is due to craving; 3) that it can only be stopped by the stopping of craving; and 4) that this can only be done by a course of carefully disciplined and moral conduct, culminating in the life of concentration and meditation led by the Buddhist monk. These four truths, which are the common property of all schools of Buddhist thought, are part of the true Doctrine (Skt. dharma), which reflects the fundamental moral law of the universe (Creel, 1953, p. 307).
Van de Wetering (1973, p. 26) says that the "first truth of Buddhism is that life means suffering. Life = suffering." But spiritual Buddhism is complex. That is, there are many levels to the Fourfold Truth. What is essential to understand is that Buddhism is first and always religious and transcendent. The aim of life is to finally and completely transcend the body (reality, existence). Until the human being achieves this, the being (not strictly the soul) will revisit (i.e., be reincarnated in) human forms until craving is fully expunged and one achieves nirvana, or the joining of right moral conduct, an absence of craving, and the importance of a bodhi (enlightenment) that derives from the other two, which is that existence (phenomenal reality) itself is illusory. One who is enlightened is a bodhisattva, and the enlightenment is that reality itself is emptiness. Nirvana is unity with that emptiness.
Theraveda, sometimes called Hinayana, Buddhism emerged in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia ("Buddhism," 1975). As a religious world view, it is connected with a so-called "Doctrine of the Elders" (theraveda], which appears to be driven by a normative psychology, which is to say beliefs about the personal experience of the universe. The practice of meditation is fundamental to that experience, and the end of meditation is a mystical state of absolute unity with the divine or through gradual attainment of insight. Concentration on what is known as a virtuous object is...