The Four Noble Truths (Francis Story)

Francis Story, The Four Noble Truths, Wheel Publication No. 34/35 (Buddhist Publication Society, bps.lk, Kandy, Sri Lanka); Amber Larson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

By walking thou canst not the world’s end gain;

Nor, if ye win it not, be freed from pain.

But truly, he whose wisdom is profound,

Who rightly sees the world—by him ’tis found.

He that has lived in holiness shall know

With mind serene the ending of life’s round,

Nor to this world nor other long to go.

(Saṃyutta Nikāya, 1. 87. Verse translation by the author)

Foundations of Buddhism: The Four Noble Truths

Without leaving samsara, there will be pain.

Humankind, pondering and disputing, has been engaged for so long in trying to find an answer to the enigma of existence, and so many first-class minds have been devoted to the task, that had the problem been open to solution by the intellect alone, we should certainly have been furnished with the definitive blueprint of our being, beyond all doubt or conjecture, many centuries ago.

From the time when prehistoric myth became merged into an attempt to give a rational account of the universe, these questions have haunted the imagination:

• What is life?
• How did it originate?
• Has it a purpose?
• And if so, what is it?

Yet, still for most people they remain unanswered. Reason has offered a wide range of ingenious possibilities from the speculations of the Eleatics down to the more sophisticated theories of the modern epiphenomenalists. But so far it has failed to provide any reasonable explanation that is not open to equally reasonable objections.

And while reason has failed, its alternative -- the supernatural revelations of others -- have shown themselves to be equally contradictory and inconclusive and have suffered an even worse defeat.

Its historical record has weighed heavily against it because of the disastrous influence it has often exerted in human affairs. The private revelations of mystics, by their exclusively subjective nature, can never offer more than an insecure foothold for faith (or confidence) in others who have not directly shared in the visions. And a doubtful faith is the father of fanaticism.

The record of our speculative thought down the centuries has come to resemble a maze of tracks in a boundless desert. The tracks can be identified by their characteristics: They are the tracks of religion, of philosophy, and obliterating many of these, the more recent tracks of science.

For the most part the tracks of religion go round in circles. Beginning as myth they continue as myth hardened into dogma, and so go over the same ground in endless repetition. Other tracks wander along aimlessly, drawn in this direction and that by new theories, new discoveries, and new contacts, their path variable as the wind.

These are the tracks of philosophy, the imprints of human restlessness and our inquiring mind — a mind which, despite its courage and adventurousness, has only the old material to work over and so is reduced to combining ideas in endless permutations, seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable and always failing to reach an end.

Science

Then, superimposed upon these there are the imprints of scientific thought, which has invaded philosophy to an ever-increasing extent, but which at the same time discourages any concern with ultimate issues, with questions of value and purpose.

Time and again the older tracks of philosophy and religion are seen to have crossed one another, and where they met there are signs of a scuffle. Too often, there is blood on the sands of history.

So it has been ever since humans emerged as an animal capable of abstract thinking. Now we have entered a phase in which supernaturalism has given way almost entirely to scientific knowledge, and the approach to the problem is somewhat different.

Yet science has not brought us any nearer to the answers. The tracks of thought still remain indecisive, their beginning a mystery, their end a mark of interrogation. Present day knowledge with its unprecedented accumulation of facts concerning the physical universe and the constitution of living organisms, has provided philosophers with a vast stock of new material to take into account, but so far the result has only been to give the mind more than it can handle.

Far from clarifying the general picture, the effect has been to overcrowd the canvas. To correlate the various specialized branches of knowledge is a stupendous task and one that is further complicated by the areas of uncertainty in each of them.

The non-specialist is seldom in a position to be able to separate theory from established fact in the scientific disciplines, and this is particularly so in the case of those which relate to the life-processes, such as genetics and biochemistry, and are therefore the most relevant to the inquiry.

Besides this, the facts that science presents often seem to point to opposite conclusions. Despite the great advances that have been made in physics, technology is still working to a great extent with factors that are not completely understood, or even satisfactorily defined.

There are, for example, certain radiations forming the basic structure of the universe which appear both as waves and as particles, although logically they cannot be both at the same time.

It is not even certain whether the expression "at the same time" has any meaning in a universe where events can hardly be said to be simultaneous at all, and where the image of a star seen from a distance of many thousands of light years may be nothing more than the ghost of something that ceased to exist in space before moodern humans appeared on the surface of the earth.

Expanding knowledge tends to cut us adrift from the apparent security of empirical facts, and in many ways the nature of thought itself has been brought into question.

There are people who entertain the hope that at some time in the not-too-distant future we may be able to get final answers to questions that have tormented men for generations by feeding all the relevant data into an electronic brain.

But that hope is founded on two very large assumptions. First, there's the assumption that all the necessary data will eventually become available and, second, that humans can devise a machine more capable than the creator of the machine. So far, the most advanced electronic computer has not been able to do more in the field of mathematics than a human mind can do. It only does it more quickly.

Even there it adds nothing new; there have been abnormal human brains that could extract cube roots with the same speed and accuracy. If a new and basically different mode of thinking is needed, it must be sought for elsewhere than in electronic machines.

Does this mean that we shall never know any more about the ultimate things than we do now? The conclusions to which science moves at present are, in regard to the older beliefs, chiefly negative. They tell us what is no longer believable but do not suggest alternatives or encourage any positive inferences.

Yet in the quest for truth science contributes something of greater value than the facts it provides. It offers a method of inquiry, a disciplined use of the facts at hand, which is more productive than the pursuit of random theories. It indicates a method by which the data of experience, no matter how limited they may be, can be taken as starting points for a journey into unknown territory, and how from a few observed facts a general principle can be deduced.

Furthermore, it includes as an important part of its method the readiness to discard whatever theory is found to be in disagreement with the observed phenomena, and this iconoclastic function of science points to a truth of the highest significance, namely, that in the search for reality what is most essential is not the gathering and tabulating of facts, but the understanding of those facts in their true relation to one another, and the preliminary stripping away of hitherto accepted ideas until we are left with nothing more than the bare bones of experience, but that experience of the most fundamental and universal kind.

Science works on theories, certainly, but is prepared to abandon them when they fall flat; it does not build model cosmologies from selected materials.

This method, which has been responsible for everything we can claim to have derived from our knowledge of the physical universe, is the only profitable one to follow when we seek to enlarge our understanding beyond the world of immediate sensory perception. And it is towards the possibility of such an extension that the psychological sciences are now turning.

There is an increasing recognition of the truth that the world of external phenomena is only a part — and by no means the most important part — of our total human experience.

What goes on within ourselves, in our psychological responses and motivations, and also on the intuitive levels of the mind, is being given the same analytical scrutiny as that which is turned on the objective features of the universe.

For the first time, scientists are making a serious study of the mental processes, conscious and unconscious. They are giving equal attention to the paranormal aspects of the mind, such as the phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance and the recollection of previous lives. From this may develop an entirely new approach to the problem of being.

A new one may develop, that is, in so far as the West is concerned. But nothing in mental science, or in philosophy, is really new. More than 600 years before the Christian era, the tracks of speculative thought had reached a stage of the utmost complexity in India. [The Buddha pointed them out. (See The All-Embracing Net of Views or Brahmajala Sutta).]

There we find the familiar arguments of mysticism versus rationalism, of empiricism, pragmatism, logical positivism, the opposing views of "eternalism" and "annihilationism," and of so many intermediate doctrines that it can be safely said that later philosophers have been able to produce nothing that was not a duplication or variant of one or the other of them.

When we examine the 62 views (diṭṭhis) or theories regarding the nature of life and the universe, which were current in the time of the historical Gautama Buddha and described by him in the Brahmajāla Sutta of the Collection of Long Discourses (Dīgha Nikāya), we find there the seeds of all later thought, the archetype of every idea that has appeared in philosophy between Plotinus and Kierkegaard.

What did yoga have to teach the Bodhisatta?

That some of them were the doctrines of established schools which had been in existence long before the birth of the Buddha is evident from the accounts of the Buddha’s own search for illumination, for on renouncing the world the prince who became the ascetic Siddharttha Gautama first placed himself under two teachers from among the many schools that were already laying claim to ultimate knowledge.

These yogi teachers, Ālāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, were not logicians but exponents of yoga. As such they had their philosophy, but its final vindication was to be sought in the subjective realm, in an intensified perception outside the scope of formal reasoning. By the practice of meditative mental absorption (jhāna), they had in fact succeeded in raising consciousness to a higher power. More