For many people at present, the four noble truths are among the first things they learn about Buddhism. This is ironic, because the Buddha himself often found that he first had to prepare his listeners to develop the right frame of mind for properly receiving the four noble truths. After all, he wasn’t concerned with teaching people about Buddhism. He was more focused on speaking to their needs—to overcome suffering—and to put them in the best frame of mind to receive and accept his teachings so that they would be willing to act on them and to reap their benefits. He did that by teaching them other topics beforehand. Only when they accepted his preliminary teachings and allowed their hearts and minds to be moved by them would they be willing to accept the four truths and to act on them.
This is because the four truths point out a duality about desire that many people find hard to accept: Their common desires—the ones they tend to follow willingly and happily—are actually the causes of suffering, whereas the desires that lead to the end of suffering require training.
The central role of desire in shaping the four noble truths can be seen in the similes the Buddha uses to illustrate his teachings as a whole. They’re all images of people acting on desire in a skillful way. The image most relevant to the four noble truths is one in which the Buddha compares himself to a doctor desiring the health of his patient, and the Dhamma to medicine (Iti 100; AN 10:108). Many people over the centuries have noted how the four noble truths are like a doctor’s approach to a disease: The truth of suffering describes the disease’s symptoms, the truth of the origination of suffering diagnoses its cause, the truth of cessation gives the prognosis that the disease can be totally cured, and the truth of the path charts out the course of treatment to bring about that cure.
The Buddha sought to rouse within his listeners the desire to adopt a nobler attitude in their search for happiness. His means for doing this was called the step-by-step discourse (anupubbī-kathā). Interestingly enough, even though he gave this discourse many times in the course of his teaching career, the Canon never gives a full script of the discourse itself. All we have is a list of the main topics it covered (MN 156):
giving, virtue, heaven, the drawbacks of sensuality, and the rewards of renunciation.
One of the most important points that the Buddha made about giving is that you should give where you feel inspired. When discussing the topic of giving, he focused on occasions when the gift is voluntary, and not simply a matter of custom. The fact that a gift should be freely given was so important that, when designing the culture of his monastic orders, he made sure that the donor’s freedom to choose where to give was always protected. For example, if people approach a monk and ask where they should give a gift, he’s supposed to say, “Give wherever your gift would be well-used, or would be well-cared for, or would last long, or wherever your mind feels inspired.” (NP 30)
Still, the Buddha noted that the happiness that results from giving can be greatly multiplied by approaching the act of giving as a skill. This skill has four dimensions:
- Your motivation in giving:
- the lowest motivation is to give a gift because you expect to get a similar item back after death, through the results of kamma
- a higher motivation than that is when you realize that giving a gift makes your mind happy and serene
- the highest motivation is when you give not because you’re expecting any return from the gift at all
- Your generosity is simply an expression of the goodness of the heart and mind. (AN 7:49) It’s good to focus on how the act of giving makes the mind happy and serene. That gives energy and further motivation to your practice.
2. Your attitude while giving: You give attentively, you give with conviction that something good will come of it, you give with empathy for the person receiving the gift, and you don’t have the attitude that you’re simply throwing the gift away (AN 5:148). When you give with the proper attitude, the recipient is glad to receive your gift and more inclined to use it well.
3. Your choice of the recipients for your gift: the Buddha said that it’s best to give to those who are free of passion, aversion, and delusion, or to those who are practicing to overcome passion, aversion, and delusion (AN 3:24). These are the people most likely to make best use of the gift. When you see that, you’ll be happy you gave.
4. Your choice of what gift to give: you give a gift appropriate for the time and place, and you focus on times when the recipients are especially in need. Also, you give without adversely affecting yourself or others (AN 5:148).
When you’ve developed giving as a skill, the act of giving makes your mind glad before you do it, bright and clear while you’re doing it, and gratified after you’re done (AN 6:37). In this way, the act of giving in and of itself is a source of happiness. But it also provides further long-term results: If you return to the human level, you’ll tend to be wealthy and inclined to enjoy your wealth (AN 5:34).
Virtue, the second topic, refers to not intentionally breaking any of the five precepts: against killing, against stealing, against illicit sex, against telling lies, and against taking intoxicants.
The Buddha notes that when you intentionally hold to these precepts in all situations, you’re giving universal safety to all. In other words, no one anywhere has to fear harm from your behavior. When you give universal safety in this way, you’ll have a share in that safety as well (AN 8:39).
These precepts embody the principle of harmlessness which is a source of happiness in and of itself. This can be seen immediately in that it gives you a solid basis for healthy self-esteem. If you conduct your life in a virtuous way, your wealth tends to be solid and lasting; you have a good reputation for being reliable; if you go to a meeting of people, you can expect that no one will have valid grounds for accusing you of misbehavior; and you die unconfused—in other words, you approach death with a clear conscience (DN 16).
As for the benefits after death, being virtuous tends to lead to a heavenly rebirth. If you return to the human world, you’ll be fortunate in line with each of the precepts you’ve followed: You’ll tend to have a long life, you won’t lose your wealth, you won’t face rivalry and revenge, you won’t be falsely accused, and you won’t suffer mental derangement (AN 8:40).
Heaven: Strangely, even though the Buddha frequently mentioned the possibility of a heavenly rebirth, the Canon records very few descriptions of the pleasures of heaven. This may have been because the compilers of the Canon were more interested in emphasizing the fact that there’s a higher happiness than heaven: total liberation. All they have to say about heaven is that there are heavens of unalloyed sensual pleasure, where sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations are all exclusively pleasant. The happiness felt by the ideal king—wealthy, powerful, handsome, loving his subjects and loved by them—is only a small sliver of the happiness felt by heavenly beings (MN 129).
Drawbacks of sensuality: On the human plane, these drawbacks are easy to see. It’s because of sensuality that people have to work, often in difficult circumstances, even though there’s no guarantee that their work will yield the wealth they desire. Even if it does, they have to protect their wealth from being stolen or falling into the hands of hateful heirs, thieves, or jealous rivals. It’s because of sensuality that family members fight with one another, that countries wage war with one another, that people commit crimes and suffer punishments when they’re caught, and that people act in ways that lead to a bad destination after death (MN 13).
However, given that, in the step-by-step discourse, this topic follows on the topic of heaven, the Buddha probably focused on the drawbacks even of sensual pleasures on the heavenly plane. On this level, the primary drawbacks are three:
- Sensual Desires can never be fully satisfied.
- Life in heaven doesn’t last forever. When the good kamma that sent you there runs out, you have to leave.
- Heavenly beings enjoying the fruits of their past kamma tend to get careless and complacent. Rare are those who give thought to developing the goodness of their minds and actions any further. As a result, the vast majority of heavenly beings, on passing away from their heavenly realms, fall to planes lower than the human (SN 56:102–113).
Rewards of Renunciation: finding happiness in ways that don’t involve sensuality. These would include the bliss and rapture that can be found by centering the mind in right concentration, leading to the even higher bliss of total liberation.
Conclusion: By starting with generosity and virtue he’s giving a preliminary answer to the questions that he says lie at the beginning of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? And what, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” (MN 135)
By defining discernment in the context of the desire for long-term happiness, the Buddha affirms the value of the search to avoid pain. And he’s also making discernment an issue of value judgment: What’s worth doing, and what’s not? As for his answer to these questions: Acts of generosity lead to long-term welfare and benefit. By following the precepts, you avoid long-term harm and suffering. By touching on the principles of kamma and rebirth in answering these questions, the Buddha shows why these questions are wise—in assuming that long-term happiness and pain are possible and will depend on your actions.
When finding happiness in these ways, you can live simply, without fear that others will be jealous of you or try to take your happiness away from you. These forms of happiness hold none of the dangers of sensuality. In particular, they never destroy your goodness. The happiness of right concentration may come and go, but the happiness of liberation never ends. When you can accept the idea that this kind of happiness would be better than sensual happiness, you’re ready for the four noble truths that will show you how to get there. In his own analogy, it’s as if he has washed his listeners’ minds in the same way that he would wash a piece of white cloth before dyeing it. They would now be ready to accept the dye of the four noble truths.
Four Noble Truths, Ṭhanissaro Bhikkhu, Chapter Four