Sarnath

The first discourse

Buddhist tradition holds that after his awakening at Bodh Gaya the Buddha travelled to the deer park at Isipatana and taught the five ascetics who had earlier been his companions, setting out the Four Noble Truths. This is the setting in motion of the wheel of Dharma, and it makes Sarnath one of the four principal places of Buddhist pilgrimage, with Lumbini, Bodh Gaya and Kushinagar.

The remains

The site holds the Dhamek Stupa, a massive cylindrical structure of the Gupta period faced with carved stone bands; the foundations of the Dharmarajika Stupa, an Ashokan foundation later demolished for building material; monastery remains of several periods; and the stump of an Ashokan pillar.

Sarnath was also a major centre of sculpture. The Sarnath school of the Gupta period produced Buddha images of a distinctive type — the body under a clinging robe rendered almost without folds, the face inward and still — that became the classical Indian Buddha image and was copied across Asia.

The Lion Capital

The capital of the Ashokan pillar, carved from polished Chunar sandstone, shows four lions seated back to back on an abacus bearing four animals and four wheels, above an inverted lotus. It carried a large wheel, now fragmentary.

The Republic of India adopted the capital as its state emblem in 1950, and the wheel beneath it as the chakra on the national flag. It is displayed in the Sarnath museum.

History

Sarnath flourished for well over a thousand years and was destroyed in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Excavation began in the late eighteenth century — with a local landowner dismantling a stupa for bricks, which is how the site first came to notice — and continued through the nineteenth and twentieth.