Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Geshe Pema Tsering frames his introduction to the Four Noble Truths around the anniversary of the Buddha’s first teaching at Deer Park in Varanasi. He explains what sets Buddhism apart from other traditions — its focus not on immediate comfort but on long-term cause and effect across lifetimes — before walking through each of the four truths in sequence. The bulk of the session unpacks the three types of suffering: manifest pain, the suffering of change (illustrated through eating until sick, buying a car, falling in love, winning money), and the all-pervasive suffering of saṃsāra. The Dalai Lama and Gandhi appear as modern examples of people who applied these truths in practice. Suited to newcomers to Buddhist thought.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 4NT 2003 08 04.mp3
UUID: e3319da4-1760-450a-966e-c6826b316dea
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB The four noble truths (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-08-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~4,614
So in order to introduce Buddhist philosophy, then we should try and talk about the main thing in Buddhist philosophy, the main point Buddhist practice and the main focus of the philosophy. This is usually said to be what’s called the Four Noble Truths or the Four Truths of the Aryas. The first teaching the Buddha gave after he reached enlightenment was the four noble truths. So when we are introducing Buddha’s philosophy, then we usually focus on this. There’s a lot of things that are actually common to most religious traditions.
Most religious traditions talk about things like compassion, suffering, going to a state that’s a happy place, having the experiences of our past negativities come back to us. Most of them focus on these different things. But the the four noble truths is something that is unique to Buddhism it’s what sets it apart from the other religions and what the four noble truths entails is two things two truths that we should practice or focus on and two truths or two things that we need to abandon that we need to get rid off and then within those things the two ones that we need to abandon include one that’s a cause and one that’s a result and the two things that we need to practice or that we need to focus on one of those is a cause and another one is a result as well. So, we talk about these four noble truths. We talk about what it is stating is a way for us to experience happiness and to stop experiencing suffering this is what is set out in the Four Noble Truths usually most most people accept this and most people have this that general disposition.
They want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer. The difference between it looking at it from a Buddhist perspective and looking at it from a perspective that we usually look at it from is that we’re not just talking about this life we’re not just talking about the things that we can experience in a positive way in this life we’re also talking about the next life we’re talking about what will be the results of our actions in a more long term basis not just in terms of how happy we will be in this life so Buddhism is not just focusing on immediate results because we can see now that if we work hard then we get certain results we can get financial rewards we can have establish ourselves in a quite comfortable situation but it’s talking more about long term results because we can’t see what’s going to happen after death we can only establish a logical understanding of what’s going to happen after death based on reasoning but we can’t see it directly the only things that we can see directly are experiences in this life so because we can’t see it directly, then it’s based on reason, this means that the focus of Buddhism is different, not slightly different, it’s different to the focus of our normal everyday lives.
So, the basis of the principles that are involved in Buddhism is the concept of cause and effect. It starts with the premise that beings want to be happy and don’t want to experience suffering and then seeks to explain how we can achieve happiness and how we can avoid suffering. The way that it does it is by this concept of cause and effect. It is said that there can’t be a result if there’s no cause so if you want to experience happiness then you have to you have to develop the causes for happiness and if you don’t want to experience suffering then you have to abandon the cause for suffering it’s the same thing as if you plant a tree if you put a seed in the ground and that’s the seed of something that’s going to create benefit that’s going to bring happiness then that’s then you will reap the rewards of that seed but if you plant a seed in the ground that’s going to grow into poison then that’s not going to be of much benefit to you so the idea is based on this idea of the seed and the result or the seed and the fruit or the cause and the result If you plant the right causes, then you will experience the right results.
So, it was actually on Saturday was the anniversary of the first day and last Saturday was the anniversary of the first day that the Buddha gave a teaching in Deer Park in India. This is called the first turning of the wheel day because setting in motion the teachings is called turning the wheel of Dharma. Saturday was the anniversary of that. That first teaching that he gave in Deer Park, Varanasi in India, he chose to teach the Four Noble Truths, the truth of how to avoid suffering and how to experience happiness. That was the first teaching that the Buddha chose to give.
So The first thing that he said was that the experience of life is a dukkha or suffering or not quite rightness. That was the first truth. That’s called the truth of suffering or the truth of unsatisfactoriness the second truth that he gave was the truth of the origin of suffering that is saying the cause for that suffering the third truth that he taught was the truth of cessation that is that suffering can have an end And the fourth truth that he taught was the truth of the path or the way to bring suffering to an end. So so the first the reason that he taught the truth of suffering first is because suffering or discomfort or the unsatisfaction is something that all beings can relate to. It’s something that everybody could understand when they heard it.
They could had experience of it, so it wasn’t something that they had to doubt. They could understand that we had experienced suffering. Then, the reason he taught the next truth, the truth of the origin of suffering, next is that then people could think, Okay, where is this suffering coming from? What’s the cause of this suffering? Is there any way that I can stop it?
They naturally want to investigate this to see what the cause of their suffering was. So then that’s why the next truth that he taught was the truth of the cause of suffering, where suffering comes from. The question that the second noble truth, the truth of the origin of suffering, would naturally bring people to next then would be whether suffering can have an end, where the suffering can be stopped and so that was why the third noble truth the truth of the cessation of suffering was taught and now the cessation of suffering is when the suffering and its causes have been completely obliterated have been completely destroyed and there is only peace left. Alright? So, this peace is what’s called liberation, moksha, nirvana, the complete cessation of suffering.
So, this is what the third Noble Truth was about then if you wanted to understand how this third Noble Truth came about then you had to understand the second Noble Truth which was the truth of the origin of suffering so you had to where suffering was coming from in order to stop suffering. So that’s how the third Noble Truth can come about. And then the fourth of the noble truths, the noble truth of the path, is the way, method that’s employed in order to reach this state of liberation of cessation of suffering that’s the truth of the path so what the truth of the path is is the different understandings and different realizations that come into effect based on the understanding of the truth of the origin of suffering that can stop suffering from coming about which lead to the cessation of suffering or they lead to nirvana so that path, that method is what’s called the truth of the path and is the fourth of the noble truths. So do you understand the four noble truths? So you need to understand the Four Noble Truths in order to do Buddhist practice.
It’s the most fundamental aspect of the Buddhist path. If you don’t understand the Four Noble Truths then anything that you do won’t be a method for eliminating suffering and so therefore it’s essential to understand that and even within those the thing that we need to understand the best out of all of them in order to make sense of them is to understand the truth of suffering or truth of unsatisfactoriness. So understanding the Four Noble Truths is incredibly important. If we can understand them properly, then we cease to create suffering for ourselves and for others. This is something that most of the important or big people in the world don’t seem to have understood at the moment and we think about it in the world there’s a lot of presidents, there’s a lot of generals, there’s a lot of prime ministers, lot of different people with power and because they haven’t understood this concept stopping the causes of suffering from manifesting they don’t seem to refrain from engaging in wars and different types of policies that harm people and negative actions in general.
If they understood the Four Noble Truths properly, they wouldn’t be doing this. So, it would save a lot of pain and problems because Four Noble Truths teaches the way in order to create peace and harmony to in order to experience happiness and not to experience suffering. But, they don’t they’re not they’re not necessarily Buddhist and then don’t accept this sort of thing so they don’t have this they don’t apply the four noble Truths to their lives even if they do understand it, even if some of them do understand it, they don’t apply it to their lives so therefore it doesn’t help them very much oh. So if we understand the Four Noble Truths properly, then we become like the for starters, we become like the Buddha Śākyamūni who lived in India about two thousand five hundred years ago. Now Buddha Śākyamūni was born a prince and he was born a very powerful Okay.
So the Buddha was born a prince to a royal family in India, but he left all that behind and went and lived as a mendicant and an ascetic in order to understand truth because he understood that the experiences he was having as the king’s son weren’t going to be a cause for happiness and he had to find the true causes for happiness so he had to go out and live in this different way and actually achieve Buddhahood because he had developed an understanding of the Four Noble Truths. Now, if we want to look at a more contemporary example then we can see the Dalai Lama. Dalai Lama is the head of the Tibetan people. He’s like the king of the Tibetan people and they have many different causes that they would they may want to start a war from. They may seek to wage war on people because of the situation in their country, because of the experiences they had.
But because the Dalai Lama understands the Four Noble Truths, instead, he spends all his time going around the world talking about peace. Despite the situation in his homeland, he keeps telling people to try and work towards peace because that is the only way they’re going to experience happiness, that starting a war would never help anything. Another person that seems to have, understood the the four noble truths, properly is, Mahatma Gandhi from India. So, if you understand the Four Noble Truths, then you will get this understanding of what’s gonna cause happiness and what’s gonna cause suffering. And one of the things that isn’t gonna cause happiness is starting a war.
Another one of the things that isn’t gonna cause happiness is cheating people, is stealing from people. These things aren’t going to cause anyone to have happiness. So, if people understood those things, then they wouldn’t be starting all the problems that we can see in the world at the moment. The first of the Four Noble Truths that we need to understand is what’s called the truth of suffering. The truth of suffering is something that we all experience, the way that it’s presented may be a little different to what we normally associate with suffering.
It is said that there are three different types of suffering: there is the suffering of suffering or outright manifest suffering, the suffering of change, and all-pervasive suffering. It is said that our whole existence is pervaded by one of these three different types of suffering. The first is these three different types of suffering. The suffering of suffering is something that we all have an experience of or many experiences of. The suffering of suffering is things like a headache.
It’s things like experiencing when our body doesn’t feel comfortable in some way or another and going from a headache all the way up until the intense pain of different types of illness. That’s it there’s physical discomfort or physical illness or physical suffering there’s also mental suffering sometimes we have suffering where we feel depressed for some reason we’ve lost something that we wanted to hold on to we feel down for some reason this is like mental suffering the mental version of the suffering of suffering sometimes we just feel sad for no particular reason we’re not happy for no particular reason even this is included within the mental aspect of the suffering of suffering. So, the different ways that the suffering of suffering manifest suffering can manifest is myriad. There are so many different ways. It’s hard to try and even categorize them.
This part mainly comes about because since time immemorial, we’ve been doing negative things and because we have to experience the results of those negative actions, then the results are going to be as varied as the causes were. So that means that we have to experience all these different kinds of suffering. So, this is the suffering of suffering. Now, suffering of suffering has one good quality in that it’s easy to understand. We can understand it without having to struggle too much.
We don’t want to suffer. It’s very straightforward. We don’t want to experience this. And not only us, but dogs and cats and sheep and goats and every other animal that we can see. We can see they don’t want to experience suffering.
If they’re suffering, they try and stop suffering in some way or another. It is a very simple, very easy thing for us to see and experience. So, that’s the first one, the suffering of suffering. We can understand that pretty clearly. The second one, what’s called the suffering of change, is much more difficult.
It’s incredibly difficult to understand. Even if we understand it, it’s difficult to realize. The reason that the suffering of change is difficult to understand is usually what we call happiness. We have this experience of something being happy, and we don’t want to see it as being suffering. In fact, even without a lot of analysis and a lot of thought and contemplation on it, then we won’t accept as being suffering.
We’ll see it as being happiness. People usually come up to us and say, So, how are you? Go, I’m fine. I’m great, because we don’t have any physical ailments or whatever, and we think we are great. We have this idea of, Yeah, I’m happy.
Everything’s good, because because we don’t understand how what we’re experiencing is the suffering of change even if someone comes up to you and says how are you where you’re going and you say well I’m great I’m going to have a picnic and I’m really happy I mean everything’s great or if they say are you happy and you say yeah I’m just going to see a show or a movie and it’s great and I’m feeling great all of these things are an actual fact we consider them to be happiness but they are in actual fact the suffering of change So but this is really difficult for us to understand because we like the idea of it being a happy thing, so it’s difficult for us to get our head around in order for us to get our head around it we have to keep applying the different types of logic to all the different experiences that we have in our life now the logic that we should apply is if that thing that we’re experiencing was true happiness, was really happiness, then the more we did it, the happier we’d get. But, that’s not the way things are.
In fact, if we do something that we enjoy in the beginning, the more we do it, the less happy we get and eventually, it becomes suffering of one kind suffering of suffering. We don’t enjoy it at all. So, that’s how one way of analyzing whether this is really happiness or whether it’s in fact suffering because of its nature. If its nature is to get make us happier and happier and happier and happier, then it’s happiness. If its nature is beginning to have happiness and then turn into suffering, then we have to ask, is it really happiness?
So we can see this if we start by looking at eating food. Now, when we first of all get if we’re really hungry and someone gives us some delicious food and we start eating, that makes us really happy. We think, This is fantastic. I get to eat this great food, we’re really happy. But if there was something inherently inherent in that happiness, there was something about eating food that always made us happy, then we could eat more and more and more and more and get happier and happier and happier and happier.
That’s not the way it is. In fact, if we keep eating long enough, we get sick. So then we can see that there’s nothing about eating food that makes us happy. The other thing is if, for example, we’re really hot, it’s a boiling hot day and we get to sit down in the shade, then that can make us really happy for about five or ten minutes, then we start getting really cold if there’s no sun there, and then we can think, oh, now I want to go and see somewhere warm. Then we go back out into the sun, and we think, oh, it’s nice in the sun, it’s warm.
But that only lasts for ten or fifteen minutes, and then it turns back into this we can end up getting hot again. So we can see that none of these actions inherently make us more happy. They keep turning back into another experience of suffering. If we look at it this way, if we start looking at it this way, then the actual nature, the actual result of this happiness that we’re trying to experience is suffering. So we keep defining it by the initial moments of it, but in actual fact, the outcome of it, its result is suffering. So we have to look at something by what results it brings, not necessarily just by the fleeting experience at the beginning.
Okay. So, okay, for an example, we can look at someone who wins a lot of money. Now, usually in our society, we think, okay, if you got a lot of money, that makes you happy. And we associate having a lot of money with having a happy experience. Alright.
So But there’s certain things about money that people don’t take into account. So, for example, they think, Okay, if I have a lot of money, I will be happy. If I just had this amount of money, I’d be happy. But then, if you get that amount of money, it’s not going to stop you getting sick, for starters. Can’t stop you having any of these illnesses that may come up, which you can’t stop that with money.
The other thing is that, once you have the money, then you have to start worrying about the money. You have to start worrying about where you’re going to put it, what you’re going to do with it and you keep having this you can have these different experiences of it. Then, other thing is money runs out. It doesn’t keep going and going so, therefore, when the money runs out, we may feel more miserable than we were at the start before we didn’t have the money because now, we know what it’s like to have money and we don’t have it anymore. So, there’s all these different experiences that are negative that are associated with something that we usually see as positive.
So, we can’t say that money can guarantee us happiness. It’s not a stable source of happiness. It’s not a constant in terms of the experiences we get from it. It’s not reliable in terms of the experiences we get from it. Another example is if we buy a car.
Now if buying a car inherently made us happy, then having that car would make us happier and happier and happier and happier. But in actual fact, what usually happens is we buy a car, and from that moment that we bought it, our happiness decreases and decreases and decreases and decreases. It’s not something that increases from just buying the car. Our experience with the car involves can involve debt, it can involve the fees we have to pay for it, it can stop being as exciting as it was at the beginning and become less and less interesting to us. So all these things are related to, something that we see as inherent like, really real happiness that is buying a new car or getting a new car.
Another thing that we usually consider that will make us really happy is falling in love or getting married. And usually, if we think about it, okay, the first year, that may be the case. But even even in the first year and sometimes after the first year, we maybe have this incredible feeling of happiness at the start, but problems come up, there’s arguments, we have arguments, we have things that need to be addressed, There’s different things that we need to focus on, and some people split up, other people end up being miserable with each other. So, you can’t rely on that experience to make you happy either. If you look at it, it starts off incredibly happy, and that happiness doesn’t always last.
So if we look at it, then everything that we can buy, any physical possessions that we can have, any experience that we can have, none of these things are cause for true happiness. None of these things are constant reliable source of happiness. All of them are going to cause us maybe happiness at the beginning but then it will eventually turn into suffering. So, there probably isn’t a thing that we can do in terms of physical things or emotional experiences that can actually make us completely happy. Okay, the third type of suffering that we’re talking about is what’s called all pervasive suffering.
Now, all pervasive suffering is a synonym for something called saṃsāra or cyclic existence. cyclic existence comes about because of ignorance about the way things really are and grasping. So, this all pervasive suffering and saṃsāra are the same thing, and because they exist, all of our experiences in saṃsāra are tainted by this, are synonymous with this all pervasive suffering. From this way of existing that is pervaded by this suffering, then the suffering of suffering and the suffering of change come about. So their root is all pervasive suffering.
Their cause or their root is all pervasive suffering and it comes about by the karma that we create because of not understanding the nature of reality so in that way we say it’s a synonym with saṃsāra, and it’s a synonym with not understanding properly. Okay, so what this brings about though is a problem though because we can think, oh, okay. All my experiences are suffering, and they’re suffering because Buddha said so. And I I I don’t necessarily see it because I see them as happiness and and and everything, but Buddha said they’re suffering, so they must be suffering. Geshe-la said he has this experience.
He doesn’t see most of the things that we take as being happiness as suffering. He sees it as happiness. He said that there’s a danger that we can just accept everything as being suffering in terms of it being a kind of nihilism that we’ll just go, okay, it’s all suffering. Don’t want anything to do with any of it. I’m not going eat.
I’m not going to do anything because it’s all suffering. But then that can be dangerous to our body and our mind. So we to understand that we do need to keep doing things in order to sustain ourselves. So what we what is the problem is our relationship with these things, the problem is our relationship with these things, seeing that they will make us feel happy. Now we see ourselves as being happy with those things.
We see ourselves as being happy with those the experiences we have when we think of them as being happiness. We we we relate to them in that way. But when the Buddhas look at us, they don’t see us as being very happy. They don’t see us as being experiencing happiness in the proper way. When Buddhas and and people who know the true nature of reality or aren’t in saṃsāra see us, then they feel pretty sorry for us in our experiences of suffering and what we think is happiness, but is actually suffering.
It’s a similar thing to as if we look at a pig rolling around in slop. Now, we may think that poor pig, it has to live in slop. It’s eating rubbish. It doesn’t have any clothes to wear. It has to live outside all the time.
It’s eating stuff that we would throw away. The pig’s life isn’t very good. But the pig doesn’t know that. The pig thinks, yes, this food is yummy. The pig doesn’t know that he could be going to have better experiences than these.
He doesn’t know that there are more ways to try and make yourself comfortable than lying in the rubbish. And that’s the same way when the Buddha see us. They think, oh, the poor things. They don’t know what better experiences that there are out there. They don’t understand that they’re rolling around in rubbish.
They don’t understand that they’re eating the slop. That’s the way that they see us. They see that’s the way that they see our experience. It’s like as if we were pigs. So we experience this suffering because we have ignorance, we have desire and we have aversion or we have hatred.
We have these three different types of negative ways of thinking. We’ve in our mind stream, that’s they are inherent in our mind stream, so therefore we see our experience caught up in suffering in in one of the three different types.