According to the Pali canon, Siddhartha Gautama delivered his first teaching as an awakened Buddha at the Deer Park in Sarnath, near Varanasi, to the five ascetics who had practiced austerities alongside him before he abandoned that path for a middle way between indulgence and self-mortification. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma, sets out the four truths in the form of a physician's diagnosis: an illness, its cause, the fact that it can be cured, and the treatment.
The first truth names dukkha, commonly translated suffering but better read as unsatisfactoriness or unreliability, as woven into birth, aging, illness, death, contact with what is unwanted, separation from what is loved, and not getting what one wants. The second truth locates the cause in tanha, craving, itself rooted in avijja, ignorance of the true nature of experience. The third truth states that because the cause is conditioned, dukkha can cease when craving ceases, a cessation called nirvana. The fourth truth supplies the method, the Noble Eightfold Path, grouped into the trainings of wisdom, ethical conduct and mental discipline.
The sermon closes with the report that one of the five ascetics, Kondanna, understood on hearing it and became the first person after the Buddha himself to see the Dharma, traditionally marking the beginning of the Buddhist monastic community, the sangha.