Overcoming the Shravakas' Attachment to the Four Noble Truths

“No suffering, origin, cessation, or path; No wisdom, nor attainment.”

This was taught to śrāvakas and bodhisattvas. “Suffering, origin, cessation, and path” are the “Four Noble Truths” that the Buddha first expounded at Sarnath (the Deer Park).

After the Buddha left the palace without the consent of his father, the king, he scaled the city walls and fled under cover of night, accompanied only by his charioteer Channa. After leaving the city, he cut his own hair to signify his resolve. The king, reluctant to part with his son, sent five royal ministers to follow the Buddha, and they accompanied him from the forest of austerities all the way to Snow Mountain. Later, when the Buddha left Snow Mountain to bathe in the Nairañjanā River, he accepted an offering of milk-rice from a cowherd girl (To continue his spiritual practice, he needed to restore his physical strength. Buddhist teachings hold that practitioners use provisional, material forms to cultivate ultimate truth: food, bedding, clothing, and other daily necessities remain indispensable for practice). The five royal ministers believed the Buddha had abandoned his spiritual aspiration, so they left him and went to Sarnath to practice on their own. After the Buddha attained enlightenment, he first expounded the Four Noble Truths to these five royal ministers at Sarnath, and they formed the first saṅgha (monastic community).

The Four Noble Truths encompass the causal truths of both the mundane and supramundane realms; the term “truth” here denotes ultimate reality.

“Suffering” is the fruit of worldly existence, representing all painful phenomena in the mundane world. There are “three kinds of suffering”: suffering of suffering, suffering of change, and pervasive suffering; “eight kinds of suffering”: suffering of birth, aging, illness, death, separation from loved ones, association with those one detests, not getting what one desires, and the suffering of the five aggregates, which are ablaze with affliction; there are also further classifications, including the “one hundred and eight kinds of suffering” and others.

“Origin” represents the causes of worldly suffering, including afflictions (kleśa) and karma. “Suffering and origin” together describe the causal phenomena of the mundane world. “Cessation” refers to the state of nirvāṇa: it denotes the complete eradication of all ignorance and afflictions, leading to a state of purity and liberation that is the fruit of supramundane liberation. “Path” is both the cause of liberation and the path to liberation.

There are various methods of practice to attain the fruit of liberation. In brief, there are the threefold trainings of precepts, meditation, and wisdom; in broader terms, there is the Noble Eightfold Path; and in even greater detail, there are the Thirty-seven Factors of Enlightenment. Diligently cultivating the threefold trainings of precepts, meditation, and wisdom, and extinguishing greed, hatred, and delusion, is what is meant by “the path”.

The Noble Eightfold Path consists of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

The Thirty-seven Factors of Enlightenment refer to the four foundations of mindfulness, four right efforts, four bases of spiritual power, five faculties, five powers, seven factors of enlightenment, and the Noble Eightfold Path. By cultivating these factors, one can realize the truth of cessation and attain nirvāṇa.

The Four Noble Truths are the teaching on the path of liberation that the Buddha expounded to the śrāvaka saṅgha. When the Buddha first turned the wheel of Dharma, he taught the three turnings of the Four Noble Truths. Hīnayāna Buddhism primarily centers on the Āgama Sūtras. Works that expound the Four Noble Truths include Vasubandhu Bodhisattva’s Abhidharmakośa in twenty volumes, and the Mahāvibhāṣā; their content is vast and profound, and they constitute the core foundational teachings of Buddhism. Practitioners who have attained the Hīnayāna level of realization develop attachment to the inherent existence of the Four Noble Truths. To break this attachment, the teaching “No suffering, origin, cessation, or path; No wisdom, nor attainment” is taught.