole life has been deprivation, aggression, loneliness, anxiety, and painful confusion, then it would be easy merely to view bad luck, parental abuse, or societal injustice as the cause of our unhappiness. So in order to actually perceive dukkha, we have to have some measure of success and pleasure in our lives and yet still experience unsatisfactoriness. It is only then that we can begin to feel the illusory or empty quality of the experience of pleasure, as well as the tangible or form quality of the experience of pain. Shakyamuni Buddha pointed out that each truth suggests the subsequent truth to us if we have truly understood. So it is valuable to reflect on the First Noble Truth as much as possible in our daily lives in order to experience the Second as a natural progression.

2.The truth of the cause of unsatisfactoriness

The truth of the cause of the experience of unsatisfactoriness is suggested to us through experiencing the form & emptiness of unsatisfactoriness. We realize that there is something about both the way we in which we view phenomena, and how we experience phenomena, which causes unsatisfactoriness. In the Sutric texts, the causes of the experience of unsatisfactoriness are said to be karma and klŽsa.

Karma is described as cause & effect, which means that through distorted perception we respond inappropriately and create the cyclic patterns of our neurotic conditioning. Ngak'chang Rinpoche says of karma: It is crucial not to confound cause & effect with some kind of mechanism inherent in the fabric of reality. The root of karma is the dualistic mind. When the dualistic mind is not present, then karma is also not present. If karma is seen as independent of the individual experiencing karma, then we have a form of fatalism which has more in common with the eternalism of popular Hinduism. The Ulukha-mukha Sutra discusses karma in terms of perception & response rather than cause & effect but the essential meaning is the same. If the cause which is our perception perceives a focus of attraction, aversion, or indifference, the effect will be the response to that cause. There is no sense in which the actual circumstances of our lives are preordained according to a system of rewards & punishments for our previous actions. This is a primitive misconception, and one which would make enlightenment dependent upon karma.

KlŽsa are the perceptual distortions of attraction, aversion, and indifference which maintain the cyclic patterns of our neuroses the distorted experience of our fivefold elemental nature. We hold to the idea that we exist as solid, permanent, separate, continuous, and defined beings, and that insubstantiality, impermanence, inseparability, discontinuity and lack of definition deny our existence. This means that whenever we perceive insubstantiality, impermanence, inseparability, discontinuity and lack of definition we experience dukkha. We experience dukkha because we attempt to divide form & emptiness. But once we have touched the idea that we create our own unsatisfactoriness through dualistic preconception, the possibility of allowing our view to change suggests itself. We can let go of the form of unsatisfactoriness.

3.The truth of the cessation of unsatisfactoriness

The cessation of the experience of unsatisfactoriness is the truth that if there is a cause of dukkha, then there must be a way in which we can stop creating the cause of dukkha. We can cut the cause at the root. We actively create samsara by continually defining our existence according to form ideas of how things should be. We refuse to let the ebb & flow of our existence be what it is. But we can stop 'doing' samsara and allow a view and experience to emerge in which form & emptiness define each other. This completely alters our perception of pleasure, as Khandro DŽchen points out: Within the non-dual perspective of Dzogchen, pleasure ceases to be regarded as problematic simply because of its temporary nature. Its temporary nature is simply its empty quality. We do not have to renounce appreciation of pleasure simply because it manifests as emptiness & form. We can then discover that our ordinary lives really do afford glimpses of real happiness because empty experiences naturally occur.

There are times when we are one with the moment, or times of exhaustion when we let go and give up the effort of creating samsara for a while. Understanding the possibility of this view and experience inspires confidence that there is a state which can be attained where we are able to exist without the distorted perceptions of dualism. We may be fortunate enough to meet Lamas who appear to experience their lives as satisfactory whatever occurs; and who direct us toward the fact that our own enlightenment sparkles through the fabric of our self-created conditioning.

We are all beginninglessly enlightened, and because of this our own non-dual state points to itself through the experience of dukkha. Through understanding that unsatisfactoriness s something we create, we can undermine this creation and allow the sparkling through of our enlightenment to illuminate the knowledge that there must be methods by which this opening can be continually facilitated.

4.The truth of the path to the cessation of unsatisfactoriness

The path of the cessation of the experience of unsatisfactoriness is the Eightfold Path. It is important to notice the word used here. We are not talking about a remedy or a cure it is a path. The word 'path' suggests something which has been found or laid down by someone who has gone this way before. A path is something which has been trodden and tested. It is purposely designed to get us from where we think we are to where we actually are. It is the path of the middle way: free from referential extremes; free of the four philosophical extremes;(3) and free of addiction to self-justification or self-denial. The path is taught as eight stages, but the totality of Buddhist method can be extrapolated from this simple structure. The fruit or destination of the path is the experience of non-duality.