Was the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma a Historical Event?
“Buddhist scriptures are not historical facts.” It is an extremely provocative title. There is a reason I decided to record a video under this title. This morning, Yadanbeopseok TV uploaded a video called There Is No Rebirth?! It was a discussion between Venerable Hyangbong, who had recently appeared on several Buddhist channels arguing that there is no rebirth, and Venerable Heojeong, who had argued against that claim. Venerable Heojeong has also played an ongoing role in efforts to reform the Jogye Order, and his position was that denying rebirth amounts to disregarding Buddhist scripture.
Near the beginning of the discussion, Venerable Heojeong cited the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Discourse on Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma. He said that it presents the Four Noble Truths—suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path—and states that craving, the origin of suffering, causes people to undergo rebirth. His reasoning was that the first turning of the Dhamma wheel was a historical event and that the Buddha must therefore actually have said this. I am addressing the subject because Venerable Hyangbong did not properly challenge that premise.
There is no basis on which we can be certain that the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is a historical record. More precisely, we do not know whether it is factual, and there is a very high probability that it was constructed later.
This does not mean that I am declaring that the discourse contains no trace of a historical event. Some orally transmitted memory or part of an actual event may be embedded in it. But we cannot be certain that the text as a whole is historical fact. That distinction is where today’s discussion begins.
We Must Place the Bible and Buddhist Scriptures Side by Side
People who regard Buddhist scripture as sacred and have strong faith in it may find this argument offensive. Yet if we are to examine anything critically, we have to take a step back from what we have heard, seen, and learned. Before clinging to Buddhist scripture and saying, “Ours is factual,” let us place it beside the Christian Old and New Testaments—the Bible—and ask the same question. Is the Bible historical fact?
If the Bible is historical fact, Buddhist scripture cannot also be historical fact; if Buddhist scripture is historical fact, the Bible cannot also be historical fact. One speaks of rebirth and many lives, while the other speaks of heaven and hell, resurrection, the end of the world, and judgment. If adherents of each religion believe only their own account to be factual, they can do nothing but become bitter enemies.
A Buddhist must not settle the matter through faith by saying, “Then Buddhist scripture must be right.” Buddhism is not a religion in which awakening is attained through belief. We are people seeking to become buddhas ourselves. To do so, we must criticize the delusions and illusions to which we are attached and wake up from the images we have made. We can escape an image only after recognizing that we are trapped in it.
A buddha is an awakened person who seeks to escape illusion and delusion and see the world as it is. A Buddhist must therefore judge scripture rationally, not defend it through faith.
Within the Bible, too, many passages conflict: the words attributed to Jesus conflict with statements in the Old Testament, and records within the New Testament conflict with one another. This is why scholars who study the Bible have argued that biblical inerrancy cannot be maintained as it is, and that the Bible can contain errors because human beings wrote and selected its contents. Buddhist scripture is no different.
Are Only Mahayana Scriptures Later Compositions?
The scientific and comparative-philological study of Buddhist scripture began very late. In the video, I mention Max Müller’s work in the late nineteenth century and the spread of Early Buddhist discourse in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s, after Southern Buddhist texts became known through Japan. During that process, the assertion that “Mahayana Buddhism is not the Buddha’s teaching” gained force.
Among those who identify with Early Buddhism are many who dismiss Mahayana as non-Buddhavacana while treating the Pali Nikayas of Southern Buddhism as the Buddha’s direct words and an inerrant historical record. They cite philological evidence that terms and ideas absent from earlier layers appear later, and that ideas concerning bodhisattvas, Amitabha Buddha, and the tathagatagarbha were formed afterward. There is a valid part to that observation.
But we must take one more step. If Mahayana scriptures are later compositions, were the Nikayas really preserved exactly as the Buddha spoke them? Can Southern scriptures alone be treated as an exception and called historical fact? My answer is no. Like Mahayana scriptures, the Southern scriptures are texts in which later people wrote down the Buddha’s meaning as they understood it.
If we stop at the claim that Mahayana is not Buddhavacana, we end up with another faith that treats only its own scriptures as inerrant. We must step back far enough to see that the Southern scriptures and the Nikayas are also texts made and transmitted by human beings.
“Thus Have I Heard” Does Not Guarantee a Historical Record
A representative device that makes people believe Buddhist scriptures contain the Buddha’s direct words is the phrase “Thus have I heard.” We are commonly taught that Ananda heard and remembered all the teachings beside the Buddha, recited them at the First Council after the Buddha’s death, and transmitted them accurately through India’s extraordinary oral tradition. Parts of that account may be factual, but it also contains a myth that encourages us to accept the whole story as historical fact.
Consider the Diamond Sutra. Its opening describes the Buddha staying at Jetavana, washing his feet, arranging his seat, sitting down, and beginning to teach. The scene is painted as though someone present recorded what they saw. But if the Diamond Sutra is a later text, that scene is also a literary setting created by a later author. It is not a historical scene in which the Buddha actually delivered the Diamond Sutra.
Judging part of the Diamond Sutra to be excellent is entirely different from claiming that it is the Buddha’s direct speech. I, too, think parts of the Diamond Sutra are excellent. But if a later author wrote what they understood to be the Buddha’s meaning under the Buddha’s name and placed “Thus have I heard” at the beginning to make it resemble scripture, the phrase may not guarantee historicity at all. It may instead be a convention of later composition.
The presence of the words “Thus have I heard” is not evidence that the described scene actually occurred. It may be a literary device that makes a later author’s story look like a discourse delivered by the Buddha.
Those who study Southern Buddhism may readily agree that the Diamond Sutra is not a historical record. If so, the same question must be applied to the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. The familiar story that “the Buddha first taught the Four Noble Truths” does not become historical fact merely because we have heard it repeated.
Compare the Atthakavagga with the Formation of the Four Noble Truths
In the video, I use the Atthakavagga, the “Chapter of Eights” in the fourth chapter of the Sutta Nipata, as an example. Some of its old verses show early forms of greed, hatred, delusion, and conceit and are easy to memorize because of their meter and repetition. Their verse form gives us reason to infer that they likely belong to a very old textual layer, perhaps close to primitive Buddhism.
Yet other discourses explaining and interpreting those old verses were subsequently attached to them. Today we would distinguish an original text from its commentary, but at that time interpretations and explanations were also added under the name of scripture. Can every later explanation therefore be called the Buddha’s words? It is a later person’s interpretation of an older verse.
I explain that a later discourse in the fourth chapter of the Sutta Nipata presents a structure close to an early form of dependent origination, along with an early form of the Four Noble Truths. The completed formulations of the Four Noble Truths and the twelve links of dependent origination were not necessarily delivered all at once from the beginning. They gradually became fixed through a process in which later people explained old verses and still later people organized those explanations again.
If the Four Noble Truths and the twelve links of dependent origination were formed through later processes of organization, we cannot be certain that the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta records the Buddha’s first discourse exactly as it occurred.
Again, I am not denying the possibility that some ancient saying or part of an event was preserved in the discourse. What matters is that we cannot be certain. We must distinguish religious belief from evidence that something actually happened. We must view causes and processes of change through dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self, instead of turning what we want to have happened into fact.
Scriptures Are Texts Written and Revised by Many People
In many cases, we do not know who authored a scripture. We have to ask whether one person or many people wrote it, whether it remained unchanged after being fixed once, or whether it was repeatedly revised. Comparing the Southern Nikayas, the Northern Agamas, and the Tripitaka reveals records with different lengths and wording. Texts closer to older layers are generally metrical, repetitive, and easy to memorize like poems or songs. As prose grows longer and scenic description richer, we must suspect an increase in later explanations and stories.
Imagine that I speak here for thirty minutes and then ask one hundred listeners to write down what they heard today. Would all one hundred write the same account? One person remembers one passage and misses another. People mishear, insert their own views, and focus on whatever they consider important. One hundred people produce one hundred different records. That is what human beings are like.
Human beings wrote Buddhist scriptures. Whether they wrote with good or bad intentions, whether they understood accurately or misunderstood, numerous authors wrote, added, removed, and revised texts from the viewpoints of different periods and schools. The Pali Nikayas are one collection among the traditions formed through that process. They cannot alone be called the original historical record.
Scripture is not “a book that wrote down every word of the Buddha without a single error.” It is a collection of texts in which many people tried to record what they understood to be the Buddha’s meaning.
If we assume that scripture is inerrant, we cannot deal with the many contradictions inside scripture itself. People ultimately say that everything is the Buddha’s teaching while choosing what they like as correct, forcing conflicting passages into different interpretations, or cutting and pasting them together. Unless we acknowledge the human process through which scriptures were formed, we become unable to study Buddhism at all.
How Stories Were Attached to the Verses of the Dhammapada
The Dhammapada did not exist only as a single fixed edition. There are shorter and longer versions, and verses were added and revised over time. The Dhammapada Avadana shows prose narratives being attached to the Dhammapada’s verses. Before and after a verse, it adds a story about where the Buddha went, whom he met, what happened, and why he spoke those words, making the verse easier to understand and more persuasive.
But an explanatory story and a historical record are not the same. Prose stating that “the Buddha spoke this verse at a certain time and place to a certain person” may be a literary story created later. The Chuyao Jing likewise adds causes and circumstances explaining how individual Dhammapada verses came about. Comparing how scriptures were transmitted, supplemented, and expanded reveals the direction in which they were formed.
The more detail a text provides about the Buddha’s conduct and the location of a discourse, the older and more accurate it does not necessarily become. The detail may instead be evidence that more prose and stories were attached later.
We therefore cannot call the Dhammapada, the Dhammapada Avadana, or the Chuyao Jing in its entirety historical fact. Even old verses may have unknown origins, while prose added later is still more likely to be fiction. What matters is not believing that scripture is historical fact, but critically discerning within it what the Buddha’s meaning may have been.
The Debate over the Twelve Links and Rebirth Must Also Be Reconsidered from Its Starting Point
Many Buddhist schools divided and argued over the twelve links of dependent origination. From the perspective I present in the video, however, an older form of dependent origination came first, and items were later added until it became fixed as a chain of twelve links. The earlier form contained no meaning of rebirth; birth, aging and death, ignorance, and other items were inserted later to explain rebirth.
People then took the completed twelve-link chain and fought over whether the three-life, twofold causality interpretation was correct and whether rebirth should be accepted. Yet they did not consider that their starting point, the twelve-link formulation itself, might be a later construction. No conclusion emerges when a text into which rebirth has already been inserted is treated as the Buddha’s absolute word.
If we fix a later-constructed text as historical fact and debate rebirth only within it, we can never escape a premise that someone inserted at the beginning.
As I see it, the core of Buddhism is dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self. Formulated doctrines bearing numbers—the Noble Eightfold Path, the Four Noble Truths, various forms of consciousness, and the aggregates—were organized later. Memorizing and believing them is not the practice of Buddhism. We must ask for ourselves what karma is, what supposedly undergoes rebirth, and whether those claims accord with dependent origination and non-self.
Dependent origination is an observable relationship. If we accept stories that cannot be understood as relationships and must simply be believed—claims that an awakened person obtains the six superknowledges, sees former lives or the opposite side of the earth, and reads other minds—merely because they appear in scripture, then we have already lost sight of what “seeing” and “knowing” mean. People believe in supernatural powers because they have not directly examined what sensation and cognition are or what it means to know.
Do Not Believe Scripture; Discern the Meaning Within It
We must not accept scripture as truth itself. What we should seek in Buddhist scripture is not a sentence that can be declared the Buddha’s direct speech without qualification, but what is closest to the Buddha’s meaning. To do that, we must approach the scriptures with doubt and questions, compare them with one another, and think for ourselves in light of dependent origination, impermanence, and non-self.
Buddhist scriptures contain stories of pigeons, monkeys, and crocodiles speaking; heavenly beings descending; and the newborn Buddha taking seven steps and declaring, “Above heaven and below heaven, I alone am honored.” We must not believe all such stories to be actual events merely because they are written in scripture. Scriptures are full of later stories and fiction. Buddhist study becomes possible only when we distinguish literary stories from teachings close to the Buddha’s meaning.
Believing that scripture is historical fact is not the study of Buddhism. Questioning scripture as well and thinking for oneself about what is closest to the Buddha’s meaning—that is Buddhist study.
I am not asking you simply to believe me either. Look further for yourself. Examine how scriptures differ, how prose was attached to verse, and how their contents expanded over time. Only after understanding that Buddhist scriptures are not historical facts can we stop worshiping them blindly and begin studying Buddhism by examining the meaning within them.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.