The tradition dates the beginning of Buddhism not to the awakening but to the moment, some weeks later, when the Buddha said it out loud. The occasion was a talk given to five former companions in a deer park at Isipatana, now Sarnath, a few kilometres north-east of Varanasi. The text is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Discourse on Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion, and it is recited in Theravada monasteries to this day.

It is short — a few pages — and almost every element of it became structural for everything that followed.

Getting there #

After deciding to teach, the Buddha walks the roughly 250 kilometres from Bodh Gaya to Isipatana. On the road he meets an ascetic named Upaka, who notices that his faculties are clear and his complexion bright, and asks who his teacher is. The Buddha replies that he has no teacher, that he is the fully awakened one, and that he is going to Varanasi to beat the drum of the deathless. Upaka says “may it be so, friend,” shakes his head, and takes a side road.

The tradition has kept this encounter, in which the first person to hear the Buddha’s claim walks away from it. It sets an expectation that the discourse will then have to work against.

The five companions #

The five — Kondanna, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahanama, and Assaji — had practised austerities with him and left when he accepted food. Seeing him approach, they agree among themselves not to greet him respectfully, since he has “reverted to luxury.” They break the agreement as he arrives: one takes his bowl and robe, another prepares a seat, another fetches water for his feet. They still address him as “friend,” an equal’s term, and he corrects them — not from vanity but because the claim he is about to make requires a different footing.

He tells them he has found the deathless. They are sceptical, on the reasonable ground that he had not achieved it with the severe practice and is unlikely to have achieved it after giving up. He asks whether he has ever spoken to them like this before. They concede he has not, and listen.

The middle way #

The discourse opens by ruling out two extremes, which it calls the two dead ends that one who has gone forth should not pursue:

  • Devotion to sensual pleasure — low, vulgar, the way of ordinary people, ignoble, unprofitable.
  • Devotion to self-mortification — painful, ignoble, unprofitable.

Avoiding both, the Buddha says, the Tathagata has realised the middle way, which produces vision and knowledge and leads to peace, direct knowledge, awakening, and nibbana. That middle way is the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

The rhetorical order matters. The audience are ascetics; the extreme they need ruled out is the second, and the discourse rules out the first in the same breath so that the rejection of austerity cannot be mistaken for a return to indulgence. The six years of searching are the evidence, and everyone present had witnessed them.

“Middle way” is one of the most over-extended phrases in the modern vocabulary about Buddhism, where it often comes to mean moderation in general. In the discourse it is specific: it names a particular path between two particular soteriological programmes, both of which were live options in fifth-century BCE India.

The Four Noble Truths #

The discourse then states the Four Noble Truths — described here as ariya-sacca, which is better rendered “truths of the noble ones” than “noble truths.”

  • Dukkha. Birth, ageing, sickness, death, union with what is disliked, separation from what is liked, not getting what one wants; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are dukkha.
  • The origin of dukkha. The craving (tanha) that leads to renewed becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there — craving for sensual pleasure, for becoming, for non-becoming.
  • The cessation of dukkha. The remainderless fading and cessation of that same craving; its giving up, relinquishing, release, non-attachment.
  • The way leading to cessation. The Noble Eightfold Path.

The formulation is famously terse and has generated two and a half millennia of commentary. Two points are frequently missed. First, the first truth’s summary clause is not “life is suffering” but that the five aggregates subject to clinging are dukkha — the qualifier is doing real work. Second, the third truth is stated as the cessation of craving, not as a description of nirvana as a positive state; the tradition’s characteristic reticence starts here.

The three turnings and twelve aspects #

The discourse then does something structurally distinctive. Each truth is presented three times, giving twelve “aspects” in all:

  1. The truth itself — “this is the noble truth of dukkha.”
  2. The task — “this noble truth of dukkha is to be fully understood.” Dukkha is to be understood; its origin is to be abandoned; its cessation is to be realised; the path is to be developed.
  3. The accomplishment — “this noble truth of dukkha has been fully understood.”

Until his knowledge and vision were purified in all twelve of these aspects, the Buddha says, he did not claim to have awakened. Once they were, he did.

This is the most practically important part of the discourse and the part most often dropped from summaries. It converts four propositions into four jobs. The Four Noble Truths, on this presentation, are not a creed to be assented to; they are a specification of work to be done, with a test for completion. The medical analogy the later tradition made famous — diagnosis, cause, prognosis, treatment — follows the same logic.

Kondanna understands #

As the discourse ends, “the dust-free, stainless vision of the Dhamma” arises in Kondanna: whatever is subject to arising is subject to cessation. This is the standard canonical formula for stream-entry, the first of the stages of awakening.

The Buddha exclaims “Kondanna has understood, Kondanna has understood,” and Kondanna is thereafter Annasi Kondanna — Kondanna Who Understood. He is the same Kondanna who, as the youngest of the brahmin seers at the naming ceremony, had predicted unambiguously that the child would awaken.

The text then has the news travel upward through the ranks of gods, realm by realm, until the ten-thousandfold world-system shakes. The earth-deities call out to the deities of the Four Great Kings, who call to the deities of the Thirty-Three, and so on. The sangha now exists, and with it the Three Jewels — Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha — are complete.

The other four attain the same vision over the following days, and shortly afterwards a second discourse, the Anattalakkhana Sutta on the characteristic of non-self, brings all five to full liberation.

Why “turning the wheel” #

The image of setting in motion a wheel (cakka) of Dhamma borrows directly from the vocabulary of universal kingship. A cakravartin, a wheel-turning monarch, rules by rolling his wheel of authority across the world without violence. The prophecy at the Buddha’s birth had offered exactly this as the alternative to awakening.

The discourse takes the rejected option’s central symbol and applies it to the accepted one. The wheel became the emblem of Buddhism — eight spokes for the eight path factors — and it is the wheel on Ashoka’s pillar capital at Sarnath, which is now on the flag of India.

The later Mahayana extended the image into a periodisation: three turnings of the wheel, with the first being this discourse, the second the Perfection of Wisdom teaching of emptiness, and the third the Yogacara and buddha-nature material. The scheme is a doctrinal claim rather than a historical one, and Theravada does not accept it.

Sarnath today #

Isipatana is Sarnath, on the northern edge of Varanasi. The Dhamekh Stupa, a massive cylindrical structure whose present form dates to around 500 CE, marks the traditional spot. Ashoka built here; the remains of his pillar, and the lion capital from it, survive, the capital now in the Sarnath Museum. It is one of the four great pilgrimage sites the Buddha himself is said to have recommended.

Common questions #

Is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta the Buddha’s actual first teaching? It is the tradition’s unanimous claim, and the discourse is clearly very old. Whether it records a specific occasion or is an early summary given narrative setting is not determinable. Its content is generally accepted as belonging to the earliest stratum.

Why five listeners? Because these were the companions from the ascetic period, and the narrative needs them: the people best positioned to know that the austerities had failed are the people who watched them fail.

What does “noble” mean here? Ariya in this context means belonging to or characteristic of the noble ones — those who have attained at least stream-entry. The truths are “noble” because they are the truths as the awakened see them, not because they are morally elevated. The word had a social sense in Indian usage that the Buddhist texts repeatedly redefine in ethical and soteriological terms.

Does the sutta mention nirvana? It names nibbana as what the middle way leads to, and defines the third truth as the cessation of craving, but it does not describe the state. That reticence is characteristic.

Sources & further reading #

Bhikkhu Bodhi (trans.), The Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom, 2000), SN 56:11 — the standard English translation of the discourse, with the commentarial notes. Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering (Buddhist Publication Society, 1984) — the best short exposition of the path as the fourth truth. Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism (Oxford, 1998), ch. 3 — on the three turnings and twelve aspects. K. R. Norman, “The Four Noble Truths,” in Collected Papers vol. 2 (Pali Text Society, 1990) — the philological study of the formula and its grammar. Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2013), pp. 23–25, 50–60.