To Know the Noble Truths

The Buddha says we suffer because of ignorance, and he defines ignorance as ignorance of the four noble truths: not seeing things in terms of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path to the cessation of suffering.

Now, for anyone who has read much about Buddhism—not even all that much—you’ve probably read about the four noble truths, but you can notice, though, that you’re still suffering. So what does the Buddha mean by saying that you know the four noble truths, or know in terms of the four noble truths?

To begin with, you don’t just know the truth. You know that there are duties to be done with each truth. The truth of suffering is to be comprehended, and comprehension means that you really understand it to the point where you have no more passion, aversion, and delusion around suffering.

You might say, “I’m not passionate about my suffering,” but there’s a lot that we don’t understand about why we suffer. That’s what we’ve got to comprehend.

The duty with regard to the cause of suffering is that you abandon it. The cessation of suffering is something you want to realize. In other words, you want to see the truth of it. And you can actually experience the truth of the cessation of suffering by performing the duty with regard to the fourth truth, which is to develop the path.

So now you know the duties, but even more than knowing the duties is to know that they’ve been done. That’s when you really know the four noble truths, really see things in terms of the four noble truths.

The image the Buddha gave is of a wheel. Back in those days when you had a table with different variables on it and you went through all the variables, they called it a wheel.

In this case, you have the four noble truths, and you have three levels of knowledge for each truth: You know the truth, you know the duties to be done, and then you know that you’ve completed the duties. So: four truths, three levels of knowledge, twelve permutations. That’s the wheel. It’s only when the wheel is complete that you can actually use it well. In the meantime, we hobble around with what we do know.

For example, to comprehend suffering, the Buddha says there’s the suffering of birth, aging, illness, and death: Those are things we know. Being separated from what we love, having to live with things we don’t love: That we know. Not getting what we want: That’s something we also know. But then he says what all those forms of suffering have in common is the five clinging-aggregates: form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. That’s something less familiar.

You can say, “How can I know about suffering if it’s something I’m not familiar with?” Well, the Buddha says the clinging is the real problem, and he says we cling in four ways. When you listen to the types of clinging, you’ll recognize them as things you really do cling to.

First is sensuality, our fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. That’s how a lot of us get our pleasures in life. You see people working, and as long as there’s a song they can sing or listen to, or some sensual pleasure that they can keep in mind, it makes the work go a lot faster, a lot more easily. Sensuality for them is what makes life worth living. So that is something people really do cling to, and that we’re all familiar with.

Then there are views about the world, what you think about how the world works: It may be the world of politics, the world of science, or just your general views about the physical world or the world of human society: That’s our sense of reality. We hold to that, too, because it’s within that reality that we’re going to try to find happiness. The more confident you are in how you understand the world, the more you’re going to cling to that understanding.

Then there’s clinging to what the Buddha calls habits and practices: Your ideas of how things should be done, how things should not be done. We hold very strongly to those ideas as well.

Then finally your idea of yourself: who you are, what you are, whether you’re your body, whether you have a self that owns the body, whether you identify with your consciousness, identify with your thinking.

These ideas of who you are, the world you’re in, and how you should behave in the world to find pleasure: These are things we cling to very strongly.

What the Buddha is saying is that these four things that we cling to are actually made up of those aggregates he talked about: The sense of your body as you feel it from within—that’s form. Feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions, the labels you put on things that give them meaning.

As with a stoplight: You see the red and you tell yourself, “That’s red.” Then what’s the meaning of red? It means, “stop.” Then there’s a question of how important the light is. You come to a stoplight at an intersection, you say, “This is very important, I really do have to stop.” Red, stop, important: Those are labels, perceptions. They give meaning to things.

Then there are thought constructs, the way we put our thoughts together.

And finally consciousness, which is aware of all these things. If it weren’t for the activity of consciousness, you wouldn’t be able to do any of these other things. Our sense of the world, our sense of our self, our sense of what should be done, and what kind of pleasures we want: All these things are made up of those aggregates.

The Buddha wants you to see further that those aggregates are very ephemeral. They’re very quick to come, quick to go. When things are so quickly changeable, you can’t really place your hopes for any kind of solid happiness on them. But to really see that, you’re going to have to develop the path.

One important part of the path is concentration. You start with mindfulness, like you’re doing right now. You focus on the body in and of itself—in other words, the body as it is right here, right now. You can focus on one aspect of it, like the breath. When you breathe in, know you’re breathing in. When you breathe out, you know you’re breathing out. You keep following the breath in and out, in and out, and you try not to get distracted. Any thoughts that would deal with the world outside, you put them aside.

You develop three qualities of mind as you do this. One is that you’re mindful; in other words, you keep in mind what you’re supposed to be doing. And you’re alert to make sure that you actually are doing it. “Is the mind with the breath? Is the breath with the mind?” As long as the answer is yes, you’re fine; you keep that up.

That’s the beginning of the third quality, which is ardency: You try to do this well. If you find that the mind and the breath are separating—well, it’s not so much that they separate, it’s the mind that goes off—you bring it back. If it goes off again, you bring it back again. While it’s there, you try to make the breath as comfortable as possible, so that you’ll want to stay here. And when the mind finally does settle down with a sense of well-being, that’s when you get into right concentration.

When the mind is solidly in its concentration, then you can look more clearly at the things that you’re clinging to, starting with sensuality: your fascination with nice sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. Ask yourself: When a sensual desire comes, when does it come? You want to be right there at the beginning, because you want to see what sparks it in the mind. The same principle applies with anger or any of the qualities of the mind that Buddha calls hindrances, like restlessness and anxiety or doubt.

You want to see, when it comes, why it comes—what inside the mind sparks it—and you want to see when it goes. As you see these things coming and going, you establish the fact: yes, they are activities. The question, though, is the value: What’s the allure? Why do you like these activities? What impels you to go with them?

Then you look for the drawbacks. This is where you think about how these things are inconstant and stressful. If they’re inconstant and stressful, why hold on to them? Why hold on to them as you or yours?—your sense of yourself, your sense of the world, *your *sense of what should and shouldn’t be done, *your *sensual pleasures. When you can see that the drawbacks outweigh the allure, that’s when you can let go.

That’s when you end your passion, aversion, and delusion around those aggregates, because you see that your ideas of the world and yourself really are made up of these aggregates, and the aggregates are not really all that reliable. If you hold on to them, there’s a lot of suffering. That’s when you lose any interest in craving for more, because as you remember, the Buddha said there’s something better when you can let go. That’s how you fulfill the duties of the four noble truths.

When you’ve done that, that’s when you really know them. You’ve thoroughly comprehended your suffering. You’ve thoroughly let go of your craving, because you see it’s not worth holding on to. You’ve fully developed the path to the point where you can let the path go, too. That’s when you realize the end of suffering.

So, that’s how we stop suffering through knowing the four noble truths: not just through knowing about them, but looking at the world in their terms.

In other words, seeing when something is suffering, you remember the duty with regard to it. The duty is to comprehend it. If there’s craving, the duty is to let go. All the elements of the path are things to be developed. So you see the truths, you see your experience in terms of those truths, and you do the duties appropriate to those truths. And in doing the duties, that’s when you really know them. You’re learning by doing.

You can read about, say, concentration: That’s one thing. And you can get started on it: That’s something else. But when you get really, really good at it, that’s when you thoroughly know it. The more thoroughly you know your concentration, the more thoroughly you’re going to know the other noble truths as well.

So you don’t have to look anyplace else. All these things are going to appear right here, as you work on getting the mind trained. It’s right here that you find that you’ve been creating the causes for suffering. But it’s also right here that you learn you can let go of those causes, and then the mind is free. Where is it free? It’s free right here.

So you don’t have to look anywhere else. Just really get to know what’s going on in your mind, in the body, right here as you stay with the breath.

The breath is a good way to do this, because you can’t watch any past breath, you can’t watch any future breath. All you have is the breath right here, right now. So as long as you’re with the breath, you know you’re in your right space.

Then the next question simply is learning to see what’s going on right here, right now. You get better and better at that as you begin to realize that those aggregates that you were trying to understand are actually the things you do in order to get the mind into concentration.

You’ve got the form of the body. You’ve got the feeling of ease that you’re developing. You’ve got the perceptions, the images in your mind about how the breath goes through the body; thought constructs, how you talk to yourself around the breath; and finally consciousness, which is aware of all these activities. It’s all right here.

So you’re getting hands-on practice with all the different elements that go into suffering. The more you know them, the more you can learn how to use them in such a way so that you don’t cause suffering until you can finally let them go, that’s when you really know.