Place · first-sermon deer park · India

Sārnāth

Also known as Ashoka's lion capital → the State Emblem, State Emblem, lion capital

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Pali canon; Ashokan pillar and schism edict

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

25.381, 83.024

Worth knowing

The name is contracted from Sarangnatha, lord of the deer, a Shaiva epithet attached to the deer park, and a Sarangnath temple still stands near the site — so the Buddhist first-sermon ground carries a name for Shiva. The lion capital from here is the emblem of the Republic and its wheel is at the centre of the flag, and the four lions are Asiatic lions, the animal that now survives only in the Gir forest.

Connections (14)

• Life routeRājagriha / Rajgir

  Sarnath is where the Buddha first taught, to the five ascetics who had abandoned him; Rajagriha is the Magadhan capital where he spent much of the following forty years under Bimbisara's protection, and where the first council met after his death. The route between them is the spine of the eight great places: the teaching begins near Varanasi and the institution is built in Magadha, and everything else in early Buddhism follows that road.

• Sacred transplantNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  The lion capital from Ashoka's pillar at Sarnath, carved in the third century BCE for a Buddhist site, was adopted in 1950 as the state emblem of the Indian republic, and the wheel below it went onto the flag. So the seals of a government sitting in Lutyens' imperial capital carry an image made for the place where the Buddha first taught — a deliberate choice of an Indian antiquity older than any of the powers that had ruled from Delhi.

• In the same set asBairāt (Virāṭnagar)

  Both sites gave up Ashokan material that ended somewhere else: Sarnath's lion capital became the national emblem and sits in a museum beside the ruins, and the Bairat Bhabru edict — the one in which Ashoka names Buddhist texts he recommends — was cut from its rock and taken to Calcutta in the nineteenth century, where it remains. The edicts have been moved by sultans, by antiquarians and by states, each for their own reasons.

• Monument relocationHauz Khās

  Firuz Shah Tughlaq had an Ashokan pillar hauled from Topra to Delhi in the 1350s, wrapped in silk and reeds and floated down the Yamuna, and set it on his palace roof — he could not read it and had scholars fail to. Six hundred years later the Republic took the lion capital from another of the same emperor's pillars for its seal. Both are appropriations of an unreadable antiquity, made for opposite reasons.

• Monument within siteChaukhandi Stupa, Sarnath

  The Chaukhandi stupa marks where the Buddha is said to have met the five ascetics on his way to the Deer Park, on the approach to Sarnath. An octagonal brick tower was built on top of it in the sixteenth century to mark Humayun's visit — so a Buddhist mound of the Gupta period carries a Mughal commemoration, and the two are now conserved as one monument.

• Traveller routeXuanzang

  Sarnath was one of Xuanzang’s major Buddhist pilgrimage destinations because of its association with Buddha’s first sermon. He recorded the great stupa and numerous monasteries in the area. His descriptions are particularly valuable because they document the monuments and religious institutions at Sarnath centuries before the site was rediscovered and archaeologically excavated in modern times.

• PatronageAshoka

  Ashoka came to Sarnath, raised a polished sandstone pillar with a four-lion capital, and had a schism edict cut on it warning monks and nuns against dividing the order. The capital is now the emblem of the Indian republic and the wheel beneath it is on the flag. The site itself is a field of ruined stupas and monastery foundations, excavated in the nineteenth century after centuries of stone-robbing.

• Craft tradition ofSarnath Gupta workshop

  Sārnāth carries the Mauryan lion capital and, seven centuries later, the Gupta workshop whose wet-drapery Buddhas became the template copied from Java to Tibet. One site holds the two moments when Indian sculpture set a standard the rest of Asia followed. The Gupta idiom — wet drapery clinging to the body, downcast eyes, a halo of carved foliage — became the model copied at Borobudur, in Thailand and in Tibet for centuries.

• Craft tradition ofChunar

  The Chunar quarries on the Ganges supplied the stone for the Ashokan pillars, including the Sarnath lion capital, and the shafts were floated hundreds of kilometres downriver and then hauled overland. The Mauryan mirror polish achieved on that sandstone has never been satisfactorily explained and was not reproduced afterwards. The same quarries later supplied Mughal and then colonial building, so one riverside cliff face runs through the whole sequence.

• Sacred transplantNakhon Pathom

  Dvaravati's characteristic monument is the dharmachakra on a pillar, set up in the open — a wheel of the law on a shaft, which is the Sarnath and Sanchi iconography of the first teaching, transplanted whole into the Chao Phraya basin in the sixth and seventh centuries. Over a hundred of them survive. Nothing comparable was being put up in India by then, so Dvaravati preserved an Indian Buddhist form after India had moved on from it.

• In the same set asBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple

  Sarnath's inscription in 2026 puts three of the four principal sites of the Buddha's life on the list — Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and, in Nepal, Lumbini — while Kushinagar, where he died, is still not inscribed. The Indian nominations have come in the order the sites were excavated and restored rather than in the order of the life they commemorate.

• Site adjacencyKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras

  Varanasi takes its name from the Varuna and the Asi, the two streams that enter the Ganges at either end of the old city, so the city's name is a stretch of riverbank between two tributaries. Sarnath is five kilometres north of the Varuna: the Buddha walked from Bodh Gaya to the edge of the Brahmanical capital and gave his first sermon just outside it, which is a deliberate choice of address.

• AnalogueParliament House / Sansad Bhavan

  The lion capital from the Ashokan pillar at Sarnath was adopted as the state emblem of India in January 1950 and its wheel is at the centre of the flag. The name Sarnath is itself contracted from Sarangnatha, lord of the deer, a Shaiva epithet attached to the deer park, so the Republic's emblem comes from a Buddhist pillar at a site named for Shiva.

• AnalogueGir National Park

  The four lions on the Sarnath capital are Asiatic lions, the animal that survives in one forest in Gujarat and nowhere else in the world. The Republic adopted the capital as its emblem in 1950, fifty years after the species had come within a dozen individuals of extinction, and the population has recovered inside a single district while the emblem has gone on every coin and passport.

On these journeys

• Eight Great Places (Buddhist)
• Ashokan pillars & minor edicts
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)

Sources

Sarnath — ASI; Minor Pillar Edicts

• Wikipedia