Buddhism: Four Noble Truths, Pratityasamutpada, Anatta and Nirvana
Four Noble Truths
The Buddha's first sermon sets out dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), samudaya (its arising in taṇhā, craving), nirodha (cessation) and magga (the Eightfold Path). The path's eight limbs are right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration. The truths are diagnostic: suffering has a cause and a practical end.
Pratītyasamutpāda and anattā
Dependent origination means things arise conditioned by others; the twelve links run from ignorance to old age and death. There is no uncaused self. Anattā teaches that the five aggregates-form, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness-are not 'I' or 'mine'. The person is a conventional designation, not a permanent substance. Nirvana is the ending of craving and grasping, not annihilation of a self.
Worked example
If suffering depends on craving, then removing craving removes the condition for suffering. Reasoning: no craving, no clinging; no clinging, no becoming; no becoming, no birth-and-death round. This is not prayer or ritual cleansing but causal therapy. The same pattern explains why anattā follows: what is conditioned and changing cannot be an unchanging master.
Traps
Do not call anattā nihilism or say Buddhism denies the empirical person. Nirvana is not heaven or extinction of a soul. Do not reduce dependent origination to one linear cause; it is a conditioned network. The Eightfold Path is not eight separate stages but a training.