The Four Noble Truths

Life is suffering. Suffering has a cause. The cause can be ended. There is a path to the end of suffering. The Buddha's entire teaching in four sentences.

The Four Noble Truths are the skeleton of the Buddha's entire teaching. Life involves dukkha — a word meaning suffering, but also unsatisfactoriness, the low ache of impermanence. The second truth names the cause: craving. We reach for pleasure, push away pain, and cling to things that do not last. The third truth is the hinge that makes the whole structure livable: craving can stop. Not suppressed, but genuinely ended. The fourth truth is the Eightfold Path, a practical set of practices — right speech, right action, right concentration — that train the mind out of its habitual grasping. The Buddha offered these truths not as theology but as diagnosis and cure, the way a physician names a disease, traces its root, confirms it is treatable, and prescribes medicine.