Explaining the Four Noble Truths to Children

The Four Noble Truths
In this explanation of the Four Noble Truths that can be found in the teachings of Buddhism, I will examine what these Truths mean and explain them in a way that a children’s Methodist Sunday School Class could understand. Instead of focusing on the foreign terms and the history or development of ideas, the explanation will mainly focus on what these ideas mean so that they can simply be comprehended at a basic level that even children of an entirely different religious background can grasp.
The Four Noble Truths come from the ideas presented by Buddha, who lived many, many centuries ago far away on the other side of the world. He became very much admired by those around him because he seemed to them to have discovered the secret of happiness: nothing upset him or made him lose his temper; he was always calm and always seemed to be at peace with himself and with everyone and the world around him. It was as though he had transcended above everything to a special place in his mind where he was free from sorrow, sadness, pain and suffering. How did he do this, everyone wondered? What was his secret?
Buddha explained how he did this by telling his people what it was he saw when he looked out at the world. He saw that human always tended to suffer in some way when they became attached to the things of the world. Whether their attachment was to money, to friends, to a place, a home, some piece of property that they loved very much and were very fearful of breaking or of someone stealing—anything at all—this attachment always tended to cause pain underneath the current of joy. In fact, it seemed that the attachment typically caused more pain than they did joy because the possession of the thing became the overriding obsession of the individual so that all else was blocked out. There was not even time to simply enjoy the thing that the person loved so much: every thought was consumed about keeping the thing—even though deep down it should have been obvious to the people that the thing they loved so much could not be kept forever for it was of this world and humankind is destined to leave this world. Instead of preparing to leave the world for the next, the people all worried about maximizing the amount of fun they could—but even this caused them anxiety, worry and stress, because they feared they were not getting as much fun out of every moment as they could be. So they were constantly wringing their hands about it. This made the people very unhappy. Why? They did not stop to think that all things are finite, meaning they cannot last forever, yet every human being has something of the infinite in him—so this attachment goes against the very nature of humankind. It is from this awareness that Buddha began to understand the Four Noble Truths.
What are these Four Noble Truths? Here they are quite simply:
First, suffering is a fact of life. All things contain some form of suffering. It cannot be escaped. Suffering is part of existence—it is part of life. No expression of life exists without it. Every rose has its thorn is a popular expression that communicates this idea. Have you ever seen a rose bush? It has beautiful, pleasing flowers—but the stems are riddled with sharp, painful thorns that prick when you touch them. Suffering is a fact that cannot be avoided, and trying to avoid it only makes it worse for everyone—so don’t do that. That is the first noble truth.
But if you are not going to run from suffering, what should you do? This leads us to the second Noble Truth. Think of how Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ accepted suffering—how He fasted in the desert so as to have the strength to overcome temptation, how He accepted His cross so as to save men from their sins. Without this example, we would not have the courage to embrace suffering like He did. Buddha also recognized this, but he expressed the idea in a different way. He stated in the second Noble Truth that desire and ignorance are what cause suffering, so people should stop letting their desires run their lives, and they should enlighten their minds through meditation on the meaning of reality. By controlling desire, one could resist the temptations of the world, the temptations to chase after things and try to find happiness in attachments. Basically, Christ taught the same concept when He fasted in the desert for 40 days: he was showing detachment from the world, which is necessary in order to rise up spiritually.
The third Noble Truth is this: we are not doomed to suffer eternally. So long as we can free ourselves from our attachments—even our attachment to ourselves—our pride, our vanity, our own sense of greatness—then we can truly rise up and be liberated from the suffering that afflicts others.
What are the practical steps that can be taken to achieve this good end? What is the path to follow? Buddha’s answer is the fourth Noble Truth: by spending time in meditation, by striving to do no evil but rather to do good to all things, and by guarding against the temptation to pursue superficial attachments in the world, we can rise up and became free from suffering in the end.
So these are the Four Noble Truths that Buddha taught very many years ago far away on the other side of the world. They are still with us today because people found them so helpful that they practiced them for years and years and found that they really do work. You can explore these ideas more on your own and see how they fit with what we have learned about our Christian faith. The secret to happiness is to prepare not for this world—but for the next, which is where we are all destined to go sooner or later.