Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductions to Buddhism.

Last time we discussed Prince Siddhartha’s path to awakening. This episode asks how the Buddha returned to the human world and explained truths such as life’s suffering.

After awakening, the Buddha’s first difficulty washow to communicate what he had understood.Scriptures describe his conflicted state at length:What I have awakened to is extremely difficult. How can I persuade others to understand and practice it?Even a learned and thoughtful teacher struggles to cultivate excellent students; the Buddha’s insight had come through extraordinary hardship.

He finally found a method Buddhism callsskillful meanswhich meansteaching according to the person.To keep people on the path, first offer ideas and practices they can understand, then gradually guide them toward the core.

The Buddha began teaching across northern India. At Deer Park, over a hundred miles from Bodh Gaya, he met the five ascetics who had once practiced with him, including Kauṇḍinya. Thinking he had abandoned practice, they agreed not to greet or honor him.

Yet the awakened Buddha possessed an unmistakable presence. The five wondered how the Siddhartha who had supposedly given up could appear so radiant.

He told them that seekers of truth must neither indulge sensory pleasure nor fall into self-denying austerity. They should avoid extremes and return to the Middle Way.

Kauṇḍinya immediately grasped the principle. All five developed profound confidence and listened to his teaching. This first sermon at Deer Park began more than forty years of teaching in the human world.

By leading the five to insight, the Buddha began both his teaching career and the Buddhist monastic community. The wordSanghain full issaṃgha,a community gathered to practice. Traditionally at least four people form a Sangha; an individual renunciant ordained under the complete code is a bhikṣu. These five became Buddhism’s first monks. The Buddha taught them suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path—the Four Noble Truths: all conditioned life is suffering, what causes it, what its cessation means, and how cessation is achieved.