Buddhists affirm the Four Noble Truths as the core of the Buddha's teaching, traditionally set out in his first sermon after his enlightenment. They diagnose the human condition and prescribe its cure: that existence is pervaded by dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness; that dukkha arises from craving and attachment; that it can cease, in the state called nirvana, when its cause is uprooted; and that the way to that cessation is the Noble Eightfold Path. The structure is deliberately medical, symptom, cause, prognosis, and treatment, a form some scholars have compared to the diagnostic schemes of classical Indian medicine current in the Buddha's own era.
Historians of early Buddhism differ over how far back the neat fourfold formula itself goes. Some, working from textual layering in the earliest surviving discourses, have argued the tightly systematized four-truth structure may reflect an early formalization by the monastic community rather than a single verbatim sermon, while the tradition's own account holds the teaching was delivered essentially as transmitted, at Sarnath, to the five ascetics who had been the Buddha's earlier companions. The dispute concerns the history of the text, not whether the truths express the Buddha's teaching, which no Buddhist school questions.