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Eastern Systems and Sacred Places, two sections of this atlas, connect at only two points site-wide. The first, Bhumisparsha to Bodh Gaya, is already told elsewhere in this atlas. This is the second: Dharmachakra, the wheel-turning hand gesture, fixed to Sarnath, the deer park where the gesture's own event took place.

A Gesture Fixed to One Sermon

Both hands are held before the chest, each joining thumb and index in a circle, the left turned inward and the right outward so that the two circles touch. It marks the first sermon in the deer park at Sarnath, when the wheel of the teaching was set turning, and the atlas records it as belonging to that event rather than to teaching in general. Among the five Buddhas it belongs to Vairocana, and its placement at the heart rather than at the mouth is deliberate: the turning is understood to proceed from the whole person, not from speech.

The Deer Park the Gesture Names

Sarnath is a deer park about eight kilometres northeast of Varanasi where the Buddha is held to have preached his first sermon, setting out the four noble truths to the five ascetics who had been his companions, the moment, the atlas records, at which there is a community rather than only an awakened man. The Dhamek Stupa still stands to thirty-nine metres; the Dharmarajika Stupa beside it is now only foundations, quarried for building material in the eighteenth century after a local landlord's workmen broke into it. Thai, Tibetan, Japanese and Sri Lankan temples stand around the ruins, so that Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana communities all keep a presence at a site none of them owns.

Where To Read More

• DharmachakraThe gesture, the second of only two edges connecting Eastern Systems and Sacred Places
• SarnathBuddhist SitesThe deer park the gesture is fixed to, and the site of the event it depicts