Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute introduction to the Four Noble Truths, Ven Margaret McAndrew opens with Buddha’s palace story—how encounters with sickness, age, and death drove his search for liberation—then traces his discovery that existing yogic paths, particularly meditative absorptions into form and formless realms, cannot lead to final liberation. She teaches the First Noble Truth in detail, explaining the four characteristics of suffering (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, voidness of self, non-self) and why worldly happiness remains inherently unreliable. She contextualizes this within the graduated path framework and concludes with teachings on suffering pervading all six realms of saṃsāra—including why gods in the deepest meditative states eventually awaken to face rebirth in worse circumstances. For practitioners with foundational Buddhist study.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 4NT 1999 07 01.mp3
UUID: 7e294e12-233e-4d66-81f3-33e27f988625
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: The Four Noble Truths (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1999-07-01
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~5,321
Of the stages of the path of finding engaged in this activity so as to be able to bring about the cessation of suffering in our own mind stream, but our motivation for gaining this understanding potentially so to be able to help others along the path. There are so many others. We’re just one. And if we look at these others, if we understand our own self, we can understand that they’re all in the same condition as ourselves. They’re all experiencing suffering.
Most of them are experiencing far worse suffering than ourselves. And so it’s far more worthwhile to make our goal the attainment of the state that can enable us to help these others. And that state has to be enlightenment or Buddhahood, which is the state that was the perfection of all goals. And so if we set our minds on this, this is a great goal. And it’s an immense source because the number of sentient beings that we think of helping is immeasurable.
And so for this reason, the amount of merit gathered from doing virtuous practice with this sort of motivation becomes immeasurably powerful. And so with that thought, we begin our study tonight. The topic that we’re looking at tonight is the four noble truths and in particular the first noble truth. Does anybody remember what the first what the first truth is? Mhmm.
The truth suffering. You’re looking interesting topic. So, anyway, no doubt nearly everybody here probably knows the story of how Buddha was a prince in the palace. And because his father was afraid that he might leave the palace and take up the life of a holy man, then his father was simply very deliberately shielded him from all the harsh realities of life and surrounded him with all sorts of pleasures and entertainment. And so the story goes that he was hardly aware of the existence of sickness, aging, and death until he went on some excursions outside the castle walls.
And on the first excursion, he saw a sick person, on the second excursion he saw an old man, and on the third excursion he saw a corpse. And these sights caused him to think more deeply about these things and to become very aware that no matter how protected our situation, no matter how fortunate we are, we’re still liable to encounter these things and that in fact all beings are liable for these various sufferings. And it was this that prompted him to actually do what his father had feared and instead of becoming king in his turn he ran away from the palace and became a wandering holy man and began seeking for a solution to the suffering for the sake of all sentient beings. So this story illustrates the first noble truth. So Buddha actually realized very clearly while he was still in the palace this fact of suffering, that suffering is very much a part and parcel of our present state of existence.
And it was that thought, that realization that it told him to go out and seek for a solution. He saw that no matter how good life was in the palace, it wasn’t any sort of real or permanent solution to these problems. But he also saw that this afflicted all others. It wasn’t just himself he was thinking about himself — in fact he wasn’t thinking about himself at all. He was thinking about all the countless living beings because he’d actually been on the Bodhisattva path for many, many lives for eons, in fact.
And he’d been working towards that point for many, many lifetimes which he achieved in that lifetime which in which he was born as Prince Siddhartha. And he he was actually very much aware of these problems. He was very aware of the problem of suffering during all of those lives. And in fact, these thoughts were just lying latent in his consciousness ready to be awakened. And he it was this thought of this awareness of the suffering of all sentient beings that was the source of his great compassion which was the motivating force that kept him working as a bodhisattva for all those lives working towards Buddhahood.
And it was finally in that life in which he was born as Prince Siddhartha that he was going to attain Buddhahood, attain enlightenment. And he actually also knew somewhere in his consciousness that a solution existed because he had met a previous Buddha one of the previous Buddhas and made the Bodhisattva vows at the time of that previous Buddha. And so he had this instinctive knowledge that not only the problem but also the solution not only that the problem existed but also that the solution was there to be found. He had a very firm conviction that somehow if he he tried hard enough that he would actually uncover that solution. And so from that point he he had no option really but to to lead his life in the palace and to go off on that search.
And so he went off to seek liberation. He had the conviction that the state of liberation that would exist must exist that he could find it and that having found it he would be able to teach it to others. And in actual fact, it also seemed quite natural in the context of the Hindu religions of the time for people to be seeking some sort of solution to the problem of suffering which would not be a worldly solution but which would be another worldly or a transcendental solution. This was very much part of the thought set of the religious people of that time. There were many yogis, many gurus teaching different approaches to the problem of suffering, teaching quite very in very deep meditative states, teaching their more gifted disciples how to enter into these deep meditative states.
And these things also had considerable clear form and powers. They could see that through learning to achieve these meditation states you could be born into states which we refer to as the realms of the form and formless gods where the beings seem to go on for uncountable eons experiencing these blissful or or very very peaceful meditative states completely untroubled by any sorts of suffering. And so it seemed to these teachers that they had achieved these certainty of liberation. And that on passing away when they took rebirth in these formless form or formless God realm state that they would then be eternally in these states of meditation liberated from all suffering. So it was Buddha’s special contribution to show that the existing paths that led to various of these different meditative absorptions did not in actual fact lead to final liberation.
And so his first approach was to go and find these teachers and to understand what they had to teach. He he quickly gained the meditative absorptions because of his previous practice of meditation in his previous lives, he was a very gifted pupil to these teachers and he learned these meditative absorptions and because his realizations and clairvoyant powers exceeded those of his teachers when he had attained these absorptions, then he saw that they were not eternal, although they lasted for an incredibly long time by our standards. They would eventually come to an end. The person in these states is simply using a particular kind of special karma which is created by practicing this meditation and eventually it leads to a very subtle state where no further karma is created and the person in that state simply uses up their good karma and eventually falls back to some worse kind of karma which they haven’t yet used up and they must for instance take rebirth in the animal realms after all of that. So it really leads nowhere.
So his next step, you probably all know, was to go and practice severe asceticism. And he found that that didn’t lead anywhere either. That was the attempt to attain liberation by subduing senses through the body and his discovery was that also was not possible. And so after having given up the extreme ascetic practices then he turned to analytical meditation. So he entered a very deep meditative absorption, but it wasn’t simply entering into these very serene states, but it was using the the power of meditation to analyze the nature of existence.
And under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, he had achieved enlightenment. And during that meditation, he understood the Four Noble truths completely. And so he also saw the other three noble truths. So does anybody remember what the other three were? Let’s see.
She’s dying to tell us. That which number is that one? Do you know what mean? That’s okay. Okay.
That’s number two. Yeah. You know, that’s true. What Hill says is true. It’s usually called the the path.
Yes. The truth of the path. Yes. True cessation is the third. So there’s the truth of suffering, the truth of the source or the cause of suffering or the origin of suffering, the truth of cessation or true cessation and the true path.
So they’re not explained in sequential order but they’re explained in logical order in the sense of research. First of all, you identify the problem, then you seek for the cause, then you find whether a solution is possible, a cure to the illness or whatever, and then you look for the right approach to bring that about. So this is what Buddha taught. So you can see all his teaching is wrapped up in the four noble truths. So tonight I’m talking about the truth of suffering anyway.
So we might think that suffering is obvious. So when we’re sick or when we lose somebody dear to us or if we’re unemployed or whatever we we we might feel that life is full of and it seems as though we might have some sort of realization of suffering but in actual fact it’s it’s not like that because what we need to do is to realize that life is tied up with suffering even when things are going well And if we check a little bit more deeply we can see that actually we’re in a consistent state of denial about fact of suffering because we always think that things are going to get better. And when they are better then we think that they’re not going to get bad again. But well this is probably a good way to think if we don’t have any anything better to hope for because it enables us to keep on going and not to just give up in despair and to become depressed. But when we encounter Buddha’s teachings then it’s actually a block to our progress to think this way because it keeps us from striving for what Buddha taught us that we can attain.
So Buddha taught us the path to liberation or the cessation of suffering and we need to put effort into achieving that. So in order to practice then we need to be motivated and in order to be motivated we have to have a full awareness of our suffering situation. So, it’s very important to, really think about this, truth of suffering. We have to reflect on it very deeply. And, we have to really, become very convinced of the uncertainty of worldly happiness and the certainty that, we’re going to again and again encounter suffering.
And this is just the nature of Samsāra existence. While we’re in Samsāra, while we’re in cyclic existence going from life to life, then we always encounter problems again and again. Some of our problems and sufferings are going to be really severe. And we we just can’t avoid this because we’re going to have to experience the results of our karmas. When I say we can’t avoid this while we’re in saṃsāra, this is the nature of saṃsāra.
So the only way to avoid this is to follow Buddha’s teachings which lead us out of saṃsāra. So, looking at it from the point of view of personal liberation, we have to escape our own individual suffering. So these four noble truths belong this teaching on the four noble truths really belongs to the division of the the medium scope in terms of the graduated path, those of you who have been studying the graduated path, now it’s divided into three scopes. And the medium scope or the intermediate scope is concerned with individual liberation. So it’s particularly involved with this intermediate scope, but we need to understand this teaching very, very thoroughly if we’re going to practice the Great Scope because the teachings of the intermediate scope are the foundation for the Great Scope practices and the Great Scope way of thinking, and in particular the understanding of suffering which we have to cultivate by studying the Four Noble Truths is explained in the context of individual liberation to motivate us on the path of achieving our own everlasting happiness, but we very much need to understand our own suffering situation in order to understand in order to apply this reasoning to all other beings and understand that if we’re suffering ourselves then other beings are suffering in the same way.
As long as we don’t comprehend our own suffering state then we can’t cultivate great compassion towards others because we can’t comprehend their suffering. It comes together. And we also can think that most of these beings are suffering worse than ourselves. So it’s it’s taught actually that bodhicitta the thought of bodhicitta, the thought of attaining enlighten for the sake of others in order to lead others out of suffering. This realization can’t be attained before we attain renunciation.
You you understand what renunciation is? Okay. Somebody tell us what renunciation means. Jane’s looking a bit vague at the moment, Diana. Right.
Yes. Right. Yes. So you’re both right, really. So, yes, it’s giving up grasping at worldly at worldly goals, I suppose.
So that doesn’t mean giving up all your enjoyments and comforts and so on. What it means is understanding that these things are not not the source of happiness, that the the source of happiness is somewhere else. And so is giving up grasping at these things. So what we’re really renouncing is our suffering because our grasping at the thing things which are the objects of our, worldly pleasures, is really what causes our suffering. But I won’t be talking about that much this week because it comes next week.
But we aiming at gaining this realization of renunciation of attachment to cyclic existence. And this is something that can’t that well, our bodhicitta can’t be generated before we generate renunciation. So for the Mahāyāna practitioner it’s taught that we have to aim to attain these two things simultaneously. So the bodhicitta can’t come first. Can renunciation be developed first before bodhicitta?
How’s that? You’ll think of the three scopes. Yes. The great scope. We practice the three scopes together.
We don’t practice first one then the first the small then the medium then the great. We we practice them all together. So we’re if we’re following the Mahāyāna path, we’re actually practicing cultivating. Yeah. Well, does anybody disagree?
Any, descending opinions? Yes, that’s right. Yes. Well, sorry. Yes, it’s not it’s not so much involved with wisdom.
That’s something else. But yes, in actual fact, there are two kinds of Mahāyāna practitioners. The the most ordinary kind is the kind that starts practicing the Mahāyāna path from the beginning and then cultivates renunciation and bodhicitta together and realizes them together. And that’s what we’re aiming for because we’re following the Mahāyāna path now. Then if we keep on following that and everything goes as it should, then we’ll achieve the realizations of renunciation and bodhicitta simultaneously.
But there are some beings who achieve renunciation and go on and follow the path of the Hīnayāna practitioner and become arhats. And then they remain in nirvana for eons and eons, but they’re eventually woken up by the Buddhas and get the message that they have to become enlightened for the sake of all sentient beings and then they start the path. But then they have to sort of come back into embodied existence. But and then they have to cultivate bodhicitta and go through all the bodhisattva paths and so on. So they actually have renunciation first.
But they still have to cultivate bodhicitta. So in their case, they’re quite an exceptional case, but there are some of them apparently. So when they start their practice, already have realization of emptiness. They’ve already got rid of the disturbing emotions, but they have to cultivate love and compassion to a much greater degree. And they also have to from the point of view of wisdom they’ve got a good start.
They only have to remove these subtle obscurations but they still have to apparently go back to the beginning of the past because they still have to practice the bodhicitta, the love and compassion aspect of it. But generally we can say that these two things are attained simultaneously if you’re a Mahāyāna practitioner. And of course the Hīnayāna practitioner doesn’t cultivate bodhicitta, they only cultivate renunciation. So it’s very important to cultivate renunciation whichever path you want to follow. So, just to mention the technical points, the, the first truth, the truth of suffering, has four qualifications or or aspects.
And those four qualifications are first of all of suffering. The truth of suffering is first of all impermanence secondly unsatisfactoriness thirdly voidness of self or independent existence, and fourthly, non self. So, if we can understand these things then we’ll, have a thorough understanding of suffering. So it’s a fact of our psychology that we always expect that things are going to be okay. And if we didn’t have anything better expect than to be always in the situation than we’re in at present, it would probably be a good thing to keep on thinking that way because, as I already mentioned, otherwise we just would become depressed and give up trying and that would only make everything so much worse.
If we could see too clearly how inevitably the things that we’re attached to are going to come to an end. How we’re always going to encounter different problems and sufferings. So when we we have Buddhist teachings, then we need to meditate on suffering and to become very strongly convinced about suffering because it motivates us to follow the Buddha’s teachings. And we don’t have to be depressed because we do have something very good liberation to look forward to and the increasing happiness that grows in the mind stream as we progress. So it’s not as though we have to feel miserable and unhappy all the time until we suddenly attain liberation.
We practice Buddhism, can expect that gradually we become less and less suffering, more and more peaceful in our minds, have more and more happiness. And this is something that just keeps on increasing. But as long as we expect happiness from worldly things, we’re going to be disappointed again and again because these things just can’t really bring us happiness. We think they do because they act as the objects for our happiness. We encounter something like nice food, like pleasant people, like beautiful things, and this gives us pleasure.
We feel happy, we feel good for a while. And then it always changes. Sometimes we lose contact with the object that we’ve been gaining the pleasure from. For instance, we sometimes part with our friends or we have beautiful objects and we lose them or they break or grow old and shabby and so we don’t continue to get the pleasure from them. Or sometimes simply the situation changes.
We perhaps might still have the same object if we find we’re not getting the same pleasure from it. So for instance, if we have a lovely cake and we’re feeling hungry, we eat the first piece of cake and it’s delicious. And then we keep on eating and the second piece of cake is still delicious but perhaps not quite as delicious as the first piece. Then with the third piece, we’re not really enjoying it anymore. And if we keep on eating past that point, we’ll certainly be really sick.
So sometimes it takes a while before we really realize that somehow the the pleasure isn’t, you know, that this cake really seems like the object of pleasure. Even though we know that if we eat too much, it’ll make us feel awful. Sometimes it takes a while for us to really register that fact because we’re so fixated on the idea that the cake is the cause of our pleasure. So the point is that it’s just in the nature of our existence in Samsāra that we never had total satisfaction and our pleasures and the happiness that we do enjoy has always been interrupted by the uncertainty, by changeability of cyclic existence. So this is the first characteristic, impermanence and also the unsatisfactoriness of cyclic existence.
So we try to cling to the causes of our happiness, but this clinging doesn’t work. Inevitably we get separated from the things that we cling to. Either the things themselves are taken away from us, perhaps they come to an end or we ourselves die. And so this is inevitable. This is the continuing nature of change and impermanence that’s one of the characteristics of cyclic existence.
There’s no way we can rely on things of this world to give us happiness. One of the main reasons for that is this impermanence and change changeability of these things. So, if we put our energy into Dharma practice, then we can be gradually cultivating the cause for real happiness which comes from things which are not worldly objects but which are objects that bring a result that will last and which will grow greater and greater until we can attain the uncontaminated happiness and uninterrupted happiness of liberation. And this is because we’re not looking for happiness in worldly things or in external objects, but we’re looking for peace and happiness in our mind and we’re looking for it through, dharma, which brings us the real, transcendental happiness. So for us at present, sometimes talking about liberation might seem a bit unrealistic.
It might seem like something that’s a long way off. You might think it sounds great, but really you’re stuck in all these problems now and you just want to find some way of dealing with your problems and not being so unhappy in the present. And in actual fact, we do need to look at the long term goal, but also if we start to practice Dharma then our lives will be much better in the present as well. So we can expect to get short term results from our Dharma practice, but it’s only by letting go of grasping at those short term results and setting them on the long term goal that we actually find greater short term happiness. I don’t know whether it’s a bit of a catch twenty two or something like that.
But anyway, it’s a fact that it’s our grasping at short term results that really interrupts our experiencing happiness. So we have to set our mind on the long term but also we find a great deal of practical help in the Dharma teachings to help us to deal with our everyday problems. So the first step we have to take is to realize, to recognize that our situation is suffering, that it’s unsatisfactory. So when we talk about suffering, English word sometimes can be a bit misleading because it often suggests with strong suffering. But Sanskrit word suggests can sometimes be translated as unsatisfactoriness.
So it involves the whole range from the most minor sufferings and discontents to the very great ones. And it’s this dukkha that we have to recognize in our lives. So it doesn’t mean that we’re always miserable. What it means is that we’re never perfectly happy, that we do have happiness. We do have worldly happiness and this is something which is much which is very different to worldly suffering but still when we examine very very deeply into its nature, doesn’t just end with our death.
If we thought that we only had this life, then it would make sense to just take what will be happiness we can find. But in fact, our life doesn’t end with death, but it goes on and on. And in fact, if we, receive a bad rebirth, then our suffering could become much worse in our next life. And so that’s, as a result of our own unwholesome actions, we could be reborn into one of the lower suffering realms. So the first meditation we do, as you know, if you’ve been studying the graduated path, our first introduction to the idea of suffering comes with meditating on the severe sufferings of the lower realms.
So, the this comes in the small scope section where the main aim is to inspire ourselves to take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha to practice right conduct by understanding that we need at least to find a remedy to avoiding rebirth in the lower suffering realms. So we meditate on the sufferings of the hell states, the sufferings of the hungry ghost and the animals. And these states are states we’re we’re taught that we have experienced many many times in the path and also if we don’t follow right conduct and if we don’t purify our negative karmas then we can experience these things again in the future. So our first step in Dharma practice, whatever our goal is, whether we want to attain liberation or enlightenment in the long term, we have to begin with these small scope practices of understanding the results of our worst actions and avoiding these bad actions and purifying our negativities and taking refuge in the Three Jewels of refuge to guide us as to the right way to go about this. So following on from this, we also need to meditate on the general sufferings of Samsāra and the understanding that we’re caught up inevitably with suffering is the thing that’s going to inspire us to liberation.
So there are different meditations and teachings. So at this point, there’s also a meditation on the the sufferings of the the worldly gods. So in terms of the six realms of Samsāra, it’s explained that we have the three lower realms that I already mentioned, which are states of extreme suffering. Also, there are these worldly gods who have many advantages over the human realm in terms of pleasure. Through their lifetime, they they don’t have gross suffering.
So it’s explained that even though they have these pleasures, these marvelous existences, they still have sufferings. So there’s different kinds of gods. This is all explained in detail in this teaching on the sufferings of the gods. So there’s three levels of gods. There’s the gods of the desire realm, the gods of the form, and the formless realms.
So the gods of the desire realm are the ones that we sometimes think of as as the worldly gods, the ones who have all those pleasures and the palaces and swimming pools and girlfriends and boyfriends and music and all that sort of thing. So that’s why they call the gods of the desire realm because they experience these sense pleasures, physical sense pleasures. They’re very, very refined, very subtle, very elegant compared to our kinds of pleasures. And they have such a good time that during a lifetime they never experience any gross suffering. Well, there’s perhaps one or two exceptions to that, but I won’t go into that.
But they do, in actual fact, we also have to learn about the demigods, the Asuras. And they have more suffering than the Devas because they have they’re jealous. They’re jealous of the Devas and they go to war and sometimes they get killed. And they but they have pretty good lives too. And then there’s the the Devas some of the Devas have to fight the Asuras so they do have some suffering but some of the Devas don’t have to to so there’s about eleven different levels I think or something like that.
I can’t remember now. But the lower level devas have to fight the Asuras. But in general, the ones that don’t have to fight the Asuras don’t have any problems at all during their lifetime. But at the time of death, they have great suffering because their body becomes ugly. They start to smell.
Their friends don’t like them anymore. They they realize they’re going to die. They feel weak. They can’t enjoy their pleasures anymore. And they see that they’re going to be they have some clairvoyant.
So generally, these gods get to be reborn in the animal realms. So they see they’re getting born as a pig or something like that, and that causes an incredible suffering. So they do have some sufferings even on the gross level. And then the form realm gods have subtle bodies, and they remain in these meditative states. Remain in what’s called there are four levels.
They have what’s called the four form absorptions. And then the formless gods have the four formless absorptions. And so if you’re born in those realms, you just remain in peaceful meditation for your whole lifetime. And in actual fact, what happens is that the gods if through practicing absorptions during a human life you were to be born during these absorptions a very special kind of karma is created which is a fixed karma which only results in a particular realm. So say that a yogi was practicing the first form absorption, then that yogi would be born in the first form realm.
During that form realm, that God creates karma to be born, enters the absorption which leads to creating the karma to be born in the next form realm. And they gradually work up through the eight realms until they get to the eighth absorption, the fourth formless realm. And during that realm, their meditation is so subtle that they don’t create any karma at all. They just more or less become unconscious. They just have this very very peaceful almost unconscious state.
Because even the bliss of meditation begins to seem like suffering and they even try to eliminate that bliss of meditation until they achieve this very very subtle, very very peaceful state. And they’re just using up their good karma in that absorption. And they eventually use up all that good karma after eons and eons. And then they suddenly wake up to the fact that they’ve used up all their good karma and they’re going to die and they’re going to get reborn again as some sort of animal. So you can imagine, you know, they imagine they thought they thought that they were liberated.
Yes. During mostly, they don’t even think during that state but just as they’re taking rebirth, they think they’ve attained liberation. And as they enter that state and then they yes. And then, oh, bugger. So yes.
So they come back from that. So, in actual fact, Buddhist Yogis don’t want to go beyond the fourth form state. Apparently, fourth form concentration is the ideal one for analytical meditation. The absorptions related to the formless realm are too subtle for analysis. So Buddhist Yogi tries to attain the fourth form concentration, but they’re combining it with meditation on emptiness.
It’s not just