Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta – The Great Discourse on the Wheel of Dhamma by Mahsi Sayadaw also known as the Dharmacakra Pravartana Sūtra is a central discourse in which the Buddha addresses five monks who attended to him just before to his final liberation. The Buddha instructs the monks not pursue either of two extremes: worldly pleasures or painful self-mortification. This approach text has been the origin of the Buddhist concept of The Middle Way. The Buddha explains that the middle way involves pursuing a “Noble Eightfold Path” that includes right understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration. This path leads to vision, knowledge, peace, enlightenment and Nibbana. The Buddha then identifies the following “Four Noble Truths”:
- Suffering – involves birth, aging, illness, death, being with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing, not getting what one wants, and “in brief” the five aggregates-of-clinging.
- Suffering’s origin is craving for sensual pleasures, existence and extermination.
- Suffering’s end comes from the relinquishment of and freedom from this craving.
- The path leading to suffering’s end is the aforementioned Noble Eightfold Path.
Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is a core Buddhist text, download it here ( 279 pages/1,66MB):
