ABSTRACT
Books on Buddhism often start with the so-called Four Noble Truths, and rightly so since this topic forms a central one in what is traditionally held to have been the first discourse of the Buddha after his enlightenment. That discourse is known in Pāli as the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (‘The Discourse Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma’). Yet, as K.R. Norman has pointed out, there is no overwhelming reason why the Pāli expression ariyasaccāni should be translated as ‘noble truths’. It could equally be translated as ‘the nobles’ truths’, or ‘the truths for nobles’, or ‘the nobilising truths’, or ‘the truths of, possessed by, the noble ones’ (1990–6, in 1993 volume: 174). In fact the Pāli expression (and its Sanskrit equivalent) can mean all of these, although the important Pāli commentator Buddhaghosa places ‘the noble truths’ as the least significant in his understanding (ibid; see also Norman 1997: 16). Norman’s own view is that probably the best single translation is ‘the truth[s] of the noble one (the Buddha)’. This would amount to a statement of how things are seen (‘truth’; Sanskrit: satya; Pāli: sacca, derived from ‘sat’, being, how it is) by a Buddha, how things really are when seen correctly. Through not seeing things this way, and behaving accordingly, we suffer. Nevertheless, while bearing in mind these alternative ways of reading the expression, let us stick with the tradition of translating the expression as ‘noble truths’.1
