Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11), Passage by Passage

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 7 September 2026

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The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) is the Buddha’s first recorded discourse, spoken in the deer park at Isipatana near Varanasi to five mendicants who had once practised austerities beside him. This page gives that discourse passage by passage, in Bhikkhu Sujato’s public-domain translation, with its setting and its wording explained.

What the discourse teaches is covered elsewhere: the Four Noble Truths for the truths themselves, the Noble Eightfold Path for the path that is the fourth of them, and the first sermon for the story of the day. This page is about the text.

What is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta?

It is the eleventh discourse in the fifty-sixth saṁyutta, or thematic collection, of the Saṁyutta Nikāya — the “Linked Discourses” of the Pali Canon — hence SN 56.11. That collection is the Saccasaṁyutta, “Linked Discourses on the Truths,” and this sutta opens its second chapter, the Dhammacakkappavattanavagga. The title is a Pali compound: dhamma-cakka, the wheel of the teaching, plus pavattana, a setting-rolling.

It is also among the most copied texts in Buddhism. SuttaCentral lists full parallels in the Chinese Saṁyukta Āgama (SA 379) and a standalone Chinese sūtra (T 109), in Tibetan (D 31), in the Sanskrit Lalitavistara and Mahāvastu, and in the monastic law codes of several early schools, including the Pali Vinaya. Whatever else is contested about earliest Buddhism, nearly every school carried this discourse.

Who were the five mendicants at Isipatana?

The discourse names no one. The Pali pañcavaggiya, “the group of five,” is filled in by the Vinaya, which names them Koṇḍañña, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahānāma and Assaji — the companions of the Buddha’s years of austerity, who had left him when he abandoned that path. Sujato notes an oddity in the opening: the Buddha calls them bhikkhave, “mendicants,” a word normally reserved for his own renunciates, though in the Vinaya they ordain only after this teaching. (See bhikkhu.)

Why the middle way comes before the four truths

The order is a rhetorical choice, and Sujato’s note explains it: the Buddha opens on the ground he shares with his audience — the rejection of sensual pleasure — which also answers the charge that he had gone soft. Only then does he name the second extreme, the very practice these five men were still keeping. The four truths wait until that ground is cleared.

“The Realized One” is Sujato’s rendering of tathāgata, the epithet the Buddha uses of himself; “extinguishment” is his nibbāna. The lines that follow define this middle way as the noble eightfold path and list its eight factors — which is why the path page, not this one, explains those factors.

The four truths, as the discourse states them

Two words carry most of the disagreement between English versions. Jāti is “rebirth” for Sujato and “birth” for Ṭhānissaro; dukkha is “suffering” for the first and “stress” for the second. The other three follow in the same clipped announcement form — origin, cessation, and the practice leading to cessation — each in a sentence or two. The discourse states them; it does not argue for them.

What “three phases and twelve aspects” means

The same three-step turn is then made on each remaining truth. Sujato names the three in his note: saccañāṇa, knowing what the truth is; kiccañāṇa, knowing the task it sets; katañāṇa, knowing the task is done. He glosses the term used here, pariññeyya, as “known all around,” “completely understood” — suffering is not to be avoided but fully understood. Four truths, three turns each: twelve.

Ṭhānissaro adds a point about the title in a note here: in ancient Indian philosophical and legal usage, a discussion running two sets of variables through all their permutations was itself called a wheel. On his reading this twelvefold section is the wheel of Dhamma the discourse is named for — the Dharma wheel is not only an image but a structure of argument.

What did Koṇḍañña actually understand?

One sentence — and not one of the four truths. What Koṇḍañña sees is the pattern underneath them. The discourse is spare about what that amounts to: a vision arose, and it stops there — no name for the attainment, no ordination. The Vinaya’s account of the same moment is not spare, and much of the tradition’s picture of Koṇḍañña comes from there rather than from SN 56.11:

That first sentence is a set formula: the Vinaya repeats it, in the plural, for Vappa and Bhaddiya, and for Mahānāma and Assaji, as each gains the same vision (Kd 1:6.34, Kd 1:6.37) — the description our page on stream-entry works from. What follows is an ordination; the Vinaya closes the scene, “That was the full ordination of that venerable.” The seeing belongs to the discourse, the going-forth to the monastic code, which is why accounts of the founding of the Sangha draw on both.

The cry that rises through the deva realms

The omitted lines are the cry itself, passed upward through the ranks of devas — earth gods, the four great kings, the thirty-three, Yama, the joyful, those who love to create and who control what others create, and the host of the Divinity. Sujato observes two things. The passage sits between Koṇḍañña’s realisation and the Buddha’s acknowledgement of it, which on his reading highlights what Koṇḍañña has done — showing that others, not only the Buddha, could realise the Dhamma; and some versions of the text lack it, which suggests it was added later.

How the discourse actually ends

Not with the shaking galaxy, then, but with a man’s name. The Pali is aññāsi vata bho koṇḍañño, and the name it produces, Aññāsikoṇḍañña, fixes that exclamation to him for good. A discourse answered by every heaven in the cosmology closes on one man in a deer park who understood it.

How the translations differ

Nothing in the table is a translator’s mistake; each choice buys something and costs something. “Stress” keeps dukkha close to ordinary experience at the price of sounding clinical; “suffering” keeps the weight and risks the caricature that Buddhism is gloomy. “Rebirth” for jāti makes explicit that the first truth is about repeated birth rather than a single arrival in this life — a reading Sujato defends in his notes, though not every translator follows him. If a line matters to you, read it in two versions before deciding what it says.

How the discourse is used today

Sujato notes that this remains a key text in Theravāda Buddhism, regularly memorised and recited. It is chanted and expounded at Āsāḷha Pūjā, the full-moon day that commemorates the first teaching. Mahāyāna traditions honour it too, but place it as the first turning of the wheel in a scheme of three, with the perfection-of-wisdom and buddha-nature teachings as the later turnings; Theravāda emphasises the single turning at Isipatana. The difference is about the whole shape of the canon rather than this text’s wording.

Read the whole discourse

It is short — ten minutes, slowly. Read Bhikkhu Sujato’s translation at SuttaCentral, where his notes sit beside the text, and Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu’s at Access to Insight. Then come back for the teaching itself in the Four Noble Truths, and the wider library in Buddhist scriptures.