Good morning and welcome to all of you. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Jordan Thorne and today I want to talk about the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths are, I think in a very real way, the foundation of Buddhism. They're at the core of the unique way we understand our life and at the core of how we live our life. These Four Noble Truths were spoken perhaps about 2,500 years ago by Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, at the very beginning of his teaching career. And these Four Noble Truths are intended to help us wake up.

[01:07]

And just a little bit before I launch into talking about the Four Noble Truths, I want to set the stage, a tiny bit of stage. And I want to say that Buddhism is a way of life. a way of practice, a way of training oneself, which is dedicated to waking up. That's what Buddha means, waking up, awoken, enlightened. Buddhism is dedicated to the realization of enlightenment, which is a rather large word. Waking up, enlightenment, sort of code words for something fairly profound, which we maybe can't understand.

[02:12]

So what is waking up? For me, Most of my days start with the sound of my alarm. It rudely rings in my ears. I reach out in the dark, turn the alarm off, lay there for a moment, swing my legs out of bed and stand up. And that's one kind of waking up. And you know, waking up is waking up. Not to get too fancy about it, but In my heart, I'm pretty sure, actually, that my alarm ringing and waking me up is not exactly what the Buddha meant when he spoke of teaching about awakening. At the Zen Center, in Zen practice, we have a kind of special vocabulary to talk about waking up.

[03:24]

And when I say special vocabulary, we use regular words, but we put them together in a way that points to what I think I'll describe as non-duality. For instance, at the Zen Center, we might hear the teaching that the bizazan of even one person at one moment imperceptibly accords with all things and fully resonates through all time. Thus in the past, future and present, of the limitless universe, this zazen carries on the Buddha's teaching endlessly. Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization. So what I just quoted comes from a text written by the Japanese Zen master Dogen. And this text, those words are part of a larger text which is being studied

[04:27]

during this practice period that began a few weeks ago and will end at the end of March. So, quoting Dogen again to give a sort of flavor of the Zen expression of waking up. Each moment of Zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization. This is not only practice while sitting, it's like a hammer striking emptiness. Before and after, its exquisite peel permeates everywhere. How can it be limited to this moment? So this is really the true teaching of being woken up outside of limited conditions when we live our life like a hammer striking emptiness. Oops. I have a daughter who plays in a band sometimes, and they try to do that on purpose.

[05:31]

This hammer striking emptiness, this expression of one moment of zazen resonates everywhere, permeates the whole world throughout all time. a true teaching of being woken up. And if we can realize that each moment of our day is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization, well, this is really pretty good. Congratulations. This is our aspiration. But I worry a little bit that The hammer striking emptiness might be an encouragement to us, but still, when we sit down and face the reality of who we are at this moment, at the moment of our sitting down, still what comes up might not be like an exquisite peel permeating everywhere, but rather just maybe like Jordan or you.

[06:51]

And it might seem like we're still not really sure how to live our life. So today, because I hope it will be an encouragement to all of you to take up the path of practice, I want to talk about what I said was the original teaching of Buddhism, There's a teaching called the Four Noble Truths. And these Four Noble Truths are, there is suffering, there's a cause of suffering, there's the end of suffering, and there is a path, an eightfold path to the end of suffering. So, Four Noble Truths, there is suffering, there's a cause, there's a cessation of suffering, and there's a path to realize the cessation of suffering. And I want to talk today mostly focusing on the first noble truth, which is the truth that human life involves change, with all the implications that follow from this simple fact.

[08:16]

And as you might imagine, Buddha didn't use the English word suffering when he talked about the first noble truth, and the second, the third, and fourth. He used a Pali word to describe these noble truths, and he used a word called dukkha. It's interesting how some words get translated like weak, I haven't translated, karma is a word, a Pali, actually a Sanskrit word that we just have brought into our vocabulary. Dukkha is one where mostly people use dukkha, but also suffering is, we translate that word often. Like no self, there's a teaching in Buddhism of no self, an atman, usually we say no self. I wondered briefly, what words get translated? Like if we wanted to translate Buddhism, because Buddha actually means something,

[09:28]

It would be awaken-ism, waking up-ism, which doesn't quite have the ring, perhaps, in Buddhism. Anyway, so the particular word I'm going to use mostly, talking about dukkha today, is suffering. But this is just one word. Buddhist Dictionary. And for Dukkha, some other translations were irritation, sorrow, despair, fear, dread, anguish, injury, sickness, old age, death, decay of the body and mind, pain slash pleasure, excitement slash boredom, longing slash aimlessness, aversion, attraction, loss, want, desire, attachment. So these are all Dukkhas.

[10:30]

Buddha's teaching has two faces. One is practical and the other is philosophical. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, which is the Fourth Noble Truth, the Four Noble Truths are practical teachings. The teachings of interdependence, transiency and emptiness These are the philosophical side of Buddhism. Suzuki Roshi said something about the Four Noble Truths in a talk he gave in 1965 at Sakoji Temple in Japantown. He said, Why Buddha told us about the Four Noble Truths is to destroy our easy way of understanding life. He wants to undermine our scientific understanding, our philosophical understanding.

[11:39]

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