Tonight's talk is on a pocket darma.

The darma in a nutshell,

core principles of the Buddha's teaching put as succinctly as I basically can, knowing that the Buddha Darma is a vast, enormous set of teachings that the Buddha gave over a period of roughly 50 years and there are

thousands upon thousands of lessons or teachings in it.

And so there's no way to,

in any sense, adequately represent vastness and the brilliant insights found therein, but my job is to simply

try to carve out for you some of the some of the most fundamental insights by the Buddha some 2,500 years ago in the hopes that these insights will be useful, especially in the dramatic and stable times that we live in.

And so there's no really better way to introduce the teachings the darma,

the insights of the Buddha in then other

other than the four truths, sometimes referred to as the four noble truths.

Essentially the four basic grounding insights around which all of the Buddha's teachings can be located within.

The Buddha said many times that all he taught was the cause of suffering and the

liberation, how to be liberated from suffering. And foundation of all of his

teachings were in one, presenting a problem, and then two, presenting the solution to the problem.

Some people who have written about the Buddha like to say this was a form of a kind of a

medical diagnosis noting what the issues were and then identifying a solution to those issues.

And certainly for those of you who've listened to my talks over the years, all of my talks since for the last

16 years have always employed this basic framework

or this basic underlying pattern,

which is to first talk about some issue or challenge we have to deal with and why it's important,

and then how we would go about addressing it. And for the Buddha, that issue is called suffering. Otherwise, an early poly, the language of the Buddha's time, the word would be dukka.

So I'm going to just give us a broad strokes of the four noble or the four truths and hopefully

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