Do you know where the Buddha delivered his first sermon?
He delivered his first sermon in Sarnath after attaining Nirvana.
I was fortunate on my last visit to Sarnath.
It has been several years since I last visited Sarnath. It is not a place that draws me in or invites me to return. Yet, I may visit Sarnath a few times more with photography students, friends, and family.
I consider myself lucky on my last visit because I was there on the occasion of a major Buddhist festival, which coincided with the Kartik Purnima festival in Varanasi. My friends and I visited Varanasi that year because of the Kartik Purnima festival, and I consider myself fortunate that it coincided with a Buddhist festival.
A short voice note on the photography.
I invite you to listen to my voice note, where I discuss the photography aspects of the place. Pause, hear, and then read on.
May I assume you have heard my four-minute talk? If you are kind enough to comment, please let me know which aspects of photography or the challenges I faced you’d like me to cover in future posts.
And, you may also watch a short video here.
https://youtube.com/shorts/l5soohkIzyc?si=J-wqX4Ts1agNoEM0
Sarnath is almost an hour’s drive from the center of Varanasi.
Shall we move on? Sarnath is in Varanasi, about an hour’s drive out from the heart of the city. I often take an auto-rickshaw, which gets you there in about the same time as a car. An auto-rickshaw snakes in and out of traffic, annoying those who drive larger vehicles. However, bikers who take snaking to stratospheric levels infuriate everyone!
One of my friends wanted to eat on the way, reminding me of the Hobbits who, after breakfast, want ‘elevenses,’ lunch, tea, high tea, dinner, and supper, with a few snacks thrown in for good measure. We stopped, had some chai, and I snapped a few desultory photos while he gorged himself.
It was only when we reached Sarnath that we discovered our visit coincided with an important Buddhist festival. To my eternal shame, I did not memorize the name of the festival, so it has lost itself in the dusty crypts of my unconscious memory.
Gautam Buddha delivered his first sermon in Sarnath.
Pilgrims from across India, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia visit Sarnath, and you may wonder why. After he attained Nirvana at Bodh Gaya, the Gautama Buddha delivered his first sermon here, at Sarnath.
There’s not much to see at Sarnath, except for a few architectural relics and a large stupa at one end of the lawns. Trees ring the premises, and even as I photographed pilgrims sitting under trees and teachers preaching under others, I visualized the Gautama Buddha sitting under a similar tree centuries ago, delivering his first sermon.
Buddhist sites are peaceful. But not everyone is a saint.
Unlike the grandiose, loud, and colorful Kartik Purnima celebration that took place later that evening, the atmosphere in Sarnath was calm. Tourists, visitors, and pilgrims sat peacefully on the lawns, conversing quietly with one another. No one disturbed the prayers of those who came to pray.
Throughout my travels, I have visited Buddhist sites in McLeod Ganj, Dharamshala, Arunachal Pradesh, China, Japan, and several other locations. In every instance, I’ve walked into an atmosphere of serenity, quiet, and stillness. This atmosphere stands in stark contrast to the cacophony and mess that greet you when you enter a Hindu festival.
We are not all saints. Despite our philosophy, we persecute others.
Anyone who reads the previous paragraph, or many texts on Buddhism, may fall into the trap of believing that all Buddhists are saints. Nothing could be further from the truth. Refresh your knowledge of what is happening in Myanmar, and follow the persecution that the Rohingya experience at the hands of the Buddhist priests, and you understand that, despite our grand philosophies, we are all guilty of ill-treating ‘the other.’
The tragic story that fills the headlines these days is the ethnic cleansing sweeping Gaza, and people across the world are correct when they protest the genocide and ethnic cleansing. Israeli behavior is disgusting, but it is not the only instance of such behavior happening today.
Other sites of human abuse today include Tibet, Xinjiang, Sudan, Congo, Manipur, and many others. People do not have the mental capacity to deal with more than one tragedy, and, right now, the carnage in Palestine overshadows everything else.
My point, therefore, is that the serenity that greets you in Sarnath must not beguile you into believing that every Buddhist is a saint. We are the same.
The Western obsession with classifying everything.
A few authors I have read in the past few months have postulated that the word ‘Hinduism’ and its application to the religion in India are British inventions. The Arabs and Persians called the region east of the Indus River and, in particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, ‘Al-Hind.’ They called us ‘Sindhus,’ a word that became corrupted—I assume—to ‘Hindus. Then, the British came along and clubbed all Shaivite, Vaishnavite, and other belief systems under the umbrella term ‘Hinduism.’
Westerners love classifying and naming everything, and they love “isms.” A German friend sent me a technical article in which German scientists tested and classified various strains of marijuana. When I asked him—politely—to screw the classifications, to smoke the stuff, and to enjoy the trip, his WhatsApp screen sent red, warning, furious signals to my phone.
Wisdom, buddhi, dharma, mindfulness.
The term ‘Buddha’ only refers to a person who has attained enlightenment. The word comes from the root ‘buddhi,’ which signifies intelligence (or, brains). A person can use, or not use, their ‘buddhi,’ and an intelligent and wise person is ‘buddhiman.’ We use a different word for someone who is merely clever.
Wisdom must accompany intelligence for us to call a person ‘buddhiman.’ Therefore, Gautam Buddha is ‘Gautam, who attained enlightenment.’
I am unsure whether Westerners adopted the honorific ‘Buddha’ in Gautama Buddha’s name, added an ‘ism’ and an ‘ist,’ and created the words ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Buddhist.’
While I do not know whether the terms are a Western creation, I am convinced my hunch is correct. I have listened to many Western people who claim that Buddhism and mindfulness go together, even though these statements are absolute rubbish.
Meditation and mindfulness are practices common to many religions, mystics, and individuals who meditate regularly.
I have also heard many Westerners who have appropriated the word ‘dharma’ to Buddhism, and this, too, is rubbish. Some use the term ‘the Dharma,’ which is stupid. The word ‘dharma’ predates Buddhism by several centuries and is a very complex word.
In the Mahabharata, Krishna told Arjun it is his ‘dharma’ to fight. In the Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh told Aurangzeb that, when all other means fail, it is permissible to pick up the sword and fight.
Does this mean that ‘dharma’ allows you to kill anyone because they are different or for sport? No!
Far too many words and concepts get lost in translation, mainly when we extract them from their original context and superimpose different cultural norms onto them.
Despite my outburst, you must visit Sarnath.
Everything I have written has nothing to do with Sarnath, the place, but everything to do with Buddhist beliefs that surround the site.
Forget my philosophical outburst when you travel to Sarnath. Many visitors to Varanasi skip Sarnath, and I believe they err in this omission. It may not have the grandeur of the river, the majesty of the ghats, the chaos and color of the ghats, or mysterious little by-lanes, but it possesses its unique character. Sarnath is spiritual, but you must be open to welcoming its spiritual power.
Remember: when Gautam Buddha attained Nirvana, he delivered his first sermon in Sarnath, possibly under one of the many trees that ring the lawns. You may be lucky enough to sit under the very tree where he delivered his first talk? Isn’t that possibility sufficient to draw you to visit the place?