The Four Truths organize the entire Buddhist path, the fourth truth opening out into the Eightfold Path of ethical conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom. They are affirmed across every Buddhist tradition as the indispensable framework, however differently the later schools go on to interpret them. Theravada scholasticism, in the Abhidhamma literature, analyzed each truth into an exhaustive taxonomy of mental and physical factors, treating the truths as objects of precise analytical meditation to be verified in direct experience rather than merely accepted as doctrine.
Mahayana philosophy took the truths in a more radical direction. Nagarjuna, in the Mulamadhyamakakarika, argued that even suffering, its origin, and its cessation are themselves empty of independent existence (shunyata), conventionally real and pedagogically necessary but not ultimately separate, self-existing facts, a reading that some traditionalists saw as undercutting the truths and that Madhyamaka philosophers insisted instead completed their logic. This willingness to submit even the tradition's foundational formula to further philosophical scrutiny illustrates a recurring feature of Buddhist intellectual history, that later schools built on the Four Truths not by leaving them untouched but by continually re-examining what, exactly, it means to hold them as true.