The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are a timeless guide for finding inner peace in our unruly modern world. But what makes these ancient teachings so exceptionally useful that they have survived empires and technological revolutions? As someone who stumbled upon nondual awareness through my own rational path, I was skeptical of traditional Buddhist concepts—until it clicked. Beyond the Buddha as a meditation master, this article breaks down his philosophical brilliance in an original and practical way. His insights about existential anguish and the path to inner peace remain remarkably relevant, whether you’re spiritual, secular, or simply seeking clarity in life.
Reflecting on a “Philosophize This!” podcast episode about the Buddha’s life, I realized I’d been overlooking something fundamental about nirvana—the legendary but enigmatic spiritual jackpot. Building on his well-known life story, let me share what I learned about these teachings that may still transform your life today, 2,500 years after their inception.
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Discovering the existential genius of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths
Recently I listened to a “Philosophize This!” podcast episode by Stephen West about the Buddha’s life, the historical figure born as Siddhartha Gautama. I knew scandalously little about the Buddha for someone offering a path to nondual awareness. The path I present is called rational nondualism, which I discovered through personal, direct experience. While inspired by Zen readings, I didn’t follow any particular Buddhist teacher, school, or congregation. I had vaguely heard about the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment, the Four Noble Truths, and something about lotus flowers, but had no idea what they meant. So I was curious.
Frankly, learning about the Buddha’s life blew my mind: It corrected several of my prejudices about his teachings. How naive, I had thought, picturing barefoot monks strolling meditatively through a Zen garden claiming to have ended all suffering through meditation. But what if they step on a mean little pebble—or worse, a Lego? Surely they suffer from the pain if they are human? And nirvana? Is it just another fantasy paradise, a spiritual version of an all-inclusive Club Med?
After listening to the podcast, I realized my understanding of Buddhist concepts had been about as nuanced as a bull in a china shop. The “end of suffering” wasn’t the permanent happiness subscription I’d imagined, and nirvana wasn’t a metaphysical resort in the sky. The actual meaning of the teachings is far more elegant and profound.
I didn’t need to know the Buddha’s life story for enlightenment (full nondual awareness), but it did help me appreciate his unique existential genius. His wisdom has come down to us through oral traditions and numerous interpretations, of which I can recommend Stephen West’s version for being accessible and historically fact-oriented. As is his podcast, this article is not about Buddhist religion and traditions but only the philosophy.
Moreover, it strikes me that most value lies in deeply understanding his teachings, not so much in just learning the facts. Some of my previous misunderstandings about Buddhism seem to be more widely circulating—particularly in the West. My interpretation is also just that: an interpretation in my own words, inspired by the podcast but not quite the same. But I hope it’s reasonable—it works for me as a practically oriented engineer. Read on if you’re interested in a rational take on a core tenet of Buddhist philosophy: the Four Noble Truths and their profound power to give you inner peace—today.
The First Noble Truth: The lack of inner peace is universal
Famously, Siddhartha Gautama was a prince who grew up in opulent riches, having separate palaces for every season with supposedly an all-female staff to cater to his every wish. He had been prophesied to become either a spiritual teacher or a great warlord, and his father thought it prudent to shield him from all troubles so he wouldn’t get it into his head to become a philosopher instead of a fierce warrior.
Thus, Siddhartha was already 29 years old when he saw for the first time what was happening outside of his pleasure gardens. Fate, in the guise of Siddhartha’s charioteer, had its inescapable ways and showed him an old man, a sick man, and a dead man. The fourth man Siddhartha saw was an ascetic in deep meditation, and the charioteer explained to the wide-eyed young Siddhartha that people desperately needed ways to deal with the harsh facts of human suffering of themselves and their loved ones, as symbolized by the three unfortunate men he had seen.
It all fell into place for Siddhartha. His many years of extreme comfort and instant gratification had left him strangely unhappy—later he would say that he was “wounded by pleasure.” And here was the ascetic, on his way to finding peace amidst the cruel facts everyone is confronted with at some point in their lives. Siddhartha understood that what he had longed for was the same as what the ascetic sought: not so much happiness or the total absence of pain but a liberation from the dissatisfaction with life’s inevitable curveballs—the impermanence of life. It dawned on him that there was a deeper principle at play than fortune, good or bad, for people to be in harmony with existence.
Siddhartha wanted to understand the cause of the pervasive human mental agony and, true to his nobility, find a way to end it for himself and others too.
The key wisdom in the First Noble Truth is to choose your life goals well because the wrong ones can deeply hurt you. Don’t try to avoid all suffering because it is ultimately inevitable and will strike you even harder when it eventually finds you. Rather, your goal should be to find a way to deal with suffering. Through his First Noble Truth, the Buddha recommends you aim for inner peace, not pleasure, happiness, or a total absence of pain.
The Second Noble Truth: There’s a reason why we lack inner peace
Now you may say, if suffering is inevitable, it doesn’t matter so much how I live my life. I might as well be entirely careless, hedonistic, or both. How on earth can living an ascetic life help me if suffering is unavoidable?
Siddhartha asked himself the same questions, and after the fateful encounter with the ascetic, he was so determined to find answers that he decided to become an ascetic himself, seeking guidance from spiritual teachers. He courageously renounced all his worldly possessions, left home to wander the Ganges plains, and fasted to the point where he was severely emaciated. But to no avail: The cause of universal mental agony still escaped him. He had to look elsewhere for answers.
To the dismay of his fellow ascetics, he broke his fast and left them in search of a better path to inner peace. He needed solitude so he could concentrate. So he sat down under a fig tree to meditate, determined to remain there until he had found the solution.
And as you probably already know, where Siddhartha sat down, the Buddha arose. The Buddha means the enlightened one, and the 35-year-old Siddhartha experienced the earth-shattering awakening to the nonduality I was also fortunate to welcome. But even after becoming aware of the nonduality, he remained in meditation because he knew he needed a way to explain this unspeakable nondual insight to others. When the Buddha finally got up, he had reached a level of vision and clarity that made him the singular existential genius whose timeless teachings still inspire millions of people today.
The Buddha went back to his ascetic friends and told them he had found the universal path to inner peace. At first skeptical, they were soon won over by the Buddha’s teachings that work both for enlightened people and those still searching, summarized in the Four Noble Truths.
The Second of these Four Noble Truths includes the epiphany about nonduality the Buddha had while meditating under the tree. This Second Truth says that the cause of the universal mental agony is threefold:
- Greed and grasping: Clinging too much to life’s positives, being too scared to lose them or miss out on them
- Hate or aversion: Being too scared or averse to life’s partly unavoidable negatives
- Ignorance—the root cause of humanity’s universal mental agony: not fully understanding and accepting the impermanence of life.
Remedying ignorance requires an appreciation of the true nondual nature of your existence because as long as you think that there is anything, and I mean truly anything existing other than your present awareness, you are bound to cling to it. The nondual truth equals the preconceptual wholeness before existence and non-existence are even conceived. If you truly understand that your life is merely an unreal appearance of this nondual truth, you instantly, entirely, and irreversibly understand the futility of grasping and aversion.
Although the third point, remedying ignorance, is sufficient for anyone to find inner peace, the existential genius of the Buddha was to envision mental and practical intermediate steps aligning with that goal. This makes Buddhist philosophy widely applicable and acceptable and a healthy foundation for the collective consciousness.
The key takeaway of the Second Noble Truth is that you have considerable agency over your inner peace through introspection, meditation, and “plain” rational thought. It’s worthwhile to engage with others about our shared existential struggles, but also sometimes to seek solitude in search of answers, following the Buddha’s example. He made it clear that the inner peace he found is also available to you and me.
The Third Noble Truth: Inner peace is achievable
Once a disease is properly diagnosed, the cure to administer often becomes a no-brainer. The disease is humanity’s universal mental agony—or lack of inner peace; the root cause diagnosis is ignorance of existence’s true nature. The cure may be no surprise: removing the ignorance. The Third Noble Truth is that understanding the true nature of existence extinguishes the flames of greed and grasping, hate and aversion, and its root cause: ignorance itself. Nirvana means “blown out,” like a candle.
This is what I didn’t “get” about the Buddha’s teaching before listening to the podcast and thinking about it: that nirvana “merely” means a state of removed ignorance, which can also be formulated positively as simply nondual awareness!
Nirvana isn’t something like a blissful state to aspire to, heaven, Valhalla, or eternal hunting grounds. I didn’t like the “blissful heaven” or “exalted state” understanding of nirvana because precisely the idea of aspiring to an external state or trying to hold on to blissful experiences is samsara: being caught up in the endless cycle of death and rebirth of desires and aversions, forever lacking inner peace.
The only way to achieve inner peace is to fully grasp the utter impermanence of existence, with literally nothing to aspire to or hold on to. This understanding isn’t trivial because it is profoundly counterintuitive. But once you do get nondual awareness, you have reached nirvana. That’s all.
Stephen West and many others typically describe the Third Noble Truth as “ending suffering—by extinguishing desire—by getting rid of the ego.” While this is accurate, it misses the crucial insight that ending suffering does not mean that you won’t feel pain anymore but that you’ll rid yourself of the ignorance of the illusory nature of the ego (self), thereby gaining agency over your desire and mental agony.
(A brief clarification is in place here: Unlike some Western Buddhism interpretations, rational nondualism doesn’t require a distinction between the self (sometimes capitalized as Self) and the ego, adhering to the law of identity—a principle of rational thought. So, I use the terms self and ego interchangeably.)
By seeing the true nondual nature of your self—and the entire world, you won’t become an angelically serene and unassailable creature. Instead, you’ll become cognizant of your true nature beyond an individual person, not existing separately from everything else, in an existence that is pure change. By not separately I mean that your conscious being is identical to the present and to change, and that nothing else can be known to exist apart from that. It is that radically, overwhelmingly simple.
The key takeaway of the Third Noble Truth is that nirvana is simply identical to nondual awareness!
The Fourth Noble Truth: Practical steps to inner peace
Here my knowledge becomes a bit patchy. I never made past the Third Noble Truth because I’m convinced the Buddha merely added the Fourth Noble Truth for those who haven’t yet reached nirvana—whose ignorance isn’t yet fully “blown out” by nondual awareness, still mentally caught up in the samsara wheel, chasing the phantoms of greed and aversion, clutching and running, never at peace.
My understanding of Buddhist philosophy aligns with Zen Buddhism, which prioritizes becoming aware of nonduality through a so-called satori moment. Satori can be reached by direct intuition through reason, which is preferred, or by conduct, meaning following several guidelines. The Fourth Noble Truth contains such mental and practical guidelines, which are also known as the Noble Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. These eight steps are traditionally grouped into three categories:
- Wisdom: right view and right intention
- Ethical conduct: right speech, right action, and right livelihood
- Mental discipline: right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration
As a practical guide to reducing human suffering, this path is a middle way between extreme asceticism and indulgence and a guide to meditative states.
The problem with guidelines for the psyche and conduct is that they’re always dualistic, as they inevitably split the mind into the subjective ego (or self) and an objective—a goal for the ego to strive for. So, without nondual awareness, the Eightfold Path doesn’t liberate the mind from samsara. Conversely, the first of the Eight Steps, the Right View, suffices to reach nirvana if it’s understood to include nondual awareness.
Yet, true nondual awareness, which involves a full awakening to nonduality, is relatively rare, so the Buddha outlined a path that harmonizes with nondual awareness without requiring it. This is what makes the Eightfold Path such an outstanding artifact in collective consciousness: It guides people’s psychology and actions with wisdom, toward wisdom, without requiring wisdom.
The key takeaway regarding the Fourth Noble Truth is that in Buddhist philosophy, knowledge, understanding, and conduct align beautifully. People can be smart and skillful in many different ways. The Buddha’s philosophy is exceedingly helpful during different life phases for people with all kinds of personalities and talents.
Conclusion
So yes, the Buddha was a singular existential genius. Not only did he awaken, like the lotus flower that has spent all its life submerged in muddy, murky waters before finally blossoming, but he also went back down underwater to guide the people who were still lost and who perhaps would never surface to blossom. Those scared of pain or too frightened to lose what they have to enjoy it. Those running after the mirages of lasting bliss, perfection, absolution, and a definitive end of suffering. Those hurting, addicted, obsessed, compulsive, wounded by pleasure, ashamed, or guilty. He gave them a path that reminds them that even when they’re struggling in the dark, reaching for the light, they are already whole, just the way they are.
The Buddha had a refreshingly down-to-earth take on his own role: “Whoever sees me, sees the teaching; whoever sees the teaching, sees me.” No praying to him as a deity or hoping for miraculous intervention—instead, he offered his life journey as a practical blueprint for finding inner peace. As he wandered through northeastern India sharing his insights, he wasn’t selling himself as some unquestionable guru but as a fellow traveler who’d figured some things out. He encouraged debate and discussion, making his teachings accessible to anyone willing to engage with them—whether prince or pauper, scholar or merchant. It worked: His pragmatic approach to ending mental suffering resonated widely precisely because it was so practical and universal.
A personal takeaway is that the Buddha still has a lot to teach me. Even though I was given nondual awareness, I could doubtlessly still spiritually grow by deepening my understanding of the Noble Eightfold Path and adhering to it. Still, I hope my overview focusing on the relationship between the Buddha’s teachings and nondual awareness was helpful. For a deeper understanding of nondual awareness by rational direct insight, which involves recognizing the illusion of separation between the subjective and objective, you could check out some articles about my books. For now, if you remember that nondual awareness is essential in the Buddha’s teachings about impermanence and inner peace, you have understood the main point I was trying to make. Thank you for reading, and I’d love to hear your comments!
It’s scientific: The best place for Marcel’s books and exclusive Simply Nondual style is Marcel’s Booktique! His books—in paper and pixel—can also be found at Amazon and other select retailers.
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