The First Sermon at Sarnath

Following his enlightenment, the Buddha is said to have traveled to the Deer Park at Sarnath, near the city of Varanasi, where he sought out five ascetics who had previously practiced severe self-mortification alongside him before he abandoned that path in favor of what he called the Middle Way. According to the Pali Canon, the ascetics initially resolved not to show him respect, believing he had abandoned serious spiritual effort, but were persuaded by his bearing and manner to listen, and he delivered to them the teaching later known as the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dhamma.

The sermon set out the Four Noble Truths, the existence of suffering, its cause in craving, the possibility of its cessation, and the eightfold path leading to that cessation, alongside the Middle Way between the self-indulgence he had rejected as a prince and the extreme asceticism he had rejected as a wandering seeker. One of the five ascetics, Kondanna, is described as immediately understanding the teaching and attaining a first level of realization, prompting the Buddha to declare that Kondanna had understood.

The other four ascetics followed over the succeeding days, and all five were ordained as the first monks of the Buddhist monastic community, the Sangha, an event that, alongside the Buddha's own enlightenment and his teaching, the Dhamma, completed what Buddhist tradition calls the Three Jewels, the foundational objects of refuge in Buddhist practice.

The First Sermon is remembered in Buddhist tradition as the moment the Buddha's private realization became a public teaching capable of guiding others, distinguishing his enlightenment, a personal attainment, from this subsequent act of instruction, without which, Buddhist tradition holds, the Dhamma would have remained known to only one person and Buddhism as an organized tradition would never have developed.

The eight-spoked Dharmachakra, the Wheel of Dharma, one of the most widely recognized symbols across the whole of Buddhism, takes its name and its central meaning directly from this event, the setting in motion of the wheel of teaching, and the symbol appears across Buddhist art, architecture and institutional identity from ancient stone carvings to the flag of modern India, whose central emblem draws on the same image.

Sarnath developed over subsequent centuries into one of the four principal Buddhist pilgrimage sites, alongside Lumbini, Bodh Gaya and Kushinagar, marking respectively the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, first teaching and death, and archaeological excavation at the site has uncovered substantial remains of ancient monasteries and stupas reflecting its sustained importance to Buddhist practice across many centuries following the event the site commemorates.