Noble Truths, Noble Path: The Heart Essence of the Buddha's Original Teachings

by Bhikkhu Bodhi

The renowned translator Bhikkhu Bodhi has crafted this anthology of suttas from the Samyutta Nikaya to enable students of Early Buddhism to penetrate into the heart of the Buddha’s teachings on the four noble truths and the eightfold path as directly and clearly as possible. The aim is to attain direct insight into foundational Buddhist teachings on liberation.

Brilliantly translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi, this anthology of suttas from the Samyutta Nikaya takes us straight to the heart of the Buddha’s teaching on liberation through the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path—the two mainstays of Buddhist doctrine that illuminate the nature of things by generating direct insight into the teachings. These suttas all pertain to the ultimate good, the attainment of nibbana, or liberation. They illuminate the Buddha’s radical diagnosis of the human condition—and more broadly, the condition of all sentient existence—in light of the four noble truths. They underscore the pervasive flaws inherent in the round of rebirths, trace our existential predicament to its deepest roots, and lay out the path to unraveling our bondage and winning irreversible release. Ven. Bodhi arranged the chapters, each with its own introduction, to provide an overview of the Dhamma that mirrors the four noble truths, thus enabling students of Early Buddhism to see into the heart of the Buddha’s teachings as directly and clearly as possible.

Genres: Buddhism, Religion, Philosophy, Nonfiction

200 pages, Hardcover

Published February 14, 2023

About the author

Bhikkhu Bodhi is an American Buddhist monk from New York City. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1944, he obtained a BA in philosophy from Brooklyn College (1966) and a PhD in philosophy from Claremont Graduate School (1972).

Drawn to Buddhism in his early 20s, after completing his university studies he traveled to Sri Lanka, where he received novice ordination in 1972 and full ordination in 1973, both under the late Ven. Ananda Maitreya, the leading Sri Lankan scholar-monk of recent times.

He was appointed editor of the Buddhist Publication Society (in Sri Lanka) in 1984 and its president in 1988. Ven. Bodhi has many important publications to his credit, either as author, translator, or editor, including the Buddha — A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (co-translated with Ven. Bhikkhu Nanamoli (1995), The Connected Discourses of the Buddha — a New Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya (2000), and In the Buddha’s Words (2005).

In May 2000 he gave the keynote address at the United Nations on its first official celebration of Vesak (the day of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and passing away). He returned to the U.S. in 2002. He currently resides at Chuang Yen Monastery and teaches there and at Bodhi Monastery. He is currently the chairman of Yin Shun Foundation.

Reviews

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the newest book by Bhikkhu Bodhi. I had the auspicious opportunity to be among the first to borrow it online from the Buddhist Association of US’s library (the book is only available for early reservation on Amazon as it will only be available in Feb next year). I also had the added auspicious opportunity to attend a book club discussion via zoom live with Bhikkhu Bodhi (BB) organised by the Insight Meditation Society just recently. Over 200 people attended the session.

What is the difference between this book and BB’s earlier “In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon”? According to BB, the anthology gives an overall schema of Buddha’s teachings from the vastness of the Canon to help newer audiences navigate the teachings and the early Buddhist texts. This book “Noble Truths” goes right into the heart and core of the path to liberation. Basically, it addresses the whole point of Buddha’s teachings – to liberate us from the cycle of samsara (re-birth) to which we are chained.

I will address the salient points I personally find illuminating from each of the 6 chapters, as a reminder to myself and as a guide for those considering to read this. Each chapter is supported by extracts from the Samyutta Nikaya at the end.

Intro: the whole of Buddha’s teachings is the Dhamma-Vinaya, that is the doctrine (of the law of nature) and the training/practise (the path to liberation). Essentially, these refer to the inter-twining relationship between the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path – where the last of the for noble truths refer to Noble Eightfold Path, and the first of the Noble Eightfold Path (that is, Right or Perfect View) points to seeing the Four Noble Truths. What a beautiful schema! (That is why Buddha’s teachings is so sublime).

In chapter 1, BB touched on the Four Noble Truths. While Buddha taught many things addressing the needs and readiness of different people, he saw the teaching of the Four Noble Truths as the crown jewel and suitable teaching only for those whose minds are ripe enough to understand clearly and directly.

Both chapters 2 (on The Five Aggregates) and chapter 3 (Six Sense Bases) should be read together because BB compared and contrasted the two, which are intrinsically linked.

It is not easy for most of us to understand the Five Aggregates because our whole experience of the world is bound within them – these are our form, our feelings, perceptions, volitional activities and our consciousness. But the Buddha taught that these Five combined together to make us think that we have a permanent and essential self. And that the reality is that all Five are conditioned, and hence so are we and our sense of “me”. Being aware of the Five exposes the fallacy of a permanent self.

In the chapter on the Five Aggregates, a very important point I learned was how three of the five aggregates (that is feeling, perception and volitional activities) ALL arise because of “contact” - so these few things all happen instantaneously! I am so glad to read this because some teachers present this in a linear fashion and it didn’t make sense to me.

In contrast, the being aware of the six sense bases and how they work exposes craving – a key driving force that chain us to samsara and cause us suffering (the other is ignorance/delusion). They refer to our eyes/ears/nose/taste/touch/mind (our internal sense bases) and things we see/hear/smell/taste/touch/think about aka mental objects (the external sense bases). They are conduits which we experience the world, especially in the experience of pleasure.

Hence, mindfulness to our body, and our mind objects, is important. Buddha described mindfulness as being like a strong pillar that chains and restraint wild animals and let them eventually calm down, so too our sense desires would calm down when we are mindful.

In chapter 4, BB touches on Dependent Origination (DO). He highlighted that DO is often presented as a 12-factor formula in the early Buddhist Texts (but not always so) and a very important point for me is that he said it was never meant to be exclusively linear but to serve as a simplified representation of a complex process that involves overlapping and intersecting lines of conditionality. I am so glad to read this, because it makes mores sense.

In chapter 5, BB touched on The Path. He said that the Noble Eightfold Path is only one of the 7 sets taught by Buddha but they are all closely interwoven. These seven sets are:

1. 4 establishment of mindfulness
2. 4 right kinds of striving
3. 4 bases of spiritual power
4. 5 faculties
5. 5 powers
6. 7 Factors of enlightenment
7. 8 fold path

They are closely interwoven eg mindfulness appears in a few sets, so do energy, concentration and wisdom. They are taught to different groups with emphasis on different aspects.

One important point I gather here is that Satipatthana (mindfulness) is often wrongly translated as “the only way” - no wonder certain cultures revere this particular sutta, bound them in gold and put in a case, and even chant it to people at their deathbeds. But actually what it means is a “one-way path/street”. This means that it points the practitioner in the right direction, and the further he goes, the more he experiences, and the more he realises about the true reality. He will be so motivated to continue and not return to the old state.

Hence, I better understand what it means when the Buddhist scripture say someone is a stream-enterer, that once one enters the "stream", he only has at most 7 re-births before achieving the goal of nibbana. And some more evolved practitioners are "once returners" and some "non-returners" meaning they have only one more re-birth or no-more re-birth before reaching the final goal of nibbana as an arahant. It is a gradual path, but for the serious practitioner, it is a sure path.

Finally, in the last chapter, BB shared that nibbana is an unconditioned state and Buddha used 40 different synonyms to describe it. I guess it must be the limitation of language to describe something so out of our experience. Anyway, the constant exhortation of Buddha was for us to not be heedless, to meditate, and not be regretful later. This, Buddha said, is his instructions to us.

[james · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't go wrong with Bhikkhu Bodhi. I was most drawn to the decription of how we turn away from hindrances and even deeper leveles of higher awareness to finally look away and into the unconditioned (ending chapters). It isn't easy taming the mind-- it can be a feral thing at times but it responds to patience and gentle instruction. I've been at this for a awhile, meditating, deep muscle relaxation and curbing the chattering mind's determination to have its way. This book cuts away the chaff and gets to the heart of the Buddha's teaching. Some suttas are repetetive, you've heard them before, but in the context of this book they're part of Siddhārtha Gautama's teachings and the repetition helps reinforce what needs to be done. I'm fond of the refuge teaching, "be a refuge unto thyseslf." I don't interpret this as isolation. The idea is when all around you is falling apart and the path becomes murky, take notice. It may be time to double down on your efforts to internalize and digest the Buddha's teachings. Keep at it, and keep at it some more and when you least expect release from your bonds, release happens. And it goes on like this with all your meritorious efforts rewarding you with peace and further illumination. I'm not one to talk too much about nirvana, but I've come far enough to know the path is where you find liberation from suffering. Buddha Shakyamuni knew well what he was talking about-- it's why we have his teachings today and western translations are better and better all the time. The Buddha urged urgency and to not sit and wait for enlighgtenment to come to you-- get after the teachings with fondness and you will be rewarded for you efforts.

[Robert Meaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome if not a bit heavy

[Rome Doherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the real stuff, a description of the Buddha's teaching, direct from sources, with good explanatory material.

[TL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indispensable brief textual concentration of the essence of the hinayana.

'The traditional explanation, [the three-life interpretation of dependent origination], goes like this: Because of fundamental ignorance, one engages in various volitional activities—wholesome and unwholesome bodily, verbal, or purely mental actions—that generate kamma with the potential to produce a new existence. These karmic activities, at death, propel consciousness into a new existence.

The new existence begins when consciousness arrives at a new embodiment, bringing forth a fresh assemblage of bodily and mental phenomena, which are collectively designated name-and-form. As name-and-form matures, the six sense bases take shape and begin to function. When the sense bases encounter their corresponding objects, contact occurs. Contact gives rise to feeling through the six sense bases—pleasant, painful, and neutral feelings, which trigger corresponding responses.

In an untrained person, feeling arouses craving, a desire to obtain pleasant objects and avoid situations that cause pain. When one obtains the objects of desire, one relishes them and holds to them tightly; this is clinging, an intensification of craving, which may also find expression in views that justify one's craving for more pleasure and continued existence.

Through clinging, one engages in a fresh round of volitional activities that create the potential for a new existence—an existence that may occur in any of the three realms recognized by Buddhist cosmology: the desire realm, the realm of subtle form, and the formless realm. That new existence begins with birth, and once birth takes place, there follows old-age-and-death and all the other manifestations of dukkha encountered in the course of existence.' (88-9)


'The twelve-factored formula was never intended to be exclusively linear but to serve as a simplified representation of a complex process that involves overlapping and intersecting lines of conditionality. The extraction of twelve conditions and their configuration in the familiar sequence might be considered an expository device intended to show the causal dynamics underlying the round of rebirths.' (90)


'Dependent origination offers a dynamic perspective on non-self that complements the analytic approach provided by the critical examination of the five aggregates. The formula shows how the process of rebirth and the working of karmic causation occur without an underlying subject, a substantial self, passing through the successive stages of life and migrating from one existence to the next.

In the Buddha's time, philosophers and contemplatives were divided into two opposed camps. One camp, the eternalists, held that at the core of every person there is an immortal self—substantial and autonomous—that persists through the cycle of rebirths and attains liberation, preserving its unchanging essence. The other camp, the annihilationists, denied the existence of a permanent self that survives bodily death. They held that with the breakup of the body, personal existence comes to an absolute end and thus at death the living being is utterly annihilated.

Dependent origination served the Buddha as a "teaching in the middle" that avoids the two extremes. It avoids the extreme that "all exists", a statement of eternalism, by showing how personal continuity is possible without a self that persists through the process. And it avoids the extreme that "all does not exist", the claim of the annihilationists, by showing that so long as the conditions that drive the process of becoming remain intact, the conditions will continue to operate, stitching together one life to the next.' (92)


'Contrary to popular misconception, the Buddha does not explicitly state "there is no self". Rather, he takes a more pragmatic approach, taking up for examination the things assumed to be a self and showing, through reasoned argument, that they fail to measure up to the criteria of true selfhood. Thus anattā functions not as a blanket denial of self but as a negation of the claims made about the things taken to be the self.' (38)


'In his first discourse the Buddha declared, "In brief, the five clinging-aggregates are suffering." This indicates that the range of dukkha is not confined to experiential pain and distress but extends to all aspects of our being...

Each aggregate can be seen as a broad category comprising a multiplicity of factors sharing a particular quality or function. Though experience in its immediacy occurs as a unified whole, in retrospect any experience—any occasion of consciousness—can be reflectively analyzed into these factors.' (33)


[The Five Aggregates:
FORM: material substance
FEELING: affections, sense-faculty side... 'the "affective tone" of an experience.
PERCEPTION: affections, sense-object side... 'the function of singling out and grasping the distinctive qualities of the object, a function that serves as the basis for identification, designation, and subsequent recognition.
VOLITION: action-instigating function
CONSCIOUSNESS: 'accessibility-illumination' of the entire sensory sphere]


'In the mental purview of ordinary people, the aggregates serve as the primary basis for clinging. Clinging occurs in a double role, by way of appropriation and identification, the two complementary sides of distorted cognition rooted in fundamental ignorance. In their totality the five aggregates comprise all the things we most intimately take to be "mine"; hence they are the basis for appropriation. At the same time, they constitute the grounds for identification, for the positing of our sense of personal identity. They are the objects on which we impute the innate sense of "I" and reflectively define as our "self".' (36)


'Since the self is [actually] a cipher, an unfindable blank, this leads to an anxious quest to fill in the blank with a concrete content, a project that culminates in a plethora of contesting views about the nature of self...

The view of a self is what the suttas call sakkāyadiṭṭhi, an expression notoriously hard to translate but which is rendered here with the clunky expression "the view of the personal-assemblage". The "personal-assemblage" (sakkāya) is the assemblage of the five aggregates themselves, Sakkāya-diṭṭhi is the view that arises in relation to this assemblage, asserting the self to be either identical with one or another of the aggregates, or to possess them, or to be contained within them, or to contain them within itself.' (36-7)


'To identify with them as "I" or to appropriate them as "mine" is to expose oneself to suffering when the aggregates change and fail to meet our expectations. To cling to the aggregates is, in effect to cling to dukkha.' (37)


'The Buddha's achievement, on the occasion of his enlightenment, was to penetrate the real nature of the five aggregates—which he called "world-phenomena in the world"—and then throughout his teaching career "to point them out, teach them, make them known, establish them, disclose, analyze, and elucidate them". As the pioneer, the discoverer of the path, he first gains his own release from bondage to the five aggregates, then, on the basis of his own realization, he guides others to liberation. Those who follow his teaching and practice as instructed become "liberated by wisdom", also winning release from the aggregates.' (38)


'The three terms of this argument—impermanence, dukkha, and non-self—become the hallmarks of the Buddha's teaching, known as the "three characteristics". They are the marks of things to be penetrated with insight in order to remove the cognitive delusions of permanence, pleasure, and self. In the standard paradigm, insight progresses from impermanence to dukkha, and from impermanence and dukkha together to non-self, the subtlest and deepest of the three.

While this three-step progression is the usual procedure the Buddha offers for cutting off identification with the aggregates, other texts offer more direct strategies. Some proceed straight from the impermanence of the aggregates to the destruction of the defilements... Other suttas suggest that one can directly contemplate the five aggregates as non-self without proceeding through any of the preliminary steps.' (40)


'So when the aggregates are closely investigated with insight, they turn out to be void, hollow, and insubstantial... No matter which approach is taken, the culmination is always the same. By seeing into the non-self nature of the aggregates, one become disenchanted, losing one's fascination with the aggregates and all the prospects of enjoyment they promise. And then, the texts continue: "Being disenchanted, one becomes dispassionate.. Through dispassion one is liberated. In regard to what is liberated, the knowledge occurs thus: 'Liberated'. One understands: 'Finished is birth, the spiritual life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no further for this state of being.'"' (41)

[jjfoerch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The nucleus of Buddhist philosophy is a set of interconnected teachings - the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, Dependent Arising, and various of those wonderful lists that Buddhism is known for - five aggregates, three marks of existence, four establishments of mindfulness, seven factors of enlightenment. This book is a condensed selection of passages from the Samyutta Nikaya focused on this subject, translated and with chapters of commentary by Bhikkhu Bodhi.

Shorter in length than In the Buddha's Words, it could be considered a more approachable way to begin reading Buddhist suttas, but the shorter length is also because this book is narrower in focus, which in turn also makes it a great convenient reference for these core concepts.

I had not previously paid much attention to the specific focus of each of the Nikayas, but here Bhikkhu Bodhi gives a nice overview of that, and how the Samyutta Nikaya is a particularly good source for these core teachings.

I bookmarked several of the suttas to go back to for further study, but also chapters 2 and 4 in their entirety. Chapter 2 on the Five Aggregates included the Assadasutta which considers three aspects of each of the aggregates - enjoyment, danger, and escape. And Chapter 4 on Dependent Origination, a topic that holds my continuous fascination, had some very helpful perspectives. One was how the factors can be divided into four overlapping groups, which is a fuller treatment of something I had noticed on my own previously. The other, and I think my interpretation may be straying from Bhikkhu Bodhi's here, is that the this-life interpretation of dependent origination is strengthened by the Buddha's account in several of the suttas of how he originally formulated the list of links, in the often overlooked reverse order that begins with Aging-and-death. This came as an insight for me, and will provide much food for thought and further study.

The introduction to the chapter on Dependent Origination also had a very helpful breakdown of the translation challenges in that term, putting forward that the prefix "inter-" as in interdependent, is not a correct translation, and that the prefix "co-" as in co-arising is also not correct, the former because it is a list of one-way causation, and the latter because simultaneity is not generally implied. In this book, Bhikkhu Bodhi uses "dependent origination". Elsewhere he has used "dependent arising", which I have a slight preference for as more natural sounding English.

I am really glad to have picked this up, and I already have a copy of its companion volume, Reading the Buddha's Discourses in Pali, though probably won't get to that one for a while.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is good and useful. Stream lines the texts to make it more accessible and less daunting for the people.

For really in depth look into the 8 fold path and how to develop it I recommend David Roylance’s book and online discussions on YouTube . But I always appreciate the angles and advice from others who know the path as they sometimes say things in such a way that resparks the practice and leads to greater wisdom and understanding and better practice.

It all comes down to doing it, but how to do it, and what to do? Sometimes we need a travel guide companion who knows the path like the back of their hand to point us in the right direction and help us take the first steps, until we get walking on our own, and the practice builds momentum.

[Jeanne Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bhikkhu Bodhi guides modern Dharma students into the thicket of Early Buddhist teachings with deep and illuminating context, and essential translated excerpts of classical texts. Both totally serious and user-friendly--a real service to anyone wanting to dip their toes in the water of this formidable realm.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bhikkhu Bodhi writes in a very clear way, while also maintaining the teaching of a large amount of information. The layout of the book is extremely well organized and the chapters are concise and waste not words in their explanation. I would consider it essential reading.

[Kant the Conqueror · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good for beginners.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 5 aggregates
The six sense factors
The seven means to enlightenment
The noble eightfold path

[Theo Meros · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful selection of suttas. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s introduction to each section is as insightful as his readers will have come to expect.

[Glen Leatherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent start