After the awakening at Bodh Gaya, Siddhartha Gautama walked northeast for several weeks and arrived at a deer park outside Varanasi — a site called Isipatana in the Pali texts, which translates with some precision as the place where the seers landed. Five monks were waiting there, not intentionally but as a consequence of geography: they had settled near Varanasi after leaving Siddhartha some months earlier, deciding he had lost his discipline. He had not lost it. He had changed his method.

What he said to them in the deer park is called the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta — the discourse on the setting in motion of the wheel of the Dhamma. It is the first teaching. In it he described the middle way between extreme asceticism and indulgence, laid out the Four Noble Truths in sequence, and articulated the Eightfold Path as the means of practice. This was approximately 528 BCE. The five monks became the first sangha. The wheel, as both symbol and concept, has not stopped since.

The site today is called Sarnath. It is ten kilometres from the centre of Varanasi — past the burning ghats, past the market lanes, into a quieter neighbourhood where the traffic slows and the walls go unpainted. The archaeological park contains the Dhamek Stupa, 28 metres tall, built in the fifth century CE, its stone carvings still legible after fifteen hundred years. The stump of the Ashokan pillar stands nearby, separated now from its capital, which is held in the Sarnath Museum.