photo taken at NALA gompa in Dhagpo Shhedrup Ling monastery - photographer Lama Karma Kunkhen Rai
The third of the days in the Tibetan Buddhist calendar that commemorate the Great Teacher of this age, Buddha Shakyamuni and His work is "Chokhor Dukhen" - the Dharma Wheel Spinning Festival.
The preceding commemoration of the Buddha's birth and the subsequent great full moon of the Master's Awakening and Mahaparinirvana ("Saga Dawa Düchen") is joined, according to tradition, after seven weeks by a festival commemorating the beginning of the Buddha's teachings - the Feast of the "Spinning (setting in motion) of the Wheel of Dharma". It actualizes the remembrance of the Buddha's first-ever interpretation, by which he laid the foundation of his teaching, the Buddha-dharma (Buddha Dharma), in the minds of his disciples who were also listening for the first time.
This "cornerstone of all Buddhism" is preserved and known as the "Dharma-chakra pravartana sutra", the "Dharma Wheel Spinning Sutra".
"Dharma" (Tibetan "chhö") is an ancient Sanskrit term for "law", "lawfulness", which is also the "sense" holding a particular reality (life, world, universe) "together" or "in function". In ancient India, this word was always felt as a term for the supreme, cosmic nature of spiritual law, however it was imagined and interpreted by individual teachers and schools. The Buddha Dharma is the realization (and realization) of the great - and natural - law of the mind, its natural self-purification, liberation (from ignorance) and full realization in Bodhi, Awakening. As such, it is symbolized and visualized in the image of the wheel, whose eight basic spokes-arcs represent the eight stages or steps of the "Noble Eightfold Path" that is the path to this liberation and Awakening. This Wheel of Dharma (Sanskrit: dharma chakra. Tib. chho-khor) is what the Awakened One must set in motion himself-a movement signifying evolution and realization.
After his Awakening under the Bodhi tree, Shakyamuni Buddha heard the plea of the deities of the world, represented by their supreme representatives Brahma and Indra, to initiate a public teaching that would be open to all who would be willing and able to listen. The Buddha then turned his steps from the solitude of the forest to the city of Varanasi, the spiritual heart of India. Nearby, in the famous "Gazelle Grove", where the free life of antelopes was protected by an ancient vow from human violence, he first met five shramanas - forest hermits, his former companions who had earlier abandoned him for his rejection of the path of extreme asceticism. They, unexpectedly overcome by the powerful impression emanating from their former comrade, now began to listen to him as a teacher.
In this, his first teaching, the "Dharma-chakra pravartana sutra," the Master shared with people for the first time the initial realization of the "four noble truths" of suffering - the distress or unsatisfactoriness that repeatedly grips and encloses human experience and mind. This realization is a necessary beginning and an object of motivation and meditation if this ever-recurring distress is to be truly overcome. The first truth "about (the reality of) distress" shows the full dimension and scope of this ever-recurring experience. The "distressing", ultimately unsatisfying inwardly, is the nature of everything that man merely "gets", that he automatically accepts, and that thus ultimately constitutes his whole passively, unconsciously accepted life. The second truth, "the origin of distress," identifies its cause and source in the underlying unconscious clinging and unconscious craving. The third, "on the cessation of distress," then points to the possibility of overcoming suffering by removing this cause, and the fourth outlines that aforementioned "Noble Eightfold Path"-the eight organically interconnected steps of inner awareness that overcome and end this distress and all the suffering that results from it. These, as we have said, form the eight spokes, the eight spokes of the Dharma wheel that set them in motion.
In this connection, the Buddha clearly articulates in the sutra the necessary attitude of a balanced "middle way," a balance far removed on the one hand from unconscious losing oneself in enjoyment and on the other from extreme asceticism as violence overcoming nature.
This view of first suffering, distress or unsatisfactoriness in their reality and full scope, and then the possibility of overcoming and transforming them, points directly to an understanding of the whole law of conditioning, the whole process of the conditioned "dependent arising of distress". The interpretation of this "chain of dependent arising" that the Buddha attached as the next step in the "first turn around the Dharma" is therefore also commemorated on this day.
The Buddha's first teaching in the "Gazelle Grove", today's Sārnāth near Vārāṇāṇī, was then greeted and saluted by the gods of all world realms. In their words, this "movement of the Dharma wheel" could not be held back or reversed from that moment on.
Thus, for the first time in the history available to us, the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the community and order of followers, the Sangha, were fully manifested.

Author Bernard Hvolka