Update: this post got a major upgrade (rewrite) to become an essay in the Spring 2023 issue of Tricycle. The version in Tricycle is more developed, but the original post, below, has a certain flair. If you’re looking for flair, read on.

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“The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma” is not the only possible translation of dhammacakkappavattana, the title of the discourse that relates the Buddha’s first teaching. There is an alternative translation, just as accurate, truer to the spirit of the Buddha’s teachings more broadly, and more useful to us as Buddhists trying to make sense of, practice, and live by the dharma in the modern world.

Monastic translators do usually go with something like “The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma” as the title of this discourse. Reasonable. Cakka can certainly mean “Wheel.” And pavattana can mean “Setting in Motion.” The Pali word dhamma is fairly represented, of course, by “Dhamma,” except for the capital “D.” (Pali doesn’t have its own script, and there are no capital letters in the earliest scripts that record it.) In any case, dhamma here means “teachings.”

In the title as usually translated, these teachings are likened to a wheel. We infer from this simile that once people start to take them up, the teachings will inevitably pass from person to person due to their intrinsic value, just as a wheel, due to its shape, will continue to roll once set in motion. All well and good.

And the wheel has been an important Buddhist symbol since canonical times. In the context of this discourse, the title brings to mind a great, massive, powerful wheel, an image of grandeur and majesty. The image implies a revealed Truth, from an inerrant Buddha who bestows it fully-formed on suffering humanity, inviolable and beyond question. (Some monastic scholars translate dhamma as “Truth,” capital “T,” though the word is nowhere used in canonical Pali to mean “truth.”)

But consider that cakka means not only “wheel” but also “eye,” “sphere,” “circle,” and (among other meanings) “ball.” And that pavattana means not only “setting in motion” but also “set turning” or “get rolling.” Dhammacakkappavattana can therefore be translated, literally, as “getting the ball rolling.”

As a translation of our title, “Getting the Ball of the Dhamma Rolling” (yes, I’m willing to capitalize dhamma in an English-language title) has much to recommend it. It may not pack the gravitas of “The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma.” But this is what recommends it. We don’t need an inerrant Buddha whose words are true because he said them, or because someone said he said them. We don’t need a fully-formed, beyond-question dharma. Such conceptions of the Buddha and of the dharma incline us towards—and are surely products of—the authoritarian religious impulse.

We are as prone to this impulse as the ancient monastics who enshrined it in some but not all of the canonical teachings, as well as orthodox traditionalists down through the ages who infused some but not all of our Buddhist traditions with it. We can listen instead to our clear-eyed, self-aware discernment, which recognizes and resists this impulse.

We can regard the Buddha as a wise but human teacher, an innovator who introduced a set of original, insightful, useful ideas, or even just the germs of such ideas (along with, possibly, some less useful ones). We can understand these ideas as natural phenomena, rather than supernatural ones—and therefore, in dharma terms, as compounded things, subject to change.

The Buddha’s ideas, like all ideas, surely evolved over time as they passed from mind to mind. Over the course of Buddhist history, they surely developed in the minds of countless human beings into just the intricate, overdetermined web of ideas that we now regard as Buddhist ideas. Some of these ideas are truer than others. Some are more useful than others.

Buddhist ideas, like any ideas, are true or useful not because of who said them, or how ancient they are, or whether they reflect the intended meaning of a sacred text. They are true to the degree that they correspond to how things are. They are useful if they are beneficial. We oughtn’t to locate their truth or goodness in their origins or in orthodoxy. We can have truth for authority, rather than authority for truth (to paraphrase Lucretia Mott).

“Getting the Ball Rolling” sets us up for a discourse in a modern sense of “discourse”: a conversation we can join. We can pick up the ball of the dharma and roll it further along ourselves. We can be “Buddhists” as followers of a human Buddha, a teacher who offered his valuable discoveries for others, and now us, to take up, practice with, benefit from, experiment with, modify, and improve.

Amazingly, both the ancient texts and Buddhist tradition offer ample support for just this understanding. We have to look past millennia of accreted dogma and orthodoxy, but we can find support for such an understanding in the discourses themselves. We also find such support in reformist Buddhist movements throughout Buddhist history, and in the wisdom of recent, unassailably Buddhist teachers like Ajahn Chah and Ajahn Buddhadassa.

In the case of the dhammacakkappavattanasutta, seeing such support in the title isn’t even a stretch. I’m not really joking with my alternative translation here (though I hope you’ll see the humor). The phrase dhammacakkapavattana may once have had just the same idiomatic meaning in Pali as “get the ball rolling” does today. In English, the idiom simply means, “get something started.” The context of the discourse, if not the style, certainly suggests that the Pali phrase had this meaning: getting something started is just what the Buddha does in this discourse. To understand the title instead from an orthodox viewpoint—as announcing not just the start, but also the middle and end of the dharma (the “Truth”)—is to miss the point of the dharma itself.

The Buddha got the ball rolling. As tradition has it, he got it rolling with the teaching that he delivers in the dhammacakkappavattanasutta. In this revered discourse, the Buddha delivers this first teaching to his first five followers, communicating to them—and to us—the insights he gained from his recent enlightenment for the first time. Since the first words in this record of this first teaching are those of its title, I thought it appropriate to share a few thoughts on this title in this first reflection for the Finding Santi website.