The Four Noble Truths Revisited

The core question for the Buddha was the reality of suffering, and how and why it brings misery to our lives. After his enlightenment he formulated his understanding of this in terms of Four Noble Truths. They are found in every general introduction to Buddhism and students generally accept them uncritically as the core of the Buddhist teachings. However, I find such a reaction extremely unsatisfactory because it takes only a little scratching beneath the surface to discover they don’t fit modern thinking at all. The suffering of conditioned existence is not on our radar; the idea that all our suffering comes from our minds is really wild; and the claim that there is a way to transcend the human condition altogether so human beings can somehow become more than human beings without any robotic enhancement, is off the charts. None of these ideas compute for most of us and we cannot simply take them in our stride. It’s essential to face up to the fact that the Four Noble Truths are askin…