The First Sermon: Turning the Wheel of Dharma

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Some weeks after his awakening, the Buddha gave his first teaching — the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, “Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion” (SN 56.11) — to five ascetics in the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi. In it he laid out the Middle Way and the Four Noble Truths, the foundation of everything Buddhism would become. The moment is remembered as the “first turning of the wheel of Dharma” — and it gave the world not only a teaching but a community.

After the Awakening: To Teach or Not?

The first sermon almost did not happen. According to the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta (MN 26), the newly awakened Buddha, reflecting on how subtle and “against the stream” his realisation was, at first inclined not to teach at all — fearing that a world “delighting in attachment” would not understand. Only after long reflection (the tradition adds the entreaty of the god Brahmā Sahampati) did compassion win out: there were, he saw, “those with little dust in their eyes” who could awaken if only they heard.

The question then was whom to teach first. His old meditation teachers had died. So his thoughts turned to five companions who had practised austerities with him — and he set out to find them.

The Five Ascetics at Sarnath

The five — Koṇḍañña, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahānāma, and Assaji (the pañcavaggiya) — had once been his fellow seekers in extreme self-mortification. When Siddhartha had abandoned that path for the Middle Way, accepting food and care for the body, they had concluded he had gone soft and left him in disgust.

Now, seeing him approach at the Deer Park in Isipatana (modern Sarnath), they resolved to ignore him — but something in his bearing changed their minds, and they sat to listen. What they heard would become the most consequential talk in Buddhist history.

The Heart of the Sermon

The teaching opened by marking out a path between two dead ends — a theme that gives Buddhism its characteristic balance:

“There are these two extremes that are not to be indulged in by one who has gone forth. Which two? That which is devoted to sensual pleasure… base, vulgar, common… and that which is devoted to self-affliction: painful, ignoble, unprofitable. Avoiding both of these extremes, the Middle Way realised by the Tathāgata… leads to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening.” (SN 56.11)

That Middle Way, he explained, is the Noble Eightfold Path. And then he set out the framework the path serves — the Four Noble Truths: the truth of suffering (dukkha), its origin in craving, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation. (For the whole architecture of the teaching, see the core teachings of Buddhism.) In a single discourse, the essential shape of Buddhism was laid down.

The Sangha Is Born

As the Buddha spoke, something happened in Koṇḍañña: he grasped the teaching directly, gaining what the texts call the “Dhamma-eye” — the insight that “whatever is subject to arising is subject to cessation.” The Buddha, recognising it, exclaimed, “Koṇḍañña knows! Koṇḍañña knows!” — and from that the elder took the name Aññā Koṇḍañña, “Koṇḍañña who understands.”

With that, Koṇḍañña asked to be ordained and became the first member of the Sangha, the community of practitioners. The other four soon followed. This is why the first sermon matters so enormously: it completed the Three Jewels. There had been a Buddha and a Dharma; now, for the first time, there was a Sangha — and so the full foundation of Buddhism as a living tradition stood in place.

”Turning the Wheel”

The discourse takes its name from its closing image: the Buddha had “set in motion the wheel of Dhamma” (dhammacakka), and the text says the earth-devas took up the cry that “the unexcelled wheel of Dhamma has been set in motion… not to be stopped by anyone.” The metaphor is of a great wheel released to roll forward through time — the teaching launched into history.

That image became Buddhism’s central emblem: the eight-spoked Dharma wheel, its spokes the eight factors of the path, marking both this first sermon and the way it opened. To this day, the event is honoured as the first turning of the wheel — the beginning of the Buddha’s forty-five years of teaching.

Why It Still Matters

Everything in Buddhism traces back to this afternoon in a deer park. The Middle Way, the Four Noble Truths, the founding of the community — the whole tradition is, in a sense, the unfolding of what was said there. When Buddhists speak of the Dharma being “set in motion,” they mean that a single human being, having found a way through suffering, chose to turn back and show it to others — and has been doing so, through his teaching, ever since.

For what led here, read the Buddha’s enlightenment; for the framework first taught here, the Four Noble Truths; and for the whole life, who was the Buddha? Buddhists honour this first sermon each year as Dhamma Day (Āsāḷha Pūjā).