Sarnath

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A traveler walking northeast out of Varanasi, away from the smoke of the burning ghats and the press of the river, comes after a few miles to a quieter ground: low brick foundations laid out in the grass, a great drum of stone rising above the trees, and the stumps of pillars that once held up monks’ cells. The place is called Sarnath now, a name worn down over centuries from Saranganatha, “Lord of the Deer.” The older texts know it differently. In Pali it is Isipatana, the place “where the sages alighted”; in Sanskrit, Rishipattana; and the wood itself is the Migadaya, the Mrigadava — the deer park, a royal sanctuary where the killing of animals was forbidden. Into that park, in the tradition’s reckoning, a wanderer walked one evening to find five men who would not look at him, and by morning had set something turning that has not stopped.

The deer park at Isipatana

The site’s sanctity is older than its ruins, and older than the man who made it famous. A deer park outside Benares was already a fixed feature of the spiritual landscape of the Gangetic plain — a place where renunciants gathered, where the rules of the city loosened, where one could sit. The Buddhist scriptures fold this geography into the architecture of the awakening itself. After his enlightenment beneath the tree at Bodh Gaya, the newly awakened Gautama Buddha is said to have hesitated, doubting whether what he had understood could be taught at all. When he resolved to teach, he asked himself who might first grasp it, and his mind went to the five ascetics — Kondanna, Bhaddiya, Vappa, Mahanama, and Assaji — who had practiced austerities alongside him and then abandoned him in disgust when he took food and gave up self-mortification. They were at Isipatana. He walked there, the texts say, across the breadth of the country, from the Bodhi tree near Gaya to the deer park near Benares, a journey of some days.

What follows is the founding scene of the tradition’s institutional life. The five, seeing him approach, agree among themselves to give him no respect — he is the backslider who broke his vows. But as he comes near, their resolve fails; they rise, take his bowl, prepare his seat. And there, in the deer park, he delivers the discourse the tradition calls the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the “setting in motion of the wheel of the Dharma.” The nineteenth-century translator T. W. Rhys Davids, rendering the Pali into English for the Sacred Books of the East, argued that the title’s familiar gloss — “the turning of the wheel of the law” — missed the political force of the metaphor. The phrase, he wrote, named “the inauguration, or foundation, of the Kingdom of Righteousness,” the wheel being the chakra of a universal monarch whose dominion now belonged to the Dharma rather than to any army.

The sermon itself, as the Pali preserves it, opens by rejecting two extremes — the pursuit of sense pleasure and the pursuit of self-torment — and naming a middle way between them. This framing carries a particular charge in the deer-park setting, for the five men hearing it were precisely specialists in the second extreme; they had broken with the Buddha because he abandoned austerity, and the discourse meets them by declaring that the punishment of the body is no nearer to liberation than indulgence is. From that opening it sets out the Four Noble Truths: that existence as ordinarily lived is shot through with unsatisfactoriness; that this arises from craving; that it can cease; and that a path leads to its cessation, the eightfold path of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Each of these truths, the discourse insists, the Buddha came to know “in this triple order, in this twelvefold manner” — and only when that knowledge and insight were wholly clear did he become certain he had attained the wisdom unsurpassed in the heavens or on earth. The architecture is deliberately processual: a thing seen, a thing to be done, a thing done.

When the discourse ended, the texts record, the ascetic Kondanna saw it — “whatsoever is subject to arising is subject to cessation” — and the Buddha, recognizing the breakthrough, exclaimed “Annasi Kondanna,” Kondanna has understood. The tradition adds that the gods of the earth took up the cry and passed it upward through the heavens, so that the proclamation of the Dharma rang through the whole cosmos in an instant, and the ten-thousandfold world-system trembled. Whatever a reader makes of that cosmic register, its narrative function is plain: it marks the moment as the largest event in the order of things. With Kondanna’s recognition the teaching had passed, for the first time, from the one who awakened to another. The five became the first monks. The sangha, the community that would carry the Dharma forward, was born in the deer park, and with it the threefold refuge of later devotion — Buddha, Dharma, sangha — acquired its third and final term.

Where the wheel was set rolling

For the tradition, Sarnath is therefore not merely a place the Buddha visited but the place where the teaching became transmissible — where it stopped being one man’s private realization and entered the world as something that could be heard, grasped, and passed on. The early lists of the Buddha’s life fix four sites as the great places of pilgrimage: Lumbini, where he was born; Bodh Gaya, where he awoke; Sarnath, where he first taught; and Kushinagar, where he died and entered final nirvana. Sarnath holds the second of these, the turning point between the private event of enlightenment and the public history of a religion. Bodh Gaya is the site of the breakthrough; Sarnath is where it begins to belong to others.

The Dhamek Stupa, a solid cylinder of stone and brick raised in the Gupta period over the spot tradition assigns to the first sermon. — Photograph by GONG JIE (Neo954), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The most imposing survivor of that long sanctity is the Dhamek Stupa, a solid drum of brick faced in carved stone, rising roughly forty-three meters above the plain. Its lower courses carry delicate floral and geometric reliefs in the manner of the Gupta age, and scholars date the structure in its present form to about 500 CE, though a Mauryan core beneath it may go back to Ashoka in the third century BCE. The tradition marks it as the exact spot of the first sermon. A short distance away lie the excavated foundations of the Dharmarajika Stupa, one of the original group attributed to the emperor Ashoka, who is said to have opened the older relic mounds and redistributed the Buddha’s remains among the new stupas of his empire. The Dharmarajika at Sarnath was demolished for its bricks in the late eighteenth century, before archaeology arrived to protect it; only its circular footing remains.

The third great Maurya monument is the pillar. Ashoka, who ruled in the third century BCE and made Buddhism something like a state cult across much of the subcontinent, raised a polished sandstone column at Sarnath inscribed with an edict warning monks and nuns against schism in the sangha. The shaft was broken in antiquity, but its crowning sculpture survived underground: four lions seated back to back, carved from a single block of sandstone, standing on an abacus ringed with a frieze of a lion, an elephant, a bull, and a horse, each pair separated by a wheel. This is the Lion Capital of Ashoka. It is among the supreme achievements of early Indian stone carving — the lions taut and stylized, the surface burnished to the glassy “Mauryan polish” that later ages could not reproduce.

The Lion Capital of Ashoka, carved in the third century BCE and excavated at Sarnath in 1904–05, now housed in the Sarnath Museum. — Photograph by Apurv013, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0, public domain)

Ruin and rediscovery

Around the great monuments a monastic settlement grew and persisted for more than a thousand years. Through the Gupta period and after, Sarnath was a working center of Buddhist learning — monasteries, shrines, image-houses, and workshops whose sculptors produced some of the most refined Buddha figures in all of Indian art. The Sarnath school of the fifth and sixth centuries gave the iconography of the awakened one one of its enduring forms: the seated Buddha, hands raised in the gesture of teaching, the dharmachakra mudra, with smooth unornamented robes that seem to cling wet to the body, a halo carved in tracery behind the head, and below the throne a small wheel flanked by deer — a compact emblem of the very event the place commemorates, the wheel of the Dharma set turning in the deer park. These images traveled; the type was copied across Asia for centuries.

Pilgrims came from far to see the ground itself. The Chinese monk Faxian passed through in the early fifth century, and two hundred years later Xuanzang left a fuller description. He recorded a great monastic enclosure of some fifteen hundred monks, ranged shrines and image-halls, a towering stupa near a hundred feet high, and beside it Ashoka’s pillar, which he found “glistening and smooth as ice,” bright as a mirror — the Mauryan polish still intact a thousand years on. His report, recovered and translated in the nineteenth century, would become one of the chief guides by which archaeologists relocated the lost Buddhist sites of India, Sarnath among them.

That long life ended in violence. In 1194, in the campaigns that broke the older kingdoms of the Gangetic plain, the armies associated with Qutb al-Din Aibak sacked the region; Sarnath’s monasteries were plundered and burned, its monks killed or scattered. Later medieval centuries saw the site quarried for building material and gradually forgotten, its mounds taken for ordinary hills. The most telling act of destruction came late: in 1794 a local official named Jagat Singh, the diwan of the raja of Benares, dismantled a stupa at the heart of the site for bricks to build a market, and in the process workers turned up a stone box holding human bone and pearls. The relics, by the custom of the day, were committed to the Ganges. The episode is grimly emblematic — the spot where the Buddha’s followers had been remembered for a millennium broken open for masonry.

The Lion Capital photographed around 1905 by Madho Prasad, soon after F. O. Oertel’s team uncovered it. — Madho Prasad, c.1905, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

It was that discovery, paradoxically, that began the recovery. Word of the relics and ruins drew the attention of antiquarians, and in the early decades of the nineteenth century the British soldier-archaeologist Alexander Cunningham — later the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India — dug into the mounds, opening the Dhamek Stupa and cataloguing the broken sculpture. Excavation continued in fits across the century. The decisive season came in 1904–05, when F. O. Oertel’s team, clearing the ground around the Ashokan column, lifted from the earth the four-lion capital that had lain buried since the pillar fell. A site museum, the first purpose-built museum of the Archaeological Survey, was raised at Sarnath in 1910 to hold what the diggers found, and the capital remains its centerpiece.

The lions of the republic

The capital’s afterlife is the strangest turn in Sarnath’s long story. A piece of Buddhist pillar-sculpture, made to proclaim a Maurya emperor’s devotion and buried for the better part of a millennium, became in the twentieth century the emblem of a modern secular state. When India approached independence, its leaders sought symbols that reached behind the colonial period to the subcontinent’s own deep past, and they found them at Sarnath. In July 1947 the wheel from the abacus of the Lion Capital — the Ashoka Chakra, the wheel of the Dharma — was set at the center of the new national flag, replacing the spinning wheel of the independence movement. The Constituent Assembly adopted the flag in August 1947. The capital itself, shorn of its lotus base and shown so that three of its four lions are visible, was adopted as the State Emblem of India when the republic came into being in 1950. The motto beneath it, Satyameva Jayate — “Truth alone triumphs” — is drawn not from Buddhism but from the Upanishads, a layering of traditions characteristic of the new nation. The wheel the Buddha was said to have set rolling in the deer park now turns on every Indian passport, coin, and government seal.

The site’s other revival was explicitly religious. In the late nineteenth century the Sri Lankan reformer Anagarika Dharmapala, stirred by the neglect he found at the Buddhist holy places, founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 to restore them and to bring Buddhism back to the land of its birth, where it had all but vanished. Sarnath became one of the society’s chief projects. Dharmapala took up the building of a new temple beside the ancient ruins in 1926, and the Mulagandhakuti Vihara — its name recalling the Mulagandhakuti, the “fragrant hut” said to have been the Buddha’s own dwelling at Sarnath — was opened on the eleventh of November, 1931. Its interior carries frescoes of the Buddha’s life by the Japanese painter Kosetsu Nosu, and a casket of relics recovered from older sites was enshrined within. Dharmapala himself, who had spent his life as a celibate lay devotee, received full ordination as a monk at Sarnath that same year, a few months before his death.

So the deer park has been three things in succession. It was a sanctuary where killing was forbidden and sages gathered; it became, in the tradition’s telling, the cradle of the teaching and the order, marked by Ashoka’s stupas and his lion-crowned pillar; and after a long silence it was unearthed, its broken sculpture carried into a museum and its central wheel carried onto a flag. The five ascetics who would not look at the approaching wanderer have been remembered for twenty-five centuries; the lions that watched over his memory now look out from the seal of a nation that did not exist when they were carved.

→ In the library: Rhys Davids, Buddhist Suttas — The Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness (Dhamma-cakka-ppavattana Sutta)

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