Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this teaching, Stephen Batchelor examines the four ennobling truths not as beliefs to adopt but as injunctions to enact. He opens by clarifying the Buddha’s playful use of language — the term sota appears in radically different contexts, revealing a resistance to rigid definitions. Batchelor then reframes the four truths away from axiomatic doctrines toward a practical framework: suffering is to be fully known; craving is to be relinquished; cessation is to be experienced; the path is to be cultivated. He shows how this sequence flows naturally from one action to the next, rooted in the Buddha’s principle of dependent origination. The core practice involves sitting still in meditation, paying close attention to existential dukkha — birth, sickness, age, death, and the fact that life does not conform to our desires — while learning to observe impermanence, suffering, and the selfless nature of experience. Rather than fleeing suffering, practitioners learn to face reality directly and consistently, shifting perspective from ego-centered resistance to truthful acknowledgment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 BwB.mp3
UUID: 8f1a29cb-5873-4304-952d-3b9ab00150f9
Teacher: Batchelor
Collection: Buddhism without beliefs (Batchelor)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~3,435
Over the last couple of days, we’ve mentioned this idea of the the counter intuitive nature of what the Buddha taught. Being an interpretation of his expression ‘Paṭisota-gāmī’, going against the stream. Today I would like to talk about another term that is very central to his teaching and that is the idea of Sotāpanna entering the stream. In both cases we have exactly the same word sota but being used in radically different ways. So, we find this actually quite a bit in Buddhism.
The Buddha will use the term in two quite contrasting fashions. For example he will sometimes say about being entangled in the thicket of views and opinions. Diṭṭhi. And then in another context he will talk about the importance of Sammā-diṭṭhi, of an authentic view. Is a kind of, one almost senses at times a kind of playfulness, a resistance to being too trapped by defining a word in one one way only, but having a flexibility, a fluidity, perhaps even a kind of enjoyment in the ambiguity of language.
To get a sense of what is meant by entering the stream, we need to see this in the wider context of what are known as the four ennobling truths. Perhaps more widely translated as the four noble truths. Here we have a doctrine that is so central to Buddhism it’s almost impossible to pick up any book on the subject and not immediately be exposed to these ideas, the four noble truths. And the problem though is that often these four truths are presented as though they are it were four propositions that every self respecting Buddhist has to believe in. And they therefore are set up as kind of axiomatic doctrines or dogmas.
And that is in fact often how they are treated. So the first truth is the truth of suffering and again it sometimes translated inaccurately as life is suffering. The Buddha never said that. It is simply dukkha. There is suffering.
There is dukkha. Again, a complicated term. The second truth is the truth of the origin of dukkha which the Buddha recognizes as a particular kind of grasping or craving. Craving is the word that was originally used. But it goes back to this kind of self clinging and holding we have been speaking about.
The third truth is the cessation of craving or grasping. And the fourth truth is that of the path, the eight fold path. Now, one of the curiosities about this model is that one often wonders why it’s been presented in this particular sequence. Why do we start with suffering then go back as it were logically to its origins, its causes. Then we come to the end of suffering.
And again if we look carefully at the text it doesn’t actually talk of the end of suffering, it talks of the end of the causes of suffering, the ending of craving. But nonetheless, it’s an odd sequence. And then finally we have the path. The path the Buddha describes as the eight fold path that leads to the ending of craving. Why are these presented in this rather, what appears to be, unnatural sequence?
I think the clue to answering that question lies again through looking carefully at the first discourse the Buddha gave in which he presents these four truths not as propositions to believe, but rather as injunctions to act or to do something. And so for each truth, there is a corresponding action. This is very explicit in in the text. The first truth of dukkha is to be fully known. The second truth of the origins of dukkha or craving is to be relinquished, to be let go of.
The third truth of cessation is to be experienced. And the fourth truth of the path is to be brought into being, is to be cultivated. Don’t worry, I’m going to go over this again, but it’s important I think to lay out the basic ground plan to see where we’re going. I said earlier that the doctrine of of dependent origination or contingency is a bit like the the e equals m c squared of Buddhism. The idea that when this is, that arises, when this arises, whatever arises is something that ceases.
To recognize this this principle within, as it were, all aspects of our life, of our experience, of our understanding of reality lies at the very core of what the Buddha taught. And from that insight, which as we saw the Buddha identifies as the heart of his own awakening, we can then tease out or develop all of the teachings and practices and everything that subsequently came to be known as Buddhism. The first step in this translation of the primary principle of dependent origination Origination leads us into its formulation as a practice in the teaching of the four Ennobling Truths. This is recognized quite explicitly by Nāgārjuna, who we mentioned earlier, the great philosopher of emptiness, who says in one of his verses, those who see contingency see suffering, its origins, its cessation and the path. He sees an exact step from contingency to the four truths.
And likewise, I’m sorry, just as the Buddha when he describes his awakening as centered in this experience of contingency, when he then leaves Gaya and walks to Banaras in order to meet his former companions in asceticism and delivers the first discourse called discourse on turning the wheel of dhamma, the first teaching he gives that constitutes this discourse is that of the four truths. So we can see both historically the link between contingency and the four truths. We can also see logically how the four truths are in a way the initial extrapolation of the idea of contingency into a form of life, into a form of practice. And again, we get at the end of the first discourse, the Buddha’s acknowledgment that it was these four truths that also constituted his awakening. And that’s not a contradiction from the the text I cited earlier, but simply an elaboration of the same principle.
He says, as long as my knowledge and vision was not entirely clear about the reality of the four truths, I did not claim to have had a peerless awakening in this world with its humans and celestials, its gods and devils, its ascetics and priests. So again, when we get into these long discussions about, well, what is enlightenment? The Buddha is very clear about this. There’s nothing mystical or obscure about it whatsoever. This is stated very explicitly that the core of this awakening, this enlightenment, is that of this deep experiential insight into contingency, dependent origination.
And in the next instance, the elaboration of that principle into these four truths. One might wonder, well, why are they called noble truths? Or why is it often translated as noble truths? The word is ariya sacca. Ariya does, of course, mean noble.
But remember that Ārya also is or was at the time of the Buddha an ethnic and racial concept. It referred to the peoples who had immigrated from Central Europe into North India about a thousand or so years before the Buddha, who considered themselves the Aryans, which means like the noble ones, the elevated ones. And the Buddha was in a way one of the people who brought that Aryan civilization to a certain peak. But as we’ve seen, as I was just saying, what the Buddha tends to do is is take a term that had a meaning at a broad meaning at his time, and then he twisted around and gives it another sense. For him, Ariya doesn’t any longer have anything to do with a particular race of people or a tribe or something like that.
But it he turns it into a universal idea that any person, no matter what their background, no matter what their their gender or whatever, is capable of becoming Aryan, of becoming noble. And these truths therefore are called noble, not because the truths themselves are noble, which would one might assume quite evidently from the way it’s present. The first noble truth, the second noble truth. It’s difficult to see what is noble about suffering, for example. Even more difficult to see what is noble about craving.
So why are these truths called noble? According to what my Tibetan teacher would explain, they’re noble because through understanding them, through integrating them into your own life, that lends your life a certain nobility or dignity. These truths are therefore ennobling rather than noble in themselves. It’s not the the truths themselves, but rather what we do with them, how we relate to them that brings about a nobility, a spiritual nobility in our own existence. And particularly, when we let go of this idea of the truths being a sort of axiomatic doctrines that Buddhists believe.
And we look at them as a model or a framework in which we do something. In other words, as a framework for practice. We can see too that they are primarily actions rather than beliefs. And through enacting these truths, that is what will have some kind of transformative effect on our lives. So what I want to look at today is how these can be enacted.
Now this is already implicit in the particular injunctions given to each one. And this is what allows us to see, I believe, how and why these truths are arranged in this particular sequence. Suffering, it’s causes, cessation, the path. If you think of this in terms of the injunctions, it becomes much more easy to see why. We could almost sum these up in four slogans, one might say, or four commands or suggestions.
No suffering, let go of craving, experience cessation, create a path. Let’s just go through that step by step. And we’ll see that each of those injunctions injunctions leads naturally and organically to the next. And that is what creates a a process here rather than a mental struggle to figure out why they’re in this order. They’re actually quite naturally flowing one from the other.
And the starting point is to is to fully know suffering. The Buddha puts an emphatic on the word know. Not just which means to know, but to fully know. By the Tibetan translation means completely or totally no dukkha. That’s the injunction.
That that that’s the practice. Now this is perhaps again one of the most counter intuitive injunctions that the Buddha gives. In other words, if you’re seeking genuine well-being, then look deeply into the nature of suffering. It seems very odd that someone might say that. It would seem to be the last place to look.
If you want to be happy, then suffer a bit more. What sense does that make? I think it makes a lot of sense. Because part of, or perhaps one of the roots of our failure to experience well-being is our almost instinctive refusal or denial to encounter and to embrace the suffering that is knit into the very fabric of our lives inescapably. One might argue that much of our life is spent in a desperate flight from having to encounter suffering.
Now for the Buddha suffering, as he describes it in in in this opening Sutta or discourse, is primarily of an existential nature. He says birth, sickness, age, and death are dukkha. In other words, the dukkha he’s referring to doesn’t mean just, you know, stubbed toes and headaches and feeling a bit bored sometimes. But it actually goes to the very heart of what it means to be human. What it means to exist as a sentient creature.
It means to embrace the fact that we have been born into this world. We are subject to the breakdown of the body and ultimately to death. And our eviction from this place. But he also phrases it in a way that’s a little more specific in terms of let’s just read the actual text itself. Encountering what is not dear is painful.
Separation from what is dear is painful. Not getting what one wants is painful. In short, the five aggregates, our body mind complex is painful or dukkha. Very difficult to find the right word in English for dukkha. And in some ways, all of this is saying can be summarized in this rather jokey phrase that you sometimes see on people’s teachers these days.
Shit happens. In other words, we’re in a world where things happen that we would prefer did not happen. And that may seem rather rather self evident, but it is a very crucial characteristic of our existence. We try to deny that. We try to get around it.
We try to avoid it. We try to explain the way to rationalize it. We like to think that the world is there for the gratification of our desires and the prevention of our undesired experiences unfortunately, it’s not like that. It can be sometimes, which is wonderful. We certainly experience joy and well-being and happiness and ecstasy and so forth and so on.
But whether or not our lives are fulfilled in those ways, that doesn’t exclude us from the fundamental fact that our existence on this earth is continuously and constantly shot through with what we don’t want, what we don’t like. Now what the Buddha is saying is that the problem doesn’t lie so so much in these in the fact that that’s the case. That’s simply the case. The problem lies in the ways in which we habitually deal with it. That rather than accepting this, acknowledging it, and facing up to it, or as in his words fully knowing it, we tend to shy away from it.
We tend to evade it. We tend to block it out. We tend to explain it away. What the Buddha suggesting is that that approach, that evasive approach is actually what will only lead to our experiencing greater discontent, frustrations, anguish, unhappiness because our our strategy of living in the world is actually in conflict with the nature of the world itself. So the first step therefore is to recognize that strategy of flight and escape and blocking out, and actually to pay attention to what it is that we feel to be so undesirable and so fearful, and to encounter it.
And this is very much one of the things that we do here on a retreat in meditation. We sit still for prescribed lengths of time. We walk up and down for prescribed lengths of time. We cut off all other or as many as possible avenues of distraction. And we allow ourselves to be totally with what is happening in the moment.
And this is, you know, if you haven’t got that point yet, clearly we haven’t been explaining things very well. But what we’re doing here in a way is setting up a condition, a circumstance in which there is no escape. I mean, of course, we can jump in our car and drive away. But if we accept the conditions of the retreat, we’re accepting to be in a situation in which we are not going to escape from ourselves. We’re not gonna flee.
If we do flee off in our minds, and it probably does happen sometimes, we come back to the breath. We come back to the pain in the knee. We come back to the pressure of our feet on the ground. We come back to what it is that we are. Without preference, without judgment, without interpretation, we just stare reality in the face and we say, yes, this is what is going on.
I may feel very anxious. I may feel very upset. I might feel very depressed. I might feel very buoyant and radiant and calm and joyous. Whatever it is, that is where where we are.
And that is where we center our attention. And this I feel is very much the the practice of the first truth, the fully knowing dukkha. To be with it. Now we do that though by providing some rather important tools. The first one is to learn how to stabilize our attention. Because it’s quite difficult to be with our experience without having a kind of base on which we feel grounded and secure in which we can just be with what is taking place.
So the first part of meditation is very much about focusing on the breath or some other object in in order that the mind begins to settle down a bit in which we get a kind of calm focus that’s much more centered in the body rather than in the head. But that is really only phase one of meditation. Phase two is called Vipassana. Again, a word that’s used very generally now a days and sometimes one loses sense, the sense of what it actually means. Vipassana means something like looking deeply.
Passana means to see or to look. The particle v either means a kind of intensifier, intense seeing, which I think is probably a fairly good way of looking at it. So again, when we come back to this moment when the mind is settled, we look at it more intensely. But the problem with that is that we think all we really have to do is just kind of eyeball it a little bit more totally. And magically, it will reveal its secrets.
I think intense here doesn’t mean just, you know, staring a bit harder. I don’t see why that would have effect at all apart from making whatever it is just that more vivid. The v particle in Vipassana also means to differentiate. It means to it it means to somehow to be able to tease open, to to to tease apart the nature of that experience. It implies a degree of of investigation, of analysis.
And specifically, the Buddha suggests that we pay attention to certain key features of our experience. We’ve said this again and again. Impermanence, dukkha, we come back to dukkha again. Anatta, the impersonal or selfless nature of experience. That it’s by the the what distinguishes the or simply sitting still, focusing the mind, getting calm and clear.
From Vipassana, Vipassana means penetratingly observing and paying attention to these key features of experience that from the Buddha’s point of view are what will lead us to this entering of the stream. This experience of awakening or whatever we call it. So we’re not just looking at things with kind of wide open eyes, but we’re also learning to pay particular attention to these key features. And through doing that, we begin to orient ourselves to our experience from another perspective altogether. As we’ve mentioned already, these these features of experience are things that we instinctively don’t pay attention to.
We we we’re kind of wired to try to create a situation in our lives that is pretty much stable and permanent. That’s one that seems to optimize and maximize our capacity for pleasure and well-being and satisfaction. And also one that is intensely identified with me and what I relate to as mine. That seems to be the neurobiological conditioning that sets us up for pretty much how we then behave in this world. The whole of the consumer society is built on this.
The Buddha is going against that. He’s going against that intuition and instructing us to look at those things that we conventionally and habitually ignore. And to do so from a still and focused space. And to do so consistently in a kind of disciplined fashion. Now what happens when we begin to experience our world more and more from that perspective, we find that over time, and perhaps at certain key moments of insight, that we that we begin to acknowledge and recognize in a very felt way the ephemeral nature of things, the transient nature of things, the tragic condition of life.
And also how the world, the sheer pouring forth of experience is quite indifferent to me and my ego and my plans and all of the stuff that I’m so involved in most of the time. And it’s a willingness to embrace that, which can be difficult. It’s difficult to embrace that, but that seems to be what the Buddha is suggesting. To embrace the world from that perspective. Now, although it might be difficult, I think it’s hard to deny that it is not more truthful.