The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha - Bhikkhu Nanamoli [7]
Although the Canon is precise and reliable in affording such details, for the early Buddhist community interest focuses upon the Buddha not so much in his concrete historical particularity as in his archetypal significance. Whereas outsiders might view him as merely one among the many spiritual teachers of the day—as “the recluse Gotama”—to his disciples “he is vision, he is knowledge, he is the Dhamma, he is the holy one,…the giver of the Deathless, the lord of the Dhamma, the Tathāgata” (MN 18.12). The last term in this series is the epithet the Buddha uses most often when referring to himself and it underscores his significance as the Great Arrival who brings to fulfilment a cosmic, repetitive pattern of events. The Pali commentators explain the word as meaning “thus come” (tathā āgata) and “thus gone” (tathā gata), that is, the one who comes into our midst bearing the message of deathlessness to which he has gone by his own practice of the path. As the Tathāgata he possesses the ten powers of knowledge and the four intrepidities, which enable him to roar his “lion’s roar” in the assemblies (MN 12.9–20). He is not merely a wise sage or a benevolent moralist but the latest in the line of Fully Enlightened Ones, each of whom arises singly in an age of spiritual darkness, discovers the deepest truths about the nature of existence, and establishes a Dispensation (sāsana) through which the path to deliverance again becomes accessible to the world. Even those of his disciples who have attained unsurpassable vision, practice, and deliverance still honour and venerate the Tathāgata as one who, enlightened himself, teaches others for the sake of their enlightenment (MN 35.26). Looking back at him following his demise, the first generation of monks could say: “The Blessed One was the arouser of the unarisen path, the producer of the unproduced path, the declarer of the undeclared path; he was the knower of the path, the finder of the path, the one skilled in the path,” which is followed by and attained to afterwards by his disciples (MN 108.5).
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
The Buddha’s teaching is called the Dhamma, a word that can signify both the truth transmitted by the teaching and the conceptual-verbal medium by which that truth is expressed in order that it can be communicated and made comprehensible. The Dhamma is not a body of immutable dogmas or a system of speculative thought. It is essentially a means, a raft for crossing over from the “near shore” of ignorance, craving, and suffering to the “far shore ” of transcendental peace and freedom (MN 22.13). Because his aim in setting forth his teaching is a pragmatic one—deliverance from suffering—the Buddha can dismiss the whole gamut of metaphysical speculation as a futile endeavour. Those committed to it he compares to a man struck by a poisoned arrow who refuses the surgeon’s help until he knows the details about his assailant and his weaponry (MN 63.5). Being struck by the arrow of craving, afflicted by ageing and death, humanity is in urgent need of help. The remedy the Buddha brings as the surgeon for the world (MN 105.27) is the Dhamma, which discloses both the truth of our existential plight and the means by which we can heal our wounds.
The Dhamma that the Buddha discovered and taught consists at its core in Four Noble Truths:
• the noble truth of suffering (dukkha)
• the noble truth of the origin of suffering (dukkhasamudaya)
• the noble truth of the cessation of suffering (dukkhanirodha)
• the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering (dukkhanirodhagāminī paṭipadā)
It is these four truths that the Buddha awakened to on the night of his enlightenment (MN 4.31, MN 36.42), made known to the world when he set rolling the matchless Wheel of the Dhamma at Benares (MN 141.2), and held aloft