First Noble Truth

by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

An excerpt from a Teaching called “How Buddhists Think”

The Buddha’s first teaching dealt with what is now called “The Four Noble Truths.”  This is the basis for everything he taught later.  If it is not understood, then Buddhism will not be understood.

The Buddha taught that cyclic existence, the entire cycle of death and rebirth with all its phenomena, is pervaded by suffering.  If you disagree with that, just look at a newspaper.  Most people’s lives are affected by war, by hunger, by old age; we will all experience sickness and death.  Other forms of sentient life have similar suffering, and it also pervades their lives.

The Buddha does not deny that some happiness exists.  Is there not joy in the drug-like process of falling in love, in loving relationships, in the birth of a child, in acquiring wealth, in seeing and having beautiful things, in enjoying nature and simply feeling good on a good day?

But there is a form of suffering that we all share: every joy has a point of termination.   The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent.  Short-term loves break our hearts when they fail to endure.  Then we revert to our habitual loneliness, anger, and unhappiness.  Even life-long loves and marriages end in separation.

The bottom-line cause of suffering, the Buddha taught, is desire.  And what causes desire to arise?  At a point so unimaginably long ago that it’s called “time out of mind,” there arose the idea of self-nature as inherently real and as separate from “other.”  This fixation on the duality of subject and object is the persistent skeletal structure for all experience.  Until you achieve realization, all the experiences you have derive from this misperception.

Copyright ©  Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo.  All rights reserved