Asalha Puja

Asalha Puja commemorates the first sermon of the Buddha, preached at the deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi to his five former companions, in which he set out the Four Noble Truths and the Middle Way; the discourse is called the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the "setting in motion of the wheel of the Dhamma", and this event is remembered as the beginning of the Buddha's teaching and of the Sangha, the community. It is kept on the full moon of the month of Asadha (June-July), and is also called Dhamma Day.

The day carries a special weight because the sermon completed the founding of Buddhism as a taught path: with the awakening the Buddha had realised the truth, but with the first sermon he began to make it available, and tradition holds that the first of his hearers attained insight on the spot, so that on this day the "Three Jewels", Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha, were for the first time all present in the world. Asalha Puja is a major observance in the Theravada countries, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, kept with temple visits, offerings, teaching and the circumambulation of shrines. It falls immediately before the beginning of Vassa, the three-month rains retreat, which opens the next day, so that the commemoration of the teaching's beginning also opens the monastic year's most disciplined season.

Thailand's government legally designates Asalha Puja, along with several other major Buddhist holy days, as a day on which the sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibited nationwide, a statutory restriction enforced against retailers, bars and restaurants across the country regardless of an individual business owner's own religious observance, reflecting the day's status as a significant Buddhist holy day recognised directly in Thai civil law rather than left purely to individual or communal religious choice.

The restriction extends to the following day as well, since Asalha Puja falls immediately before the start of Vassa, the rains retreat, and Thai authorities treat the pair of days together as a period warranting the alcohol sale ban, a specific and enforceable civic expression of Buddhism's close relationship with the Thai state that has no real equivalent in how most Western countries treat their own major religious holy days, where such restrictions, when they exist at all today, have generally been relaxed or repealed over recent decades.

In Sri Lanka the same full moon is kept as Esala Poya, a public holiday marked with alms-giving and temple observances distinct from the specific alcohol-sale restriction Thailand imposes, and it falls within the same lunar month, Esala, that gives its name to Kandy's great Esala Perahera procession of the Sacred Tooth Relic, though the multi-day Perahera itself is a separate observance from the Poya day commemorating the Buddha's first sermon.