Unit 12 · Close Reading the Suttas

Every sutta opens by saying where it happened and who was there. The first sermon names the deer park at Isipatana, today called Sarnath, near the city of Varanasi. It names the listeners as the group of five monks. The Pali name of the talk is Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the discourse on setting the wheel of the Dhamma in motion.

The sutta appears in the Samyutta Nikaya, at 56.11, in the collection of talks on the truths. A longer version, with the story of the journey to Sarnath, appears in the Vinaya, in the book called the Mahavagga. Rhys Davids translated the sutta in Sacred Books of the East volume 11 in 1881. That English version is now in the public domain.

Scholars date the Buddha’s life to about the fifth century BCE, often c. 480 to c. 400 BCE. Theravada tradition gives earlier dates, placing his death in 544 or 543 BCE. The words were passed down by memory for centuries. They were written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE, as Sri Lankan chronicles report. So the text we read is the sutta as its reciters kept it, not a recording.

The sermon does not begin with the truths. It begins with a warning. Rhys Davids renders the opening this way: there are two extremes which one who has given up the world ought to avoid. The first is a life given to pleasures, which the text calls low and unprofitable. The second is a life given to self-torment, which the text calls painful and unprofitable.

The listeners knew the second extreme well. They had fasted with Gotama for years. The sermon’s first move, then, speaks to their own past. It tells them that the hard path they admired did not lead where they hoped. Readers often point out that the Buddha, as the text presents him, had tried both extremes himself: a palace life and harsh fasting.

Between the two, the sutta says, lies a middle path. It says this path opens the eyes, gives understanding, and leads to peace, insight and nibbana. Buddhists across schools call their way the Middle Way for this reason. The phrase later took on other meanings too, as when Mahayana thinkers spoke of a middle between being and non-being.

Read the sermon aloud and you notice repetition. Phrases return again and again with one word changed. Each truth is stated, then stated again in the same frame. To a silent reader today this can feel slow. To a monk reciting with others, it was a way to keep every word exact.

The suttas also love numbered lists: two extremes, four truths, an eightfold path, three turnings, twelve aspects. Scholars such as Rupert Gethin note that lists work like hooks for memory. A reciter who knows there are eight parts will notice if one is missing. Buddhist teachers today still teach through these lists.

So a close reader asks two questions. What does the passage say? And how does its shape help it survive? The sermon’s repetition is not padding. It is how an oral tradition guarded the text for centuries before it was written. It is also why the sutta still works well when chanted, as monks do at Asalha Puja.

Rhys Davids renders the first truth as the noble truth concerning suffering. The sutta then lists what it means. Birth is suffering. Decay is suffering. Illness and death are suffering. Union with the unpleasant and separation from the pleasant are suffering. Not getting what one wishes is suffering.

The Pali word is dukkha. Many translators now say that suffering is too narrow. Dukkha can also mean stress, unease or unsatisfactoriness. Walpola Rahula argued in 1959 that no single English word covers it. The list in the sutta ranges from great pain, like death, to ordinary frustration, like wanting something and not getting it.

Buddhist teachers stress that this truth is a diagnosis, not a complaint. Many compare the four truths to a doctor’s method: name the illness, its cause, its cure and the treatment. The sutta itself does not use the doctor image. Later commentators and modern teachers do. Readers should keep the text and its later readings apart.

The second truth, in the sutta’s words, concerns the origin of suffering. The Pali word is tanha, literally thirst. Rhys Davids renders it as craving. The text names three kinds: craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and craving for non-existence.

The image of thirst is worth pausing on. Thirst returns after it is satisfied. The sutta describes craving as leading to renewed becoming and delighting now here, now there. Theravada teachers read this as a claim about how karma and rebirth continue. Some modern readers focus instead on how craving shapes a single day.

Notice what the sutta does not name as the cause. It does not blame the world, the body or other people. It points to a pattern of wanting inside experience. Buddhists believe this is why the problem can be addressed: if craving is the cause, then its ending is possible. That idea leads straight to the third truth.

The third truth concerns the cessation of suffering. The sutta describes it as the complete fading away and ending of that very craving, letting it go and being free of it. Buddhists call this state nibbana in Pali, nirvana in Sanskrit. The word suggests a flame going out.

The fourth truth names the path. The sutta lists eight parts: right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right rapture, in Rhys Davids’ wording. Modern translators often render the last as right concentration. Buddhist teachers group the eight into wisdom, ethics and meditation.

The word right translates samma, which can also mean complete or whole. So the path is not a checklist done in order. Teachers describe the eight as supporting one another, like strands in a rope. Here the sermon returns to its start: this Noble Eightfold Path is the middle path it named at the opening.

After naming the four truths, the sutta has the Buddha describe his own knowledge. For each truth, he says, there were three stages. First: this is the truth. Second: this truth is to be done in a certain way. Third: this has been done. Readers call these the three turnings or three phases.

Each truth has its own task. Suffering is to be fully understood. Craving is to be abandoned. Cessation is to be realized. The path is to be developed. So the four truths are not only facts to know. As the sutta frames them, each asks for a different response.

The Buddha, as the text presents him, then says that until this knowledge in twelve aspects was complete, he did not claim full awakening. Once it was, he did. Buddhist commentators read this passage as the heart of the sermon. It shows the truths as a practice, not only a teaching.

At the end of the talk, the sutta turns to the listeners. It says that the eye of truth arose in Kondanna, one of the five. What arose was the insight that whatever has the nature to arise also has the nature to cease. It is a short line, but Buddhists treat it as a turning point.

The Buddha, in the text, exclaims that Kondanna has understood. From this, the text says, Kondanna gained the name Annata Kondanna, Kondanna who knows. Theravada tradition counts him as the first person to enter the path through the Buddha’s teaching. In the Vinaya’s fuller story, he then asks to be ordained, and the sangha begins.

Notice the content of his insight. It is not a new fact about the four truths. It is a general pattern: what begins, ends. Theravada commentators call this the stream entry of the first disciple. Later the other four understand too, over the following days, after more teaching.

The sermon does not end with the five. The text says that earth-dwelling gods raised a cry: the wheel of the Dhamma has been set in motion at Benares, and no one in the world can turn it back. The cry passes up through heaven after heaven, each group of gods repeating it, until it reaches the Brahma world.

The sutta then says the ten-thousand-fold world system shook and a great light appeared. Here the text uses the language of cosmology, the Buddhist picture of many worlds and many kinds of beings. Buddhists have read the passage in several ways. Many traditional readers take it as an account of events. Some modern readers read it as a way of saying the event was cosmic in importance.

A careful student does not need to decide. The task is to describe what the text says and why its tellers included it. The repeating cry uses the same memory technique as the rest of the sutta. It also gives the talk its name: the Dhamma has begun to turn, like a wheel that has started rolling.

Buddhists speak of the Three Jewels or Three Refuges: the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha. Before the sermon, the tradition says, there was a Buddha but no community that followed his teaching. After it, the five became the first monks. So Buddhist teachers often say the Three Jewels were complete for the first time at Sarnath.

This is one reason Buddhists call it the first sermon, even though the tradition reports that the Buddha had spoken with others before. Two merchants, Tapussa and Bhallika, offered him food earlier and took refuge. But they received no teaching of the truths. The sermon at Sarnath is the first teaching of the Dhamma as a path.

For this reason Sarnath became a place of pilgrimage. The emperor Ashoka set up a pillar there in the third century BCE. Its lion capital is now the national emblem of India. The wheel on the Indian flag also recalls the wheel of Dhamma, a sign of how widely the image traveled.

Theravada Buddhists treat the first sermon as a foundation. It is chanted at ordinations and at Asalha Puja. Monks in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar learn it by heart. For Theravada teachers, the four truths and eightfold path are the core of the whole Dhamma.

Many Mahayana traditions honor it too, but some describe it as the first turning of the wheel. Some Mahayana sutras speak of a second turning, the teaching of emptiness, and a third turning, the teaching found in texts such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra. In that view the first sermon is true and needed, but not the last word.

Modern readers add their own emphases. Some present the four truths as practical psychology. Others, such as Thich Nhat Hanh in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (1998), focus on transforming suffering in daily life. Scholars ask how the text grew over time. A careful reader describes each view without ranking them.

Three Pali words carry the sermon’s argument. Dukkha names the problem. Tanha names its cause. Nibbana names its ending. The fourth truth, the path, names how to get from one to the other. Seen this way, the four truths make one chain of reasoning.

Each word is hard to translate. Dukkha can be suffering or unease. Tanha can be craving or thirst. Nibbana can be blowing out, as of a flame, or release. Translators choose, and each choice shapes a reader’s picture. That is why a close reader keeps the Pali word in view beside the English.

Spelling also varies. Pali forms are dukkha, kamma, nibbana and dhamma. Sanskrit forms are duhkha, karma, nirvana and dharma. English books use both. Theravada writers tend to use Pali; many Mahayana writers use Sanskrit. Neither spelling is more correct. They point to the same terms in two languages of Buddhist texts.

The Mahaparinibbana Sutta is the sixteenth discourse in the Digha Nikaya, the Long Discourses. Its name means the great discourse on the final nibbana. Rhys Davids called it the Book of the Great Decease in Sacred Books of the East 11 (1881), and divided it into six chapters with numbered verses.

The sutta follows the Buddha’s last months. He travels from Rajagaha north toward Kusinara, stopping in towns and teaching along the way. He falls ill, recovers, eats a final meal, and dies. Then the text describes the funeral and how the relics were shared. Few suttas follow a story over so many places and weeks.

Scholars think the sutta grew over time. Parts may be very early, and others were likely added as the community developed. Versions survive in Chinese and Sanskrit too, which lets scholars compare. For Buddhists, it is the account of the parinibbana, the final passing of one who has already reached nibbana.

The sutta opens with politics. King Ajatasattu of Magadha plans to attack the Vajjians, a people governed by assemblies. He sends a minister to ask the Buddha’s view. The Buddha, as the text presents him, does not answer directly. He asks Ananda questions about the Vajjians instead.

Do they meet often and in full numbers? Do they meet in harmony and act in harmony? Do they respect their elders and their customs? Do they honor their shrines and protect holy people? As long as they do, the Buddha says, they may be expected to prosper. These are the seven conditions of welfare.

Then he gathers the monks and gives them a parallel list for the sangha. Meet often. Meet and act in harmony. Keep the rules. Respect elders. Readers often note the link: the sutta that ends with the teacher’s death opens with how a group stays whole. The Vinaya-minded tradition read this as guidance for the order after him.

At Beluva the Buddha falls seriously ill. When he recovers, Ananda says he was comforted by the thought that the Buddha would not pass away without leaving instructions for the order. The Buddha’s reply, as the text gives it, is one of the most quoted passages in the sutta.

He says he has taught without any difference between inner and outer teachings. The teacher, he says, has no closed fist that keeps some things back. He adds that he does not think of himself as the one who leads the order or that the order depends on him. So why would he leave special instructions?

Readers have taken this in several ways. Theravada teachers see it as a sign that the Pali teachings are complete and open. Some Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, which value later or esoteric teachings, read the passage in its context: the Buddha held back nothing his listeners needed. Scholars note it as a clue to early debates over authority.

The passage right after the closed fist gives the sutta’s best-known line. The Buddha, as the text presents him, says he is old and his body is worn like a cart held together with straps. Therefore, he tells Ananda, be lamps unto yourselves. Be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp and as a refuge.

The Pali word dipa can mean lamp or island. Rhys Davids chose lamp. Many modern translators, such as Maurice Walshe (1987), choose island: be an island to yourselves, a safe place in a flood. Both readings make sense. A lamp gives light to see by. An island gives safe ground. The translator’s choice colors the verse.

The line does not tell Ananda to rely on himself instead of the teaching. It pairs self and Dhamma: take the self as refuge, and the Dhamma as refuge, nothing else. The sutta then explains how: through mindfulness of body, feelings, mind and mental objects. Teachers across schools quote this passage when students fear losing a teacher.

Ananda is the most human figure in the sutta. He was the Buddha’s cousin and his attendant for about twenty-five years, tradition says. At Kusinara, the text says, he went into a building, leaned against the door frame and wept. He had not yet reached awakening, and his teacher was leaving.

The Buddha sends for him. As the text gives it, he tells Ananda not to weep. Has he not taught that we must part from all that is dear? Whatever is born must end. Then he praises Ananda to the monks. For years, he says, Ananda served him with kind acts, kind words and kind thoughts. He tells Ananda to keep striving, and he will soon be free.

Buddhist readers draw two lessons. The teaching on impermanence holds even for the Buddha. And grief is met with kindness, not scolding. Tradition adds that Ananda reached awakening on the night before the First Council, where he recited the suttas from memory. So the one who wept becomes the one who keeps the teaching.

Near the end, the Buddha anticipates a worry. Some may think, he says, that the word of the Teacher is ended and they have no teacher. They should not think so. The truths and the rules he has taught, the Dhamma and the Vinaya, will be their teacher after he is gone.

This answers the question the sutta has asked from its start: who leads when the leader is gone? The answer is not a successor. It is a body of teaching and a code of discipline. Buddhist communities read this as the reason the texts matter so much. The recited words take the place of the living teacher.

Different traditions built on this in different ways. Theravada monasteries center the Vinaya and the suttas. Many Mahayana and Vajrayana communities also stress living teachers and lineages, while honoring the texts. Zen speaks of transmission from teacher to student. Each claims continuity with the Buddha, but they locate it in different places.

At Pava, a smith named Cunda invites the Buddha and the monks for a meal. The text says Cunda served a dish called sukara-maddava. The Buddha asks that it be served only to him and that the rest be buried. After eating, he falls ill with severe pain, but he continues on toward Kusinara.

The dish’s name is uncertain. It may mean something like pig’s delight. Rhys Davids translated it as dried boar’s flesh, a common reading. Other readers, ancient and modern, think it was a kind of mushroom or a food that pigs like. The Pali commentaries already record different views. Scholars today still do not agree.

What the sutta stresses is Cunda. The Buddha tells Ananda that some may blame Cunda. He should be told instead that his gift carries great merit. Two meals, the text says, are equal in fruit: the one before the Buddha’s awakening and the one before his final passing. Readers see this as care for a layperson’s feelings, even at the end.

After asking three times for questions and hearing none, the Buddha speaks his last words. Rhys Davids renders them: decay is inherent in all component things; work out your salvation with diligence. In Pali, the words are short: vayadhamma sankhara, appamadena sampadetha.

Sankhara means things that are put together, formed or conditioned. Rhys Davids calls them component things. The claim is that anything made of parts will come apart. Appamada means heedfulness or diligence, not being careless. The Dhammapada’s second chapter praises the same quality. Salvation is Rhys Davids’ word; many modern translators prefer strive or bring about the goal.

Readers note how the last words gather the sutta’s themes. The body is like the worn cart. The dear must part. Even the Buddha’s life is conditioned and ends. Yet the response is not despair. It is effort. The sutta then describes him entering deep meditative states and passing away, as its tellers remember.

The last chapter describes the funeral. The Mallas of Kusinara honor the body for six days with music, garlands and perfume, the text says. The body is cremated. Then kings and clans from other regions send messengers. Each claims a share of the remains, and a dispute threatens.

A brahmin named Dona calms them. The Buddha taught patience, he reminds them. It would not be right to fight over his remains. He divides the relics into eight equal portions. Each group takes one home and builds a stupa, a mound for relics. Dona keeps the vessel, and a late arrival takes the ashes of the fire.

The sutta says the Buddha had earlier told Ananda that his remains should be treated like those of a universal king, with a stupa at a crossroads. Buddhists across Asia have built stupas ever since. Archaeologists at Piprahwa, in India, found a relic vessel in 1898 with an inscription that many scholars read as naming the Buddha’s relics.

In chapter 5, Ananda worries that after the Buddha’s death the monks will no longer see him. The Buddha, as the text presents him, names four places worth visiting with reverence. Where the Buddha was born. Where he awakened. Where he set the wheel of the Dhamma in motion. Where he passed away.

Buddhists identify these as Lumbini, in today’s Nepal; Bodh Gaya; Sarnath; and Kusinara, today Kushinagar. All four are still pilgrimage sites. Pilgrims from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan, Tibet and the United States visit them. The emperor Ashoka marked Lumbini with a pillar in the third century BCE, and its inscription names the place as the Buddha’s birthplace.

The passage shows the sutta thinking ahead. The teacher will be gone, but places can hold his memory. The text says those who die while on such a journey with a devoted heart will be reborn in a heavenly world. Buddhists read the four places as reminders; the practices at them are described in guides to Buddhist pilgrimage.