Asalha Puja and Vassa

Asalha Puja is an annual Buddhist festival day, and Vassa ("rain") is the three-month monastic retreat that begins the day after it. On Asalha Puja, Buddhists of the Theravada tradition (the branch of Buddhism practiced mainly in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos) commemorate the Buddha's first sermon. The name Asalha Puja is Pali (the language of the Theravada scriptures) for veneration in the month of Asalha, the eighth month of the Buddhist lunar calendar. The festival falls on the full moon of this month, usually in July, and is also called Dhamma Day ("Day of the Teaching"). The retreat lasts three lunar months, spanning the rainy season, and ends in October. In English, Vassa is sometimes called Buddhist Lent, after a perceived parallel with Lent, the Christian season of fasting before Easter.

The First Sermon

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama, the teacher whose path to awakening founded Buddhism) gave his first sermon in a deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi in northern India. He addressed five ascetics who had once practiced alongside him. The discourse is known as the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta ("Setting the Wheel of the Dhamma in Motion"), meaning a Sutta (discourse of the Buddha) on the Dhamma (the Buddha's teaching, a word that also means truth or law).

The sermon presented the middle way, the balanced path between indulgence and severe self-denial that Buddhists follow toward liberation. It presented the Four Noble Truths: that suffering exists, that it has a cause, that it can end, and that a path leads to its end. That path is the Eightfold Path, a set of eight practices covering ethical conduct, meditation, and understanding. Buddhist tradition holds that one of the five ascetics, Kondañña, understood the teaching immediately and asked for ordination, becoming the first member of the Sangha, the monastic community.

The day marks the first teaching, the first disciple, and the founding of the Sangha. Buddhist tradition holds that with the Sangha the Three Jewels of Buddhism (the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha) were complete.

On the evening of Asalha Puja, worshipers walk three times around the main shrine or stupa (a dome-shaped Buddhist monument) of their temple with candles, incense, and lotus flowers, one circuit for each of the Three Jewels. Monasteries hold recitations of the first sermon and teachings on the Dhamma.

The Rains Retreat

Vassa begins the day after the full moon of Asalha Puja. In the Buddha's time, wandering ascetics of many traditions paused their travels during the Indian monsoon, when roads flooded and walking risked damaging young crops and harming the small creatures in the wet ground. Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha adopted the custom for his monks and nuns, and it became part of the monastic code. For three months, monastics commit to residing at a single monastery and may stay away overnight only for a limited set of permitted reasons.

The retreat is a period of intensified study, meditation, and instruction. It also structures the monastic calendar. Seniority in the Sangha is traditionally counted in rains, so that a monk of five Vassas has been ordained through five retreats. The retreat shapes lay practice as well. In Thailand and neighboring countries, Vassa is a common season for temporary ordination, in which young men spend weeks or months as monks. Many laypeople take on additional commitments for the three months, such as giving up alcohol or meat, keeping additional ethical precepts, or attending the temple weekly. Vassa opens with merit-making ceremonies (offerings and acts that Buddhists believe bring spiritual benefit), including the offering of bathing cloths for the rains and, in Thailand, the presentation of large carved candles intended to burn in the temple throughout the retreat. In the city of Ubon Ratchathani (Thailand), the candle processions have developed into a major annual event.

Pavarana and Kathina

Vassa ends on the full moon three lunar months after it begins, usually in October, with Pavarana (a Pali word meaning invitation), a ceremony in which monastics invite one another's correction for anything done amiss during the retreat. The month that follows is the Kathina season, in which lay communities present new robes and supplies to monasteries that have completed the rains. Kathina is named after the wooden frame once used for sewing monastic robes, and the robe offering is one of the main merit-making occasions of the Theravada year.