Foundations
The Four Noble Truths
Tibetan: pakpé denpa zhi ('phags pa'i bden pa bzhi) · Sanskrit: catvāri āryasatyāni · Dutch: De Vier Edele Waarheden
The Four Noble Truths are the Buddha's first teaching after his enlightenment: there is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can end, and there is a path that leads to its end.
The Four Noble Truths are the Buddha's first teaching after his enlightenment: there is suffering, suffering has a cause, suffering can end, and there is a path that leads to its end. He gave it in the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, to the five ascetics he had once spent years of austerities with. Tradition calls this the first turning of the wheel of Dharma. Everything that came afterwards rests on it, Vajrayana and Dzogchen included.
A diagnosis in four parts
The first truth is duhkha, usually translated as suffering. The word reaches further than pain. It covers the low hum of dissatisfaction, the sense that something is never quite right, and the plain fact that good times don't last. Tibetan teachers speak of three kinds: the suffering of pain itself, the suffering of change, and an all-pervading suffering that simply comes with any existence in samsara.
The second truth names the cause. Suffering isn't random. It grows out of craving and aversion and the karma we build up through them, and beneath those lies ignorance: not seeing what we really are.
The third truth is the good news. Suffering can stop. Its stopping is called nirvana.
The fourth is the path, traditionally set out as the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.
The classic comparison is with going to the doctor. If you are ill, you first have to admit it. Then you look for the cause, trust that recovery is possible, and take the medicine. Hearing only the diagnosis is frightening. Hearing all four together gives you reason to hope.
Where they show up in practice
In the Nyingma tradition the Four Noble Truths aren't a beginners' topic to be ticked off and left behind. They run through the whole path, and what changes is how closely you look. At first they explain why we suffer. Much later, in Dzogchen, the question turns to what the suffering mind actually is.
You meet them very directly in the four thoughts that turn the mind to the Dharma, the contemplations that open the Ngöndro. Reflecting on karma and on the suffering of samsara is really the first two truths made personal. You don't study them from a book so much as recognise them in your own life.
At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling the Saturday class in Hoofddorp begins with those contemplations before we practise the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro together. If you'd like to see how the Buddha's first teaching works in practice, you're welcome to come along.