# The Buddha's first sermon at Sarnath
**सारनाथ में बुद्ध का पहला उपदेश**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/buddha-sarnath/
- Chapter: [Indus and Veda](https://indianepics.online/chapter/indus-vedic.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 530 BCE – 440 BCE (± 20 years)
- Where: Sarnath, near Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh (25.381, 83.024)
- Tags: religion

## Summary

In the deer park near Varanasi the Buddha preaches his first sermon to five ascetics; its date depends on which chronology of his life is right.

वाराणसी के पास मृगदाव में बुद्ध ने पाँच तपस्वियों को पहला उपदेश दिया; इसकी तिथि इस पर निर्भर है कि उनके जीवन का कौन-सा कालक्रम सही है।

## Account

Buddhist tradition holds that after his enlightenment at Bodh Gaya the Buddha walked to the deer park at Isipatana, now Sarnath, and there set the wheel of the dhamma in motion in a sermon to five former companions. Two to three centuries later Ashoka raised a pillar at the site, crowned by the lion capital that India adopted as its state emblem in 1950; the Dhamek stupa beside it was rebuilt in its present form in the Gupta period.

The year is genuinely uncertain. The long chronology, worked out from the Sri Lankan chronicles, puts the Buddha's death around 483 BCE, which places the first sermon, forty-five years earlier, around 528 BCE. The short chronology, favoured by many historians since the 1980s, follows the northern Buddhist count of about a century between his death and Ashoka, and puts his death around 400 BCE and the sermon in the mid-fifth century. The range shown spans both. On the map, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, Rajagriha and Kushinagar trace the Buddha's world in the middle Ganga plain, between Kosala and Magadha.

## Sources

- Bechert, H. (ed.), When Did the Buddha Live? The Controversy on the Dating of the Historical Buddha (1995)
- Hultzsch, E., Inscriptions of Asoka (1925) — https://archive.org/details/InscriptionsOfAsoka.NewEditionByE.Hultzsch (Sarnath pillar edict and Rummindei pillar inscription)

## Image

Dhamek Stupa, 2025. Hardy Explorer, CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADhamek_Stupa%2C_2025.jpg

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