Overview

Buddhism's Four Noble Truths have the same structure as myths: renunciation is to the sacred as desire is to suffering. Are the Four Noble Truths then a myth? If they are, they cannot have any more intrinsic value than, for example, the myth of Adam and Eve. And as such a superficial narrative, all the superstructure of Buddhism collapses, and all the purported grandeur of the Buddha's achievement disappears. So Buddhism's fate, and the reputation of the Buddha, depend on the relationship between the Four Truths and myths. Since their common structure is a given, we have to choose between seeing the Four Truths as a mere myth, or as I have chosen to do, as the container of all myth, as their underlying structure. Once we do the latter, essentially grafting all of world mythology unto Buddhism, we cannot fail to see the mass of conceptual suffering as the old age, sickness and death that in Buddhism are caused by craving. One might object that to see myths as a precursor to the Four Truths, a tentative groping after the structure that the Buddha finally discerned with greatest clarity, leaves intact the conventional view of the Four Truths as yielding metaphysical products. But if we do so, as we have already done in this book, we are seeing myth and social structure as the unconscious expression of the Four Truths. And once we have done this, are we not bound to see myth and social structure as the content of the Four Truths? I think we are. Once we accept that some expression is motivated by the structure of the Four Truths, we are saying that its craving and suffering are products of the Law of Causality. So the only way to escape the conclusions of this book is to deny that the Four Truths share the same structure as myth and culture.