Suffering (dukkha) is diagnosed in four structured moves: the fact of dukkha, its origin in craving (tanha), its cessation, and the path leading there. The structure mirrors a physician identifying a disease, its cause, its curability, and its treatment, so the first truth is a description of a condition rather than a verdict that life is misery.
Dukkha is not merely pain but spans ordinary suffering, the suffering produced by change (even pleasant states end), and suffering as conditioned states (the instability inherent in all compounded things). Translating it only as 'suffering' narrows a term that names imperfection and impermanence across pleasant and unpleasant experience alike.
The doctrine of anatta holds there is no unchanging soul or self; what we call a being is a combination of five constantly changing aggregates (matter, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness). Consciousness does not persist as an identity but arises moment to moment dependent on conditions, so the sense of a continuous 'I' is a construction, not a located entity.
The origin of dukkha is tanha: thirst for sensual pleasure, for existence, and for non-existence. The mechanism is that this craving produces continued becoming and clinging, so dissatisfaction is driven not by external conditions themselves but by the grasping response to them.
The teaching is presented as something to be tested and seen for oneself (ehipassika) rather than accepted on authority, faith, or scripture. Belief without understanding is treated as valueless, so even the teacher's words are to be examined like gold tested by fire before acceptance.
A man shot with a poisoned arrow who refuses treatment until he learns who shot it, their caste, the bow's make, and the arrow's feathers will die before his questions are answered. The point is that metaphysical speculation (whether the universe is eternal, whether the self survives death) is irrelevant to the urgent practical task of ending suffering now.