The Buddha had a lot to say about how to understand life. After his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, he gave his first sermons to his disciples, teaching about the nature of suffering and the path to ending suffering. 

Over this lifetime, the Buddha offered a detailed and wide-ranging set of teachings that would ultimately be codified in what we now call Buddhism. Collectively, these teachings are known as the dharma or buddhadharma. As his teachings spread, they picked up parts of local religious traditions and cultures, and naturally adapted to reflect that. 

The Buddha’s teachings span the nature of mind and emotions, the nature of suffering and the path to ending suffering, guidelines for living ethically, cosmology and the nature of reality, the possibility of achieving nirvana, and instructions for mind-training practices like meditation. 

At the heart of the Buddhist teachings are the eightfold path and the four noble truths, which is where this deck begins. From the four noble truths to the Middle Way to the law of karma, here are some of the Buddha’s most central teachings.

Discover Deck 2:

The four noble truths: Discover the Buddha’s foundational teachings on the nature of suffering—and the path to its cessation.  

What is the eightfold path? Eight pathways to freedom and awakening. 

What is the Middle Way? Finding the path between the extremes of asceticism and hedonism.

What are the Three Marks of Existence? Understanding the three basic conditions of all phenomena is essential to realizing enlightenment. 

What did the Buddha mean by suffering? The term dukkha is often misunderstood. Here’s what the Buddha really meant when he talked about suffering. 

What are the three poisons? These three negative qualities of mind cause most problems in our lives—and in the world. 

What is karma? Our actions today, and the intentions behind them, determines what unfolds tomorrow. 

What are the three jewels? What it means to take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. 

What is nirvana? Nirvana is the Sanskrit word for the goal of the Buddhist path: the end of suffering and rebirth. 

What role does ethics play in Buddhism? Living ethically is critical to training the mind and freeing ourselves from suffering. 

What do Buddhists believe happens after death? The Buddha spoke of cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. 

What is dharma? The dharma is what the Buddha taught, but the word has many meanings.

What is buddhanature? We all have the capacity to awaken. 

Recommended Reading: 

• Dharma Talk: The Four Noble Truths with Gelek Rinpoche 
• Why We Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Suffering, by Thich Nhat Hanh 
• Being Natural: Finding Buddhanature, by Master Sheng-Yen 
• The Three Gems, by Thich Nhat Hahn 
• Changing Karma, by Jon Kabat-Zinn 

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1. There is suffering.
2. There is a cause of suffering.
3. There is an end to suffering.
4. The way out is the eightfold path.

The Buddha is said to have realized these fundamental truths on the night of his great awakening. But fearing they were too far removed from ordinary experience for others to understand, he decided to keep them to himself. Legend has it, however, that the god Brahma Sahampati intervened, convincing the Buddha he must pass on what he’d learned. So the Buddha tracked down his former meditation companions, the five ascetics, who were residing in the Deer Park near Benares. In what is known as his first sermon, the Buddha taught them the four noble truths. The ascetics are said to have been enlightened on the spot.

The first noble truth—there is suffering (dukkha in Pali and Sanskrit)—isn’t pessimistic, as is often believed, but realistic, according to the Theravada Buddhist monk and scholar Walpola Rahula. The Buddha didn’t mean that ordinary life is nothing but misery—of course there’s sukkha, or happiness, he said. It’s just that even happy moments are ultimately unsatisfying, because everything changes. Good, bad or indifferent, nothing lasts. Impermanence (anicca), like dukkha, is one of the three inescapable facts of existence. We all, without exception, are subject to aging, sickness, and death. Even the self isn’t fixed or enduring: anatta (no-self) is the third mark of existence. Trying to get what we want and hang onto what we have while avoiding or rejecting what we don’t want inevitably leads to disappointment. Ignorance of this reality is the root cause of suffering, the second noble truth tells us.

The third noble truth—that there is an end to suffering—is the saving grace. Pain and dissatisfaction are not all there is. Just as suffering is the human condition, so too is the possibility of an end to suffering.The fourth noble truth—the eightfold path—spells out practical action we can take toward our own awakening and freedom from the suffering of samsaric life.  The eightfold path guides us in living ethically, training the mind, and cultivating wisdom.

Why are these truths “noble”? Explanations vary. Some scholars hold that the four noble truths are the teachings that elevated or “ennobled” Siddhartha Gautama by liberating him from samsaric existence. Similarly, they can liberate us.

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The Buddha is often described as a great physician or healer, and the eightfold path (also called the noble eightfold path, “noble” because following it can make us better people, like the Buddha) can be viewed as his prescription for relief. Suffering is the disease, and the eight steps are a course of treatment that can lead us to health and well-being; we avoid the extremes of self-indulgence on the one hand and total self-denial on the other. For this reason the Buddha called the path “the middle way.” The eight steps are:

1. Right view 
2. Right intention 
3. Right speech 
4. Right action
5. Right livelihood
6. Right effort 
7. Right mindfulness
8. Right concentration

The path begins with right view, also called right understanding. We need to see clearly where we are headed before we begin. Right intention means the resolve to follow this path. Right speech and right action refer to what we say and do—to not harming other people or ourselves with our words and behavior. Right livelihood means how we live day to day, making sure our habits and our work don’t cause harm to ourselves and others. 

Right effort refers to focusing our energy on the task at hand. Right mindfulness means awareness of the mind and body with discernment. With mindfulness, we might pause and consider whether what we are doing is harmful to ourselves or others. Finally, right concentration refers to dedicated practice, whether it is meditation or chanting. In other words, once we have directed our minds and lives toward awakening, we can proceed. Though the eightfold path is always listed in this order, it is not strictly sequential, and does not need to be followed in only this order.

The eight steps can be divided into three areas for training: ethical conduct (sila), concentration (samadhi), and wisdom (prajna.) Right speech, right action, and right livelihood concern ethical conduct. Right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration relate to the practice of concentration. Right view and right intention are related to the development of wisdom. 

The eightfold path may not always be easy to follow, but we make the effort because we believe it will lead us out of suffering.

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The Buddha’s time was a period of great religious upheaval and experimentation. Wandering renunciates from various sects, seeking spiritual fulfillment and freedom from the suffering of life, became a common sight on the Gangetic Plain. Before he was known as the Buddha, or Awakened One, he was Siddhartha Gautama, a wealthy nobleman living in luxury. But later he left his home, renounced that lifestyle, and embraced the other extreme as an ascetic practicing mortifying austerities. Statues depicting this period of the Buddha’s life show an emaciated figure with all of his ribs visible as he sits meditating. It is said he survived on just a few grains of rice a day.

Ultimately, the Buddha realized that both indulgence and deprivation were equally useless, even detrimental to his goal of achieving awakening. Legend says that this moment of awareness occurred the day before his enlightenment. Close to death, the Buddha abandoned his austere practices and the ascetics he had been practicing with, and shortly after that he encountered a young woman named Sujata, who offered him a meal of rice and milk, restoring his energy. Having found fault with both extremes, the Buddha embraced the middle path in between. In his first sermon, he expounded this middle way along with the eightfold path and its prescriptions for right behavior.

The middle path informs much of Buddhist thought, even its more abstract concepts. For example, once when the Buddha was asked whether or not the self exists, he remained silent. He told a student afterward that if he had answered yes, he would have been promoting the concept of eternalism; if he had answered no, he would have been promoting annihilationism or nihilism. In between, in his silence, lay the middle path.

As Buddhist thought and practice developed, the concept was applied to any dualism, or diametrically opposed pair (subject/object, samsara/nirvana, part/whole). The Madhyamaka school, founded several hundred years after the historical Buddha’s lifetime, takes its name from the Sanskrit term for middle path, madhyama-pratipad. The school’s exemplar, the philosopher-monk Nagarjuna (c. 2nd-3rd centuries CE), applied the middle path to existence and nonexistence: In between any two opposites lies emptiness, or sunyata, which is not nothingness but a vast creative potential, he argued. The middle way is similarly fluid and full of possibilities, for Buddhist thought and for our lives.

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Everything changes, the Buddha taught. This may seem obvious, but much of the time we relate to things as if their existence were permanent. So when we lose things we think we can’t live without or receive bad news we think will ruin our lives, we experience a great deal of stress. Nothing is permanent, including our lives.

Dukkha, suffering or dissatisfaction, is among the most misunderstood ideas in Buddhism. Life is dukkha, the Buddha said, but he didn’t mean that it is all unhappiness and disappointment. Rather, he meant that ultimately it cannot satisfy. Even when things do satisfy―a pleasant time with friends, a wonderful meal, a new car―the satisfaction doesn’t last because all things are impermanent.

Anatta—not-self, non-essentiality, or egolessness—is even more difficult to grasp. The Buddha taught that there is no unchanging, permanently existing self that inhabits our bodies. In other words, we do not have a fixed, absolute identity. The experience of “I” continuing through life as a separate, singular being is an illusion, he said. What we call the “self” is a construct of physical, mental, and sensory processes that are interdependent and constantly in flux.

It is the illusion of a separate, permanent self that chains us to suffering and dissatisfaction, the Buddha said. We put most of our energy into protecting the self, trying to gratify it and clinging to impermanent things we think will enhance it. But belief in a separate, permanent self leads to the craving that, according to the four noble truths, is the source of our suffering.

The Buddha’s teachings, especially the practice of the eightfold path, provide the medicine to cure our illusions so that we become less self-centered and less attached to impermanent things. As we investigate the truth of the three marks of existence, we develop factors of enlightenment such as equanimity—the ability not to be jerked around by our likes and dislikes—and serenity.

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The Pali word dukkha, usually translated as “suffering,” has a more subtle range of meanings. It’s sometimes described metaphorically as a wheel that is off its axle. A more literal translation of the first noble truth might be “life does not satisfy.”

The Buddha taught there are three kinds of dukkha. The first kind is physical and mental pain from the inevitable stresses of life like old age, sickness, and death. The second is the distress we feel as a result of impermanence and change, such as the pain of failing to get what we want and of losing what we hold dear. The third kind of dukkha is a kind of existential suffering, the angst of being human, of living a conditioned existence and being subject to rebirth.

At the root of all kinds of dukkha is craving, or attachment. We go through life grasping at or clinging to what we think will gratify us and avoiding what we dislike. The second noble truth tells us that this very grasping, or clinging, or avoidance is the source of dukkha. We are like drowning people who reach for something floating by to save us, then discover that what we’ve latched onto provides only momentary relief, or temporary satisfaction. What we desire is never enough and never lasts.

The third noble truth assures us there is another way to find an end to suffering, and that way, as explained in the fourth noble truth, is the practice of the noble eightfold path. As we practice, we develop a happiness that is not dependent on external objects or life events but results from a cultivated state of mind that does not come and go as circumstances change. Even physical pain becomes less stressful with the awareness of a cultivated mind.

So, the teaching of the four noble truths is not that life is destined to be nothing but suffering, but that the means of finding liberation from suffering is always available to us. In this sense Buddhism is not pessimistic, as many people assume, but optimistic.

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We don’t need to look far to see the three poisons at work. We see them every day in the news and in the streets, and if we pay attention, we can see them in our own mind and actions. The arising of these feelings may be outside our control—we don’t choose to be angry, for instance. But recognizing how greed, hatred, and delusion cause tremendous harm in the world can help us learn to manage them. Likewise, just as swallowing poison later causes sickness, nurturing these harmful attitudes leads to negative behaviors we will later regret. 

Though commonly referred to as poisons, the Buddha first introduced these mental attitudes as fires in the Fire Sermon (Adittapariyaya Sutta): “Monks, all is burning . . . Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.”

Fire is a central metaphor of Buddhism, typically as a negative quality of mind or consciousness. Putting out these fires is the goal of Buddhist practice. The word nirvana is derived from the extinguishing of fire. Sariputra, one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, was once asked, “What is nirvana?” He answered, “The destruction of greed, the destruction of anger, the destruction of delusion—this is nirvana.”

The three poisons are depicted at the center of the Wheel of Life (bhavachakra), a visual representation of the sorrows of samsara. Greed is depicted as a rooster, hatred as a snake, and delusion as a pig. Importantly, they literally feed off one another; each animal consuming the tail end of the other in a vicious cycle of delusion. The centrality of the three poisons demonstrates their role in powering the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the escape from which is nirvana.

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The Buddha taught that while we each have accumulated karma from previous lives as well as from the present one, karma is mutable. Every moment is an opportunity to take positive action, to think, speak, and act in a skillful way that will lead us away from the clinging and delusion that keeps us mired in suffering. In other words, we can work with our karma to ensure a better future.

For present-day Buddhists who don’t buy into the idea of rebirth, karma can still serve as a useful principle for this life, and it’s at the very heart of the Buddha’s four noble truths and his path of practice. Even if one doesn’t expect to be reborn or get enlightened, if they live virtuously, the logic goes, that person and the people around them will feel better.

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I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the dharma.
I take refuge in the sangha.

For many practitioners, taking refuge is one of the first steps in declaring oneself a Buddhist, along with taking the precepts, guidelines for an ethical life. But what does it mean to take refuge in the three jewels?

Taking refuge is a way to formalize one’s commitment to and faith in the Buddha’s path and take shelter from the vicissitudes of life. But taking refuge does not mean retreating from life. Rather, it enables us to embrace the world in all its complexity as the vehicle for releasing our destructive habits. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described it as “committing ourselves to freedom.” In taking refuge in the Buddha, we are looking to him as a teacher and exemplar—an ordinary person who awakened to his true nature and serves as a guide to an enlightened life. When we take refuge in the three jewels, we also take refuge in our own buddhanature and potential for liberation.

The Buddha of refuge is not only the historical figure Shakyamuni, who had a profound realization under the bodhi tree, but also the myriad buddhas the teachings tell us came before him and will follow after him, along with the pantheon of buddhas and bodhisattvas who are seen as enlightened teachers on earth and in other realms.

The word dharma has many meanings but here it refers to the teachings of the historical Buddha and, in some traditions, to those of all enlightened beings. From a more expansive view, refuge in the dharma can also mean finding support in the vast and fathomless universe, simultaneously empty and perfectly complete.

The sangha is the Buddhist community. Traditionally it referred to the community of ordained monks and nuns, but today sangha includes all Buddhist practitioners, lay and ordained. In the most expanded understanding, taking refuge in the sangha means embracing kinship with all living things. 

The Buddha taught that each of us is responsible for our own journey of awakening. “Be a light unto yourself,” he told his attendant Ananda as he was dying. But at the same time, the Buddha left his followers a precious legacy—the teachings and the community. Buddhist teachers say we are never alone if we take refuge in the three jewels.

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That’s the basic idea, but there are of course many nuanced interpretations. In the Theravada tradition, for instance, nibbana is the way out of the endless cycle of rebirth and death known as samsara; it is a state that exists beyond space and time, impossible to describe. But a person who has attained nirvana is completely out of the woods of suffering and stress.

In Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and other types of Mahayana Buddhism, the state of nirvana is synonymous with becoming a buddha, or realizing one’s innate buddhahood or buddhanature. In some schools, it’s believed that everyone’s basic nature is inherently enlightened, but since it is cloaked in ignorance—like clouds in front of a brilliant sky—we don’t recognize it. From this perspective, freedom from suffering and getting out of the round of birth and death aren’t the only goal: once you become a buddha, you can stay on hand to help until all sentient beings are freed from samsara.

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