Sarnath

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sarnath is a town 8 km northeast of Varanasi, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and it sits near the confluence of the Ganges and the Varuna rivers. To a first-time visitor, it might look like any other ancient site of crumbled stone and overgrown foundations. But around 528 BCE, something happened here that shaped the course of Asian civilisation. A man who had just achieved enlightenment at Bodh Gaya chose this particular patch of land, a deer park outside Varanasi, to speak his first words as the Buddha. He gathered five companions and delivered what is now called the Dhammacakkappavattana sutra. That moment is known as the First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma.

  The questions this place raises are not simple ones. How did a single teaching given to five men grow into one of the world's major religions? How did a thriving centre of Buddhist scholarship get reduced to rubble in a single century? And how did it return, centuries later, to become a UNESCO-nominated site visited by well over a million people a year? The answers move through empires, invasions, colonial-era plunder, and a global revival that is still unfolding today.

• 2. The Deer Park and Its Name

  ›

  The Sanskrit name Saranganath, which translates as "Lord of the Deer", carries inside it a much older story. According to Buddhist legend, the future Siddhartha Bodhisattva had previously been born as a deer. When a king took aim at a doe, the deer offered his own life in her place. The king, moved by that act of self-sacrifice, declared the land a sanctuary. The legend gave the site its name and its character: a place of refuge, set apart from the ordinary world.

  Pali texts offer a second name, Isipatana, meaning "the place where holy men descended" or "the hill of the fallen sages". The terms isi in Pali and the corresponding Sanskrit word both refer to accomplished and enlightened persons. Even the language used to describe Sarnath carries an expectation of the extraordinary. The Lalitavistara sutra frames the Buddha's own choice in precisely those terms: he selected "Deer Park by the Hill of the Fallen Sages, outside of Varanasi" as the setting for his first teaching.

  The hagiographic Buddhavamsa goes further still, claiming that a previous Buddha named Kassapa was also born in Sarnath and also gave his first teaching there to a gathered sangha of men and women. Whether taken as history or as sacred narrative, the implication is consistent: Sarnath is understood within the tradition not as an ordinary location that happened to host a significant event, but as a site with its own spiritual gravity, drawing awakened beings across lifetimes. The Mahaparinibbana sutra makes this explicit: the Buddha himself named Sarnath as one of four pilgrimage sites his followers should seek out and approach with samvega, a Pali word meaning feelings of reverence. The other three are Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, and Kushinagar.

• 3. Centuries of Flourishing

  ›

  Buddhism took root in Sarnath during the second urbanisation of the Indian subcontinent, roughly 600-200 BCE. Patronage from kings and wealthy merchants in nearby Varanasi helped sustain the community through the Mahajanapadas period, the Nanda Empire, and into the Maurya Empire. By the 3rd century CE, Sarnath had become a major centre for the Sammatiya, one of the early Buddhist schools, and also for the arts of sculpture and architecture.

  Faxian, a Buddhist monk from Jin China, passed through northern India between 400 and 411 CE and recorded seeing four large towers and two viharas where monks were living. When the pilgrim Xuanzang arrived around 640 CE, the site had grown considerably. He reported hundreds of small shrines and votive stupas, and a vihara approximately 61 m in height that contained a large statue of the Buddha. Xuanzang counted about 1,500 resident priests studying according to the Sammatiya school. He also documented an Ashokan pillar near a stupa marking the location of the first sermon.

  During the Pala dynasty (8th-11th centuries), the rulers sponsored new mahaviharas across northern India and also directed patronage toward existing institutions including Sarnath. Monks and pilgrims arrived from across Asia. Even after the Gahadavala dynasty replaced the Palas, whose capital sat at Varanasi, the site retained royal support. A mid-12th-century inscription of Queen Kumaradevi, consort of King Govindachandra, records her role in constructing or restoring monastic quarters at Sarnath. That inscription, excavated at the site in March 1908, is now held at the Sarnath Archeological Museum. It is likely among the last records of construction at Sarnath before the catastrophe that followed.

• 4. Destruction and Disputed Causes

  ›

  Qutb ud-Din Aibak, commander of the army of Muhammad of Ghor, led his forces from Ghazni to Varanasi and Sarnath in 1194 CE. The reigning Gahadavala king, Jayachandra, who ruled approximately from 1170 to 1194, was killed at the Battle of Chandawar. Aibak reportedly removed around 1,400 camel loads of treasure from the region. The 13th-century Persian historian Hasan Nizami recorded that nearly 1,000 temples were destroyed and mosques built on their foundations.

  The destruction did not stop at Sarnath. Another of Muhammad of Ghor's slave generals, Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, destroyed Vikramashila in 1193, Odantapuri in 1197, and Nalanda in 1200. Surviving Buddhists fled to Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet, and South India. By the close of the 12th century, the great monastic centres of northern India, along with their libraries of suttas, meditation instructions, and commentaries, had almost entirely vanished from the subcontinent.

  The cause of that destruction is contested. Some scholars, including archaeologist Giovanni Verardi, argue that the monasteries from Sarnath to Vikramashila were not primarily destroyed by Muslim forces but were instead appropriated and transformed by Brahmin communities. Verardi contends that orthodox Brahmins, who had been gaining influence under the Gahadavala and Sena dynasties, accepted Muslim rule in exchange for the suppression of Buddhism. Archaeologist Federica Barba has pointed to evidence that the Gahadavalas built Hindu temples on traditionally Buddhist sites at Sarnath, converting Buddhist shrines into Brahmanical ones. Her reading of the evidence suggests that Buddhists had already been expelled from Sarnath and the site was being converted into a large Shiva temple compound before the Muslim armies arrived. The Kumaradevi inscription itself mentions that King Govindachandra protected Varanasi from incursions by the Ghaznavids, who the inscription calls "Turushkas", which places political pressure on the region well before 1194.

• 5. Looting in Modern Times

  ›

  For centuries after the expulsion of Buddhists from Sarnath, the site remained largely unvisited by its original faith community. Pilgrims from Tibet, Burma, and Southeast Asia continued to travel through South Asia between the 13th and 17th centuries, but they most often made for Bodh Gaya rather than Sarnath. Jains, however, maintained their own tradition of visiting. A manuscript written in 1612 CE by Jinaprabha Suri, the Tirthakalpa, describes a Jain temple in Varanasi close to a Bodhisattva sanctuary at a place called dharmeksa, a Sanskrit word meaning "pondering of the law", which scholars identify as a reference to the Dhamek Stupa.

  The 18th century brought a different kind of attention. William Hodges, who may have been the first British landscape painter to visit, arrived in 1778. He published an illustrated account of his Indian travels in 1794. Hodges described the Dhamek Stupa, though he misidentified it as a ruined Hindu temple. The first undisputed modern reference to the ruins came from Jonathan Duncan, a charter member of the Asiatic Society and later Governor of Bombay. In January 1794, workers employed by Zamindar Jagat Singh dismantled a brick stupa. Inside its relic chamber, they found a green marble reliquary encased in a sandstone box. The reliquary held some bones and pearls, which were subsequently thrown into the Ganges. Singh's crew also removed much of the stone facing from the Dhamek Stupa and took several Buddha statues to his house in Jagatganj. The stupa's bricks were hauled away to build a market.

  The spoliation continued through the 19th century. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton visited around 1813 and drew a rough map, calling the site Buddha Kashi. In the mid-19th century, 48 statues along with substantial quantities of brick and stone were removed to construct two bridges over the Varuna River. Around 1898, further materials were taken from Sarnath and used as ballast for a narrow-gauge railway then under construction.

• 6. Excavation and Recovery

  ›

  Alexander Cunningham was 21 years old and serving as a British Army engineer with the Bengal Engineer Group when he carried out the first systematic archaeological excavations at Sarnath in 1835-1836. He had studied the accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang closely, and used their descriptions alongside Duncan's notes to guide his measurements and digging. During those excavations, he retrieved statues from monastery "L" and temple "M", and also recovered the sandstone box that Duncan had originally reported at the Dharmarajika Stupa. He deposited these items with the Asiatic Society of Bengal; they are now in the Indian Museum in Kolkata. By 1836, Cunningham had confirmed Sarnath as the location of the Buddha's first sermon. In 1861, he became the founder and first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India.

  Markham Kittoe, who lived from 1808 to 1853, excavated further in 1851-1852. He identified four stupas at the site, excavated what he believed to be a hospital between the Dhamek and Jagat Singh stupas, and recovered a seated Buddha statue from Jagat Singh's house. In his writings, Kittoe speculated that the site had been destroyed by fire.

  Friedrich Oertel conducted the most extensive excavations on record in 1904-1905, focusing on the Dhamek Stupa area, the Dharmarajika Stupa, and several monastery and temple structures. In March 1905, the team uncovered parts of the Ashokan pillar, including its base, shaft, Schism Edict, lion capital, and fragments of the dharmachakra sculpture. These objects date to approximately 241-233 BCE, making them the oldest and most significant relics found at Sarnath. J. Ph. Vogel translated the Brahmi inscription and tentatively dated it to 249 BCE. The Lion Capital that topped the pillar survived a 45-ft fall to the ground and now forms the State Emblem of India; the wheel of dharma from the same pillar appears on the flag of India.

• 7. Living Sarnath Today

  ›

  Anagarika Dharmapala, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who devoted his life to reviving Buddhism in India after what he saw as seven centuries of virtual extinction, supervised the construction of the modern Mulagandha Kuty Vihara at Sarnath. Mary Robinson Foster, a wealthy Hawaiian philanthropist, provided much of the financial support for the project. The temple opened to the public in 1931. Inside, the walls are decorated with frescoes by Japanese artist Kosetsu Nosu, who lived from 1885 to 1973, depicting scenes from the life of the Buddha. The temple holds a gilded replica of a fifth-century CE sculpture of the Buddha preaching his first sermon.

  Sarnath also functions as a Jain pilgrimage centre. The village of Singhpur, about 1.7 km northwest of Sarnath, is believed to be the birthplace of Shreyansanatha, the 11th tirthankara of Jainism. The current Sarnath Jain Tirth was built in 1824 and stands roughly 70 m southwest of the Dhamek Stupa. The main deity inside is a blue-coloured statue of Shreyansanatha, 75 cm tall, seated in the lotus position.

  Nations where Buddhism is a major faith, including Cambodia, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam, have established temples and monasteries at Sarnath in styles characteristic of their home cultures. A standing Buddha statue 24.3 m in height, inspired by the Buddhas of Bamiyan, stands on the grounds of the Thai temple; construction began in 1997 and the statue was unveiled in 2011. In 1998, Sarnath was nominated for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The Chaukhandi Stupa, which marks the spot where the Buddha reunited with his first five disciples, is capped with an octagonal brick tower that Akbar erected in 1588 as a memorial to Emperor Humayun. Tourist arrivals, which topped 1.5 million in 2018, confirm that Sarnath has reclaimed its place as one of the most visited sacred sites in South Asia.