The Four Noble Truths are the framework at the center of Buddhism, a four-part analysis of why beings suffer and how they might not: that ordinary existence is pervaded by dukkha; that dukkha arises from craving; that craving, and so the suffering it feeds, can be brought to an end; and that a practical discipline, the Noble Eightfold Path, leads to that end. They are less a creed to be believed than a sequence to be worked through, and they remained the common inheritance of every school that later divided Buddhism.
Everything turns on the word placed first: dukkha. Reach for the usual English, suffering, and the whole teaching hardens into a verdict that life is pain. Yet dukkha points less at outright agony than at a restlessness threaded through everything, the faint ache that even happiness carries because it will not last. Get the word wrong and Buddhism sounds like despair. Get it right and the opening move becomes a claim about ordinary discontent, one that turns, against expectation, toward a way out.