Gotama Buddha famously proclaimed that the signature teaching of all enlightened beings is the Four Noble Truths, the fourth and final of which is the Noble Eightfold Path. In the Mahāparinibbāna-Sutta, the Buddha answered interlocutor Subhadda in response to the latter’s question on whether enlightened ones could be found in other spiritual communities guided by other teachers:
“Subhadda, in whatever teaching and training the noble eightfold path is not found, there is no ascetic found, no second ascetic, no third ascetic, and no fourth ascetic. In whatever teaching and training the noble eightfold path is found, there is an ascetic found, a second ascetic, a third ascetic, and a fourth ascetic. In this teaching and training the noble eightfold path is found. Only here is there an ascetic, here a second ascetic, here a third ascetic, and here a fourth ascetic. Other sects are empty of ascetics. Were these mendicants to practice well, the world would not be empty of perfected ones.” — DN ii 151: Mahaparinibbana-Sutta
The historical Jesus of Nazareth lived a little less than 500 years after the historical Buddha. While the Buddha is reputed to have taught the well-known Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, the teachings of Jesus are not known to be of the same genre as the Buddha’s. Instead, we hear of Jesus preaching his Good News of the Kingdom of God the admission into which requires one to repent and believe, obeying God’s commandments to love God with all of one’s capacity and love one’s neighbours as oneself. In speaking about the Four Noble Truths of Jesus, what I aim to do is not to claim that Jesus expressly formulated his teachings in this framework as the Buddha did. I am also not referring to the peculiar teachings of the apostle Paul about Jesus as the redemptive atoning Christ, who by his death on the cross became the vicarious substitute for all of humanity’s sins thus saving humanity from eternal damnation. Rather, I am seeking to explore how the teachings of Jesus about the Kingdom of God could be conceivably expressed in accord with the logic and perspective of the Four Noble Truths.
I also limit my discussion mainly to what can be gleaned of Jesus’ teachings from the four gospels and not from Pauline and other non-gospel sources. This is because I do not subscribe to the presupposition that New Testamental texts outside the four gospels are necessarily reflective of the intent and message of Jesus of Nazareth. I also do not accept the assumption of scriptural inerrancy and a singular authorial intent throughout all the sixty-six books of the contemporary Bible. Hence, each book of the Bible needs to be critically examined in its own right and the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the only places where we find substantive accounts of Jesus’ message and teachings. Even then, the gospel of John is the latest to be composed of the four gospels and ostensibly contains theological ideas and beliefs reflective of the author quite different from historically earlier accounts of what Jesus said and did as recorded in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Of these three, the gospel of Mark is historically the earliest to be written and served as a basic source text for later incorporation of passages into the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In addition to Mark, both Matthew and Luke also drew from a hypothetical document called the Q source. These are well-known viewpoints of the majority of biblical scholars, with which I agree and hereby express.
Jesus and His Four Axioms
That said, how could we possibly translate the message and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth into the language of the Four Noble Truths? I propose the following, which I lay out as a sequential listing of four core propositions:
1. There is evil and suffering in our old decaying world.
2. Such evil and suffering are rooted in human sin in all its expressions.
3. Cessation of sin and thus its consequences occur with the coming Kingdom of God — salvation.
4. Repentance from sin, believing in the coming Kingdom, living righteously in love, and obedience to the Ten commandments are the essential way to salvation.
Structured in terms of the architecture of the Four Noble Truths, the first noble truth of Jesus is simply the presence of evil and suffering in the world of experience. Evil is opposition to what is divine and good, the privation of goodness. Evil is plainly manifest in immoral and unjust conduct and its consequences, as well as in every form of imperfection and brokenness in our experience. In particular, the lack of mercy and abrogation of justice in society are central to the evil we see in our world. Sickness, death, destruction of life, disease, natural calamities, famine, and every kind of naturally-caused suffering imaginable are part of this evil, as is human-made suffering such as warfare, poverty, and slavery, and all manner of relational anguish amongst people. Suffering that pervades life and oppresses humanity together with the utter meaninglessness of life separated from God are all a given in this broken world of experience. Such is the first noble truth of Jesus.
The second noble truth of Jesus can be articulated as the cause of such evil and suffering, which is human sin in all its myriad expressions. Sin is fundamentally a falling short of the glory of God or missing the mark for humanity set by God. At its base, sin is a selfish resistance to and willful rebellion against God’s desire for his people, that is humanity in general and the Jews in particular. Such resistance and rebellion result in conduct of moral and legal transgression against the laws and dictates of God, specifically the Ten (Decalogue) as delineated in Exodus 20. The devastating impact of sin is seen in existential alienation from God’s presence in one’s life and ultimate decimation of the body with no recourse for resurrection or reprieve for eternity. This is spiritual death in mortal life and total irretractable death (Hebrew: gehenna) at the end of mortal existence.
The third noble truth of Jesus can be articulated as the end of evil and suffering in the imminent Kingdom of God when God finally comes to destroy all forces of evil and suffering once and for all. At the same time, God ushers in a new era of permanent peace, justice, mercy, goodness, and joy based on love, where all his people come to dwell in his Kingdom to come. On one level, we can understand God’s Kingdom as an existential and empirical reality where all of God’s people reside together in harmony. One another level, we can fathom God’s Kingdom as a new and living way of being, knowing, and acting in the world based on universal unconditional love (Greek: agape). When humanity is able to embody and enact the Kingdom of God in their lives, there will be an end to evil and suffering.
The fourth noble truth of Jesus naturally follows from the preceding truth as the way leading to salvation from evil and suffering — the imminent Kingdom of God — by means of repentance from sin, believing in the Good News of the coming Kingdom of God, and righteous living in love and obedience. Repentance is to consciously turn away from sin in thought, word, and deed and turn towards the goodness and mercy of God in love. This is conjoined with faith in the Kingdom of God not only as an imminent empirical fact but as a living experience here and now by way of a new and living way of being, knowing and acting. Such experience entails a radical reorientation of one’s life towards a totally-engaged love for God and for one’s fellows, which naturally expresses itself in a superlative holy obedience to the imperatives of the Ten commandments. This is enacted not as a form of egocentric and moralistic striving but as creative expression of a new way of being in the world transfigured by one’s faith in the imminent Kingdom.
Excursus on Disclaimers
This essay does not make the claim that the Four Noble Truths of Jesus are identical to the original set of the same of the Buddha. Rather, the aim here is to show that structurally and logically there is a resemblance between what Jesus taught his disciples and what the Buddha taught his. This resemblance is implicit rather than explicit, requiring post-facto interpretive interpolation and retrieval rather than strict textual exegesis. As such, it is open to criticisms of anachronism and semantic superimposition, that is the charge of reading too much into the texts of Jesus from a decontextualized vantage point of Buddhist teachings. This charge does warrant serious consideration given its strength and obvious facticity. But, be that as it may, what this essay aims to do is to engage in a process of intertextual dialogical hermeneutic in the process of shedding light on one possible model of structuring Jesus’ teachings, and to consider whether it is tenable to frame Jesus’s teachings in the soteriological framework of the Four Noble Truths. This is so as to reappraise the teachings of Jesus in terms of their relative liberative impact on followers of Jesus as compared to those who engage in the practice of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha.
One clear and important difference between the Four Noble Truths of Jesus and that of the Buddha is this: Jesus was proclaiming an apocalyptic and prophetic message that sought to emphatically direct his listeners to repent from their evil ways, to be moved by the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom, and to conduct their lives in loving, just, forgiving, merciful, and righteous ways befitting of the Kingdom. While the Buddha was elucidating a distinctive paradigm of empirically understanding the nature of flawed human experience and to chart a practical way out of that dissatisfaction towards freedom. In other words, Jesus and the Buddha differed significantly in the content and intent of their respective messages. And it is this difference that would likely account for any variance in their respective impact on their followers. Yet whatever the variance might be, it is instructive to note that both masters called forth a commitment from their disciples to henceforth lead a radically transformed life oriented towards a higher reality or value that superseded the values and impulses of the mundane world. In this call and in the subsequent disciplic movement of followers towards genuine freedom as they perceived it, new impetus and momentum for a distinctive kind of community were generated by the visions and inspirational energies of both Gotama and Jesus, each for their respective communities. Seeds for new people movements traversing human history were planted, each in their own geographical location, which soon spread throughout their regions and in fact the entire globe as it turned out.
Contemplative Reading of the Four Axioms
On a deeper level, if we are brave enough to probe and delve into the message of Jesus beyond the surface meanings embedded in the Jewish sociohistorical context, would we be able to read the texts in contemplatively more profound ways? I suggest that this is possible, though not likely to be universally accepted by mainline Christian religious hierarchy. Nonetheless, I would like to attempt just such a reading. I call this the hermeneutic of contemplation in the Christic sense. By this I mean to read the Four Noble Truths of Jesus in light of contemplative inquiry and process in order to excavate fresh meanings and insights. I am not engaging in strict exegesis but free-flow eisegesis where dialogical fusion of horizons between the reader and text prevails rather than supposed neutrality in exegeting “objective” truths. In this regard, can there really be any presuppositionless exegesis? I submit to you that epistemic neutrality and objectivity is simply impossible. That said, how can we possibly understand the Four Noble Truths of Jesus in Christic contemplative ways?
First, the first noble truth of evil and suffering in this old decaying world points to our existential and psychological condition as human beings bound to a world outside our control. Looking deeper into our experience, we can see a moment-by-moment decay and dissolution of our bodymind experience. We can also see how entrapped our experience is in terms of the incessant restlessness, craving and grasping, resisting and hating, and a perpetual sense of lostness as to our place in this seemingly meaningless and purposeless universe. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes describes this existential angst and anguish rather well. As conditioned and deluded beings, we are stuck in our uncontrolled and unaware experience of constant change, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction, even danger and disaster.
Secondly, the second noble truth of Jesus of the cause of evil and suffering rooted in human sin in all its expressions points to the ubiquitous state of our reactive minds and afflictive hearts. Our minds react to stimuli and situations with psychological pulling and pushing enmeshed in unawareness. We are hardly aware of the habitual and compulsive nature of our mental activity — our thoughts, evaluations, judgments, memories, imaginations, projections, impulses, intentions, and fantasies. We even misperceive and misconceive our experience that filter through our five physical senses. Our cognitive and emotional activities get caught up in a cycle of misperception and misconception that act as fuel to the bonfire of inner reactivity. This causes anguish and malaise. At the root of our misperception and misconception is the delusion of a permanent, autonomous, and sovereign self that stands alone and apart from everybody and everything else. All our shortfalls and flaws in mental, verbal, and physical conduct stem from this fundamental delusion of standalone self.
Thirdly, the third noble truth of Jesus of the end of evil and suffering in the coming Kingdom of God which is salvation points to the necessity of a radical and profound overhaul of one’s way of being, knowing, and doing in the world. Contemplatively speaking, the Kingdom of God entails nothing less than total revolution of our deluded and disintegrating human condition to initiate a “new creation” within our inner being. Whereas the ”old creation” of our being and our world of experience is one of brokenness and decay pervaded by suffering, this “new creation” of being “born from above” is a new way of being within ourselves and in our world that is one of wholeness (shalom) and peace, bliss and joy, vibrancy and exuberance. Such blissful exuberant wholeness naturally manifests as ethical living and genuine loving, relationally alive in an ambience of deep peacemaking and timeless joy. This new creation in the depths of our being is none other than a new consciousness of nonduality that is paradoxically primordial and dimensionless.
Finally, the fourth noble truth of Jesus of the way to salvation as comprising repentance, believing, and righteous living points to a holistic program of conative, affective, cognitive, and ethical transformation requiring close attention and quiet prayerfulness, silence and solitude in abundant measure. Repentance in contemplative terms is more than mere feeling of regret or remorse for one’s sins and turning away from sinful behaviours to turn towards God. Contemplatively, repentance can be a seen as a turning around in the deepest seat of consciousness that consists of nothing less than relinquishing completely all traces of deluded self-grasping. Such repentance is seldom if ever perfectly accomplished in the first instance but progressively unfolds as one commits to a path of deep contemplative practice. For contemplative practice to bear fruit and lead towards genuine liberation from suffering, it has to be grounded in a correct vision of the way things are — the reality of our experience both in terms of our everyday obscured data and in terms of the data of ultimate seeing. What this means is that we must have a proper view of how our usual and habitual patterns of behaviour function and are experienced, as well as gaining deeper and clarified insight into how our experience really is like when stripped of its veils of obscuration.
This correct vision of the way things exist is initially conceptual in nature and realized by means of careful intelligent analysis backed by experience. Thus, “believing” is not merely an act of blind emotive faith but the result of a mindful process of investigation and observation. In other words, believing here is a mindful reorientation of one’s vision away from falsity and towards reality. With correct vision comes correct living. Such correct living entails conducting oneself in thought, word, and deed in harmony and alignment with the correct vision previously obtained. Instead of selfish reactivity and afflictive emotions that relatively defile the natural purity of the mind, one aspires to and engages in mental, verbal, and physical conduct that stem from love and ethical sensitivity, surrendering one’s delusion of self to embody an open-hearted, open-minded, open-handed way of being in the world. Such a way of being reflects and mirrors the mode of being of Jesus who is but the embodiment and creative image of the cosmotheandric Christ.
Dialogical Study of Freedom
Anecdotal reports, oral histories, general social documentation, and perhaps even empirical observations point to the basic premise that both Buddhism and Christianity have spawned worldwide communities of faith and practice with long and deep impact on world culture at large. Both traditions have produced individuals and communities of contemplative practitioners and mystics who are well-known for their saintliness, virtue, and altruism. Despite differences in emphasis and expression, both Buddhist and Christian traditions have shown a commonality of ethical values and even certain spiritual practices like meditation in their contribution to the life of the world. While religion on its shadow side has been historically linked to conflict and violence, leading to great suffering, it has also influenced and contributed to the lives of millions if not billions of people in a positive and beneficial way. Religion is a complex phenomenon that defies simplistic and sweeping generalizations.
In this regard, it is pertinent to note that the architecture of the Four Noble Truths of Jesus, as this essay has elucidated, could conceivably add to the clarity and structure of Jesus’ teachings for contemporary seekers. As such, it may not only illuminate a process of spiritual practice for followers of Jesus but enrich one’s understanding of Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In other words, the Truth of the Kingdom of God that brings life and is rooted in Life is fully embodied in the person and life of Jesus, who is the Way even as he fully knows the Way in his very being. This Way of the Four Noble Truths of Jesus is not only a teaching of Jesus but the wisdom of Jesus embodied in his very presence, his fully sanctified life. For all followers of the Way who is Jesus, they can unequivocally follow Jesus by following the Four Noble Truths of Jesus and in so doing also testify to the fact that Jesus is none other than their Way. For Jesus knows fully and intimately the Way comprising the Four Noble Truths and is verily the Way himself. To know something is to be one with it. Jesus knows the Way and thus is one with the Way. When we follow and come to know the Way fully ourselves, we come to know Jesus and be one with Jesus. And in this is our lasting freedom.
Jesus. Four Noble Truths. Us. These shall no longer be separate but all shall melt into the expanse of nondual freedom beyond words and concepts. In the final analysis, the Four Noble Truths of Jesus are not propositions to believe in but realities to be lived and realized. At heart, they are just the Four — dynamic acts of embracing suffering, releasing reactivity, stopping self-making, and acting mindfully — to be known in full. And we can only truly know by being that which is known.
