Dharmachakra Mudra is a mudra, a symbolic hand-gesture of the Indian religious traditions, known in Sanskrit as Dharmachakra Mudra and signifying the turning of the wheel of Dharma.
Form and meaning
In this seal both hands are held before the heart, each with thumb and index joined, one turned in and one out. It marks the Buddha's first sermon at Sarnath, the setting in motion of the wheel of the teaching.
Mudras appear across Hindu and Buddhist ritual, iconography, classical dance and yoga, where a fixed position of the hands carries a settled meaning or is held to direct attention and breath. The gesture is described here within those documented traditions.
History and attestation
Dharmachakra Mudra depicts the Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment, delivered at the Deer Park in Sarnath near Varanasi to the five ascetics who had earlier been his companions, an event traditionally called "turning the wheel of the dharma." The finest and most widely reproduced surviving example is the fifth-century Gupta-period seated Buddha excavated at Sarnath itself, now in the Sarnath Archaeological Museum, whose precisely carved hand position, the right hand's fingers touching the left palm's fingers to trace the shape of a turning wheel, became the standard model against which later depictions of the gesture across the Buddhist world are frequently compared.