The First Discourse
The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (”setting in motion (pavattana) the wheel (cakka) of the law (Dhamma)”) is the first discourse that the Buddha delivered after his enlightenment. I think it is the single most important text in human history. (I realize that’s a pretty strong statement, and I’m not going to defend it here, but if anyone wants to have a cup of coffee with me after class, I’d be happy to give my reasons.)
The Buddha delivered the discourse to the five ascetics with whom he had been traveling and practicing for the several years prior to his enlightenment. Those five had abandoned him about a month earlier when he decided that the extreme asceticism he’d been practicing was not getting him closer to his goal, and he took a little solid food; the monks felt that he was selling out, indulging in sensual pleasures, and they’d walked away. But the Buddha understood that they were good men, advanced on the path, committed to their practice—as he put it, they were men “with little dust on their eyes”. The discourse he delivered to them was dense with meaning; it lays out, in just a dozen or so short paragraphs, the foundational concepts for all the teaching that came later: the concept of “the Middle Way”, “the Four Noble Truths”, and “The Eight-fold Path”.
In my rendering of the sutta, which I will read and which we will discuss in class on Tuesday, I expand the Buddha’s telegraphic delivery a bit, to help a modern audience understand the message a little more clearly. And I’ve changed some of the traditional translations of Pali terms, for reasons that I explain in the footnotes to the rendering.
For those who want to compare the version I’ve composed with more literal translations, there are four very good such translations on the Access to Insight website, from four different translators, each an experienced practitioner and a student of Pali:
The sutta is short enough so that it would take less than half an hour to read each of those, and that would be a worthwhile exercise.
