Gotama Siddhata achieved Enlightenment and became the Buddha when he was 35 years old, and he taught for the next 40 years. He died at the age of 80, after a long and painful illness which he suffered with fortitude and grace.

We don’t know precisely what it means to be Enlightened. The Buddha himself frequently referred to the state he attained through that experience as a “awakening”. When we wake from sleep, we understand that what we experienced in our dreams, although it felt powerfully real, was in fact delusory—a distortion of the reality we know when we wake. Just so, the Buddha understood that what unenlightened people experience through their lives, although it feels powerfully real, is a delusion, a distortion of what the Buddha experienced as “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”.

The decision that the Buddha made to reveal that knowledge and vision to the world was a difficult and courageous one. Imagine that you were able to enter another person’s dream and attempt to how the dreamer the reality of the world as you knew it. Would you be able to convince the dreamer that the figures and events in her dream were illusory and that she would be better off shedding those illusions and facing the reality that you experienced in the waking world? The task would be difficult, at best.

Yet that is the task that the Buddha took upon himself; to show those of us who are not yet Enlightened that the world we experience is not the real world but a construct of our minds with which we delude ourselves, that there is a more profound reality that we would experience if awakened to it, and that our lives would be immeasurably better if we were to just accept the promise of such an awakening.

The reality of which the enlightened Buddha received “knowledge and vision” is known as the Dharma. (Dhamma in Pali; this is one of the few doctrinal terms for which I’ll use the Sanskrit form, because that form is so much more familiar to us; for the same reason, I won’t italicize it.) The term comes from an Indo-European root (dhá) referring to that which forms a foundation or upholds; the English words “form” and “firm” probably derive from the same root. In Buddhist doctrine, there were four distinct realms in which the term had meaning.

• In the realm of the physical world, the term refers to the causal dynamics by which things are created, held together, and destroyed: the essential physical laws of cause and effect.
• In the realm of human behavior, Dharma refers to the dynamics by which the consequences of intentional action unfold, the ways in which our actions create the situations in which we find ourselves.
• Within Buddhist ontology—the Buddhist understanding of the nature of things—the “dharmas” refer to foundational phenomena, the essential, unconditioned, elements that combine to create the conditioned and composite phenomena that we experience in our perception of the world.
• Finally, within the Buddhist tradition itself, the Dharma refers to the truth to which the Buddha awakened and which forms the core and foundation of his teachings. In this last sense, the term is often used as part of a composite: the Buddhadharma—the truth that the Buddha experienced directly.

At the core of the Buddhadharma is a set of four linked truths that define our human condition.

• Dukkha. The first truth is what the Buddha called “the ennobling truth of dukkha“. We’re going to be spending a lot of time throughout the course exploring the multiple meanings of the term dukkha; for now, I’m going to use the word that’s been most commonly used to translate the term: pain. This is the Buddha’s first truth: there is pain. There is pain wherever we look; aging is painful, disease and injury are painful, the prospect of inevitable death is painful. Even at the height of pleasure, there is an underlying layer of pain, because we know that the pleasurable experience will end.
• The cause of dukkha. The second truth the Buddha saw when he woke from delusion is that dukkha, pain, has a cause: a condition which nurtures it and brings it into existence. The Buddha identified that cause of dukkha; it is craving—wanting things to be different than they are, wanting our situation to be other than it is. When craving exists, dukkha exists; craving creates dukkha.
• The end of dukkha. The third truth is that craving is a necessary condition for dukkha; if craving did not exist—if it were eradicated, with no residue left behind—then there would be no foundation on which dukkha could arise, and there would be an end to dukkha.
• The Way to end dukkha. And the fourth and final truth is that there is a way to end craving—a path of ethical action, with eight distinct factors: right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right diligence, right concentration, and right focus. Fitting our lives to that path, living by that path, we can come to control our tendency to want things to be different—our craving. If we stay on the path and develop it in every aspect of our lives, we will come, as the Buddha came, to “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”; we will find that we possess the equanimity to accept that knowledge and vision with all of its difficult parts, and we will understand the delusion and futility of demanding that things be other than they are; our craving will end, and there will then be an end to the pain that has pervaded our lives.

We’re going to be hearing a lot more, thoughout the course, on the Four Ennobling Truths and the Eight-Factored Path. For now, try to see it as the promise that the Buddha held out to those who heard his teachings. For those willing to commit themselves wholly to the eight-factored path and join the Buddha in those practices that furthered development of the path—living on alms food, eating just once a day, spending large parts of the day in solitary meditation, remaining celibate, owning just a set of robes and a begging bowl—the Buddha promised the possibility of achieving the same Enlightenment that he had achieved, coming to a direct knowledge and vision of things as they are, and realizing the end of pain and suffering. Those that did achieve such a state were known as arahats—”accomplished ones”.

But the benefits promised by the Buddha were not only available to those who followed him into the homeless life. Anyone who understood the four truths, even if imperfectly, and who practiced the path, even partially and incompletely, would, the Buddha promised, realize consequent benefits. That was the promise he held out to the Kalamas: free yourself from greed, anger, and a delusory belief that some miracle can intervene to make things better without any work on your part; work to cultivate kindness, compassion, patience; trust yourself to know goodness from wickedness and devote yourself to pursuit of the good ways; and you will realize benefits from that. If there is some kind of super-mundane dynamic of return on behavioral investment, either through rebirth in good or evil conditions, or through some system of divine reward and punishment, living the kind of life the Buddha recommends will increase the chances that such a system will work to your benefit. And even if there is no such dynamic, the Buddha makes what seems to me to be an undeniable claim that good people lead happier lives; they sleep better at night, they are more content, suffer less remorse, have more friends and create better relationships with those they love.

The Buddha’s initial experience of the four ennobling truths and the eight-factored path to an end to pain formed the foundation for a rich and complex doctrine that incorporates a subtle understanding of psychology, a vision of how the universe works that prefigures modern science in many interesting ways, a profoundly original epistemology, and, throughout, a detailed and thoroughly empirical ethics.

Most of the discourses that have come down to us in the Pali Canon (we’ll have more to say about how that happened in just a bit) were addressed to the monks and nuns who had left their homes to become bhikkhus and bhikkhunis in the Buddha’s sangha. In those discourses, the Buddha speaks with full authority, as “The Teacher”, the Tathagata. The discourses addressed to the sangha are profound, frequently complex and often difficult to understand without some help; the subject matter is the doctrine, the techniques of meditative practice, and the rigorous set of rules that govern monastic life.

Very many of the discourses in the Canon, however, perhaps as many as one-third, are not addressed to bhikkhus and bhikkunis. They are addressed to merchants, brahmins, military chieftains, gods and spirits, kings, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, craftspeople, criminals—a very wide range of beings, the human members of which can be classified together under the term “householders”, i.e. people who have not entered the homeless life and who are still tied to the concerns of life in the world. While those discourse lack nothing in the way of profundity or wisdom, they are considerably less abstruse than the discourses to the sangha. They are less concerned with doctrine and practice techniques and more concerned with ethical behavior and with understanding the relations between one’s intentional behavior and the circumstances that one finds oneself in.

Notes

“bhikkhus and bhikkhunis in the Buddha’s sangha“

The term sangha means, literally, “multitude” or “assembly”. The terms bhikkhu and bhikkhuni are usually translated “monk” and “nun”; the literal meaning is “beggar”; our word “beggar” and the Pali “bhikkhu” probably derive from the same Indo-European root.

“Tathagata“

The term means, literally, “thus-gone one”, the One who’s travelled a particular Way (and, implicitly, come back to tell us about it). It is a term that the Buddha frequently uses to refer to himself, especially when he is speaking to members of his sangha. It seems to me that his purpose here is to remind them of the reason that they chose to follow him, and to help them focus on the Path rather than the Person. They follow him, not because he is the Buddha, the One who achieved Enlightenment, but because he has discovered the effective Path to that Enlightenment; he can’t show them Enlightenment, because that’s a subjective experience; he can show them the Path, and show it, moreover, clearly enough for them to follow it themselves.