Dharmachakra

The name comes from the first sermon. In the Pali Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, "Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion", the Buddha teaches a group of five monks in the Game Refuge at Isipatana, near Varanasi, and the gods cry out that he "has set in motion the unexcelled Wheel of Dhamma". The place is also known as the Deer Park at Sarnath. In the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the account of his last days, the Buddha names the place where he "set rolling the unexcelled Wheel of the Dhamma" as one of four places his followers should visit. The wheel is older than its Buddhist meaning. According to the Tibetan Language Institute's guide, it first meant royalty, the "Monarch of the Wheel" (chakravartin), and came into Buddhist use on the pillars of Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE. The earliest Buddhist sculpture does not show the Buddha at all. Albert Grünwedel (1901) and Alfred Foucher (1917) both describe reliefs that stand for him with signs instead: his footprints, the tree of his enlightenment, a stupa for his death. For the first sermon the sign was a wheel, which in Foucher's words was "usually accompanied by two gazelles", for the Deer Park. Grünwedel adds that on the sculptures of Ashoka's time the wheel stands for the Buddha himself, sometimes with a trident placed above it.