The Four Noble Truths

The principle of every spiritual journey and any search for truth is the correct understanding of suffering. This is largely the supreme teaching of Gautama Buddha. It is from this awareness of the suffering that triggers a process that wakes lighting. This in the case of Buddha, but also in the case of all human beings, if people follow his doctrine, since, as explained in the so-called "third turn of the wheel of Dharma", all human beings have a lighting seed . Is the suffering that becomes wisdom; to use a metaphor of alchemy, suffering is the raw material that the alchemist transformed into gold.

All Buddhist teaching is summarized in the Four Noble Truths expressed by the Buddha in Deer Park Sarnath, near Varanasi city, after his enlightenment,

The tradition says that the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, decided pilgrimage to India in search of knowledge after leaving the palace of his father, where he was sheltered from the decadent reality of the world, observed a person sick, a very old and a dead person: where these experiences seeds of a search which would lead to the realization that the world is essentially suffering. After learning all ascetic techniques of concentration and mind control that could be learned from the different sects of the Indian subcontinent, and not satisfied, the Buddha decided to sit under the sacred fig tree (the Bodhi tree) and not rise to understand the cause of suffering. The Four Noble Truths are the substance of the Buddha's enlightenment, doing what people might describe as an internal science, based on an impeccable self-observation . In an act of deep introspection Buddha Dharma testified in his own body: the inner experience of the law of the universe --of impermanence, emptiness and the absence of an individual being produced a state of wisdom, that it is the same integration that law. One becomes what he

In contrast he identifies various types of happiness, both spiritual and material for laymen as well as for monks. One of the five original Collections in Pali comprising the Buddha’s discourses, there is a list of happinesses (sukhāni), like the happiness of family life and the happiness of the life of a recluse, etc. But all these are comprised in dukkha. Even the very real spiritual positions of dhyāna (recueillement or trance) achieved through the exercises of higher meditation, free from even a shadow of suffering in the recognised sense of the word, positions which can be explained as unmixed happiness, with the position of dhyāna which is free from feelings both pleasant (sukha) and unpleasant (dukkha) and is just real equanimity and awareness – even these very high spiritual positions are contained in dukkha. After explaining the spiritual happiness of these dhyānas, the Buddha mentioned that they are ‘impermanent, dukkha, and subject to change’. Observe that the word dukkha is clearly used. It is dukkha, not as there is ‘suffering’ in the common sense of the word, but as ‘whatever is impermanent is dukkha’