I heard this story on a podcast once; I don’t remember which one, and I’m not sure that I have the details exact, but this is the story as I remember it.

A number of years ago, a young PhD candidate in England had written her dissertation about the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. She amassed a body of philological evidence to prove that no one who had lived in Northern India in the 5th Century BCE could have composed that text. Her dissertation caused something of a stir in Buddhist scholarly circles, and a reporter, getting wind of the foofaraw, called a very famous Thai monk to break the news. He told him, basically, that the man Gotama Siddhatha, whom we know as the Buddha, could not have delivered the discourse on which all Buddhism is founded. The monk just chuckled. “Well,” he responded, “whoever delivered that discourse, that was the Buddha.”

In fact, there’s no longer much doubt among those who study the history of early Buddhism that the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta is, in fact, the work of the Buddha. While the form in which we have it almost certainly is not the exact form in which it was first delivered, and while that first delivery might very well have taken place over more than one teaching session, still, the discourse that we’ve received is probably very close to the form in which the Buddhist sangha heard it during the Buddha’s lifetime: the introductory Preface, as it were, to all of the teachings that would follow in the course of the Buddha’s long career—the teaching that summarized, set the stage for, and provided the necessary framework for understanding all that would follow. The Buddha himself probably listened in to the sangha’s recitation of the sutta on more than one occasion; he referred to it again and again; and it’s canonical form does, in fact, represent fairly the first foundational discourse of the newly Awakened Buddha.

What Gotama Siddhattha awakened to, when he became the Buddha, was the complete understanding of how the world works, of how everything emerges from contingent conditions, and how everything that emerges establishes, by that event, the conditions for its own ending. The way he came to understand that process working, in the formation of universes and galaxies, the action of hammer on heated steel, and the changes that a person undergoes through the course of a lifetime and through the course of every moment—that understanding of the phenomenal world and of our experience of it is called the Dhamma (Dharma in Sanskrit). In this discourse, the newly emerged Buddha set in motion (pavatthana) the wheel (cakka) of the Dhamma, hence Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta.

I think that the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta is the most important single teaching delivered in recorded history; I won’t take up much time in class arguing that point, but I’m prepared to defend it over a cup of coffee if anyone is interested.

Most people are familiar with the most common legend regarding the Buddha:

He was born, the legend tells us, the son of a great king. The omens at his birth were marvelous and auspicious, and the King called a seer to interpret those. The seer told the king that the newborn boy was indeed destined to be great. He would either be a world-conquering monarch or a great teacher, with a Dhamma that could change the course of civilization. “Enough with teaching,” cried the King. “What can we do to insure that he becomes a world-conquering monarch?” “He must never know suffering,” the seer answered. “He must never know of aging, illness, sorrow or death – those things that cause our human lives to be filled with pain and anguish.”

So the King raised the young Siddhatha in complete protection from all contact with a suffering world; he grew up on the second floor of the palace, surrounded by friends, all of them in perfect health, and servants, all of them beautiful, skillful, and ready to do the young Prince’s every bidding.

But the young Prince grew curious about the world beyond the palace walls, and one day he convinced his charioteer to take him out into the village beyond those walls. In that first outing, Siddhata saw an old man walking with a cane. “What is wrong with that man?” he asked the charioteer. “That man is old,” the charioteer replied. “Does everyone grow old?” Siddhata asked. “Yes.” “Even I?” “Yes.”

On the next outing, Siddhata saw a leper and learned of the inevitability of disease. Next time out, they encountered a family carrying the body of their beloved father to the burning ghats, weeping and wailing with grief. “Will even I die?” “Yes.”

Finally, on a fourth outing, Siddhata experienced what seemed the strangest sight of all—a man walking barefoot, wearing nothing but a simple yellow robe, with a look on his face of extraordinary happiness and peace. “Who is that,” he asked the charioteer, “walking so confidently and with such peace amidst all this suffering?” “That”, he was told, “is a sramana; he has renounced the comforts of home and family and spends his time in meditation, developing his ability to be kind and compassionate and to remain in equanimity despite the violent changes in the world.” The young Prince was thoughtful on the journey back to the palace.

The existential angst aroused by the encounter with suffering grew in Prince Siddhata until, one night, while his beautiful young wife and beloved newborn son slept, he crept outside the palace walls, shaved his beautiful black hair and beard, discarded his fine royal clothing, and put on the simple yellow robe of a sramana. After wandering for six years, undergoing a variety of austere disciplines, he attained Enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree in the village of Bodh Gaya on the full moon night in May. He achieved bodhi, wisdom, and became the Buddha.

He was just 35 years old when he Awakened to the truth, and he went on to teach for the next 45 years; he died at the age of 80 in the village of Kusinara, near the village where he grew up.

Except for the last paragraph, all that is legend, based partly on material from the canonical texts, more on older legends that were current at the time, and written down several hundred years after the Buddha’s death.

No one can be certain of historical truth, especially at a remove of 2500 years and with respect to a man who lived who lived in a society in which literacy was just beginning to develop and which had, in any event, almost no interest at all in what we would today regard as history. Nevertheless, the study of early Buddhism has flourished over the past 50 years or so, and scholars have come to a remarkable level of agreement regarding certain facts about the culture into which Siddhata Gotama, the man who became the Buddha, was born, about the history of Northern India through his lifetime, and about the probable course of his life.

We’ll look at that story throughout the course of our study of the Buddha’s teachings. Our primary source material will be the teachings included in what’s come to be known as the Pali Canon; most scholars agree that those texts are the oldest and most probably authentic record of the teachings that the Buddha actually delivered, although there are few who would argue that they are his exact words.

We’ll begin with a look at one of the earliest teachings from that canon, called the Ariyaparisena Sutta. Sutta is a Pali word derived from the word that means “thread” (our word “suture” is a cognate term) and it’s usually translated as “Discourse”. (Sometimes, and to my mind unfortunately, it’s translated as “sermon”.) Ariyapariyesana is a compound term, composed of the word ariya, meaning “noble”, and “pariyesana“, derived from terms meaning, basically, “looking around”, and usually translated as “quest” or “search”. In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Buddha tells his community of followers about the circumstances of his decision to search for an end to suffering, how that search resulted in the experience of Enlightenment, and why he made a decision to embark on the difficult task of teaching the world about the difficult truth he had discovered.

There are certainly legendary elements in the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, but they are in the nature of metaphor rather than myth, and in no way central to the message of the teaching. For the most part, the Buddha tells his story in a straightforward way, without much in the way of decoration.

I’ve posted a rendition of the sutta on our Dharma Study website, with links to several other more complete and accurate web-based translations of the text. I also wrote, a while ago, an essay on the Buddha’s early life and enlightenment which contains passages from several other suttas dealing with those same events; we’ll be referring to those other suttas in our discussion on Tuesday.

I look forward to seeing you then.

This was originally posted last October, for the Fall session of the class. The information is still relevant.

In our next class, we’ll establish the context from which the teaching of the Eightfold Path emerged. We’ll do a very short review of the Buddha’s life and times, and we’ll look in moderate detail at the very first teaching he gave, which culminated in the teaching of the Path. The following web-based resources will be helpful, not only to an understanding of what we will cover in our first class, but to understanding all of the classes that follow.

• The course syllabus outlines the Eightfold Path and reviews the direction we’ll take in studying it. The three web pages referred to in the last section of the syllabus—Bhikkhu Bodhi’s short book on the Path, Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo’s essay on The Path to Peace and Freedom for the Mind, and the Wikipedia article on the Path—will provide basic reference materials throughout the course.
• There are several essays on the Dharma Study site which will help provide the context for our study of the Path.
  • A short review of the Buddha’s early life, leading up to the first teaching.
  • A rendering of that first teaching, known as the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta (The Discourse on Turning the Wheel of the Law). That page also contains links to a couple of other translations of that Sutta, somewhat more literal than the one I prepared.
  • An annotated map of the Buddha’s life; I’ll pass out a copy of the map itself in our first class.
  • A fairly detailed outline of the concept of Dhamma—the Buddha’s essential message, at the center of which is the concept of the Eightfold Path.
  • A review of how the Pali Canon came to be, and a look at the reasons we have for trusting its authenticity.
• Stephen Batchelor is one of the most insightful teachers of Buddhism around today, and there are a number of audio talks by him at the Dharmaseed website; you can either download those talks and load them onto your iPod or other MP3 player, or you can stream them for listening online at your computer. The talk that is particularly relevant to our course is his talk on the Buddha’s Middle Way.