The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta setting in motion the wheel of the Dhamma (law) is the first discourse that the Buddha delivered after his awakening enlightenment. It is one of the most important texts in Buddhism which connect us with the first ever teaching delivered by The Buddha after his attainment of Samyak Sambhodhi. It is called “The Discourse on setting in motion the wheel of Dhamma.”
After the attainment of Buddhatva or Buddhahood, The Buddha spent seven weeks at Bodhgaya, reflecting and meditating on various places and issues. Followed by it, when he actually found that the teaching, he has found is of great depth and something untold before and the people would find it very difficult to understand, so he decided not to deliver it and retire himself in woods. Sensing this, the king of gods Sehpati Brahma came down with celestial offerings to request the Buddha not to remain silent but to proclaim the coveted Dhamma. He further expressed that the world really in great need of this precious Dhamma and there are people who are capable of understanding it. After accepting the request the Buddha looked for a proper vessel to which he can deliver the Dhamma he has discovered. So he remembered his first two teachers Alāra Kalāma and Uddhaka Rāmaputta to whom he thought of sharing his knowledge but he found that both of them had passed away. Then he thought about the five old friends who were with him during the six years of penance. Since these five monks were staying in Varanasi he also left for it.
At Isipatana migdāva (Deer park), the Buddha delivered the first discourse to the five ascetics with whom he had been traveling and practicing for the several years prior to his enlightenment. They were: Kondañña, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahānāma, and Assaji. Those five monks had abandoned him about a month earlier when he decided that the extreme asceticism he that he was practicing would not get him closer to his goal, and he consumed the food offered by Sujātā. The monks felt that he has broken the commitment by indulging in the consumption of the food, and they walked away. But the Buddha understood that they were enough wise having strong commitments for the Dhamma practice, so he made his mind to deliver the Dhamma to these five ascetics. The discourse he delivered to them was so depth in meaning containing the very foundational concepts of Buddhism such as “The Middle Way”, “The Four Noble Truths”, and “The Eight-fold Path”. These principles which reflected in the first discourse of the Buddha later became the foundation of the whole Buddhist system resulting into the origination of the huge Buddhist literature.
Thus, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta or the first turning of the wheel of the Dhamma plays a very important role in laying the foundation stone of Buddhist tradition. It primarily talks about the ‘Cattariariyasaccani’ or Four Noble Truths, based on which the whole Buddhist systems of ‘Dukkha, Anicca and Atta’ are explained. The Pāli phrases for the four noble truths are grammatical anomalies. From these anomalies, some scholars have argued that the expression “noble truth” is a later addition to the texts. Others have argued even further that the content of the four truths is also a later addition. Both of these arguments are based on the unproven assumption that the language the Buddha spoke was grammatically regular and that any irregularities were later corruptions of the language. This assumption forgets that the languages of the Buddha’s time were oral dialects and that the nature of such dialects is to contain many grammatical irregularities. Languages tend to become regular only when being used to govern a large nation-state or to produce a large body of literature: events that happened in India only after the Buddha’s time. Another argument for the lateness of the expression “noble truth” is that a truth meaning an accurate statement about a body of facts is not something that should be abandoned. In this case, only the craving is to be abandoned, not the truth about craving. However, in Vedic Sanskrit as in modern English a “truth” can mean both a fact and an accurate statement about a fact. Thus, in this case the “truth” is the fact not the statement about the fact and the argument for the lateness of the expression does not hold.