Suffering_. Thirst that leads to
rebirth, accompanied by pleasure and lust, finding its delight here
and there. This thirst is threefold, namely, thirst for pleasure,
thirst for existence, thirst for prosperity.

3. The Noble Truth of the _Cessation of Suffering_. It ceases with
the complete cessation of this thirst, a cessation which consists in
the absence of every passion, with the abandoning of this thirst,
with the deliverance from it, with the destruction of desire.

4. The Noble Truth of the _Path which leads to the Cessation of
Suffering_. The holy eightfold Path; that is to say, Right Belief,
Right Aspiration, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of
Livelihood, Right Endeavour, Right Memory, Right Meditation.

In these statements there are some things which we can readily
understand, but also some things which are not so easy. It is a
thought with which Christians are familiar, that desire is the parent
of all sorts of pain and disappointment, that the assertion of the
self, the putting forward of personal wishes and claims, involves
suffering. And we read in the Gospels that the way to escape from
such suffering is to cease from desire, no longer to be anxious about
what this world can give us or take from us, and not to lay up
treasures. Buddhist doctrine has its moral basis in the perception of
the vanity of all human effort and desire, and in the conviction that
the true riches for man cannot consist in any of those goods to which
the heart naturally clings. Where that perception does not exist,
where the first of the Noble Truths is not accepted as beyond all
question, Buddhism can have no hold. So far the doctrine is easy to
follow. But in the second of the Truths we find that the cause of
suffering is sought in the history of the human person as Indian
thought conceives it. Man suffers because he has been born again, has
suffered a rebirth, and the cause of his rebirth is the thirst which
has been felt or even nourished in a previous existence. The thought
that suffering is due to desire is not presented simply, as it is in
our Gospels, but in connection with a doctrine of man's life and of
the connection of one generation with another, which is quite strange
to us, but apart from which primitive Buddhism held that its doctrine
of suffering could not be understood. The Buddha, after discovering
the doctrine, is at first in doubt whether or not he will preach it;
and the cause of his doubt is that