The Third Noble Truth is about the cessation of dukkha (unease, stress, suffering). In his first sermon the Buddha said, "And this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha: the remainderless fading and cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, and letting go of that very craving."
I found a poem by Phra Ajaan Mun Bhuridatta Mahathera (1870-1949) called "The Ballad of Liberation from the Khandhas [Skandhas]" which contains these lines --
The crucial thing: the ending of desire.
Labels stay in their own sphere and don't intrude.
The mind, unenthralled with anything, stops its struggling.
This is a restatement of the Third Noble Truth, seems to me. I am interpreting "labels" as "mind objects," if that makes it clearer.
The last line reminds me of a famous early Zen text, the Hsin Hsin Ming. A bit:
With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing.
All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power.
The question is, of course, how do we do this? And that's answered in the Fourth Noble Truth.
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