Dhamma Khetta is where the whole tradition started

From a switch factory to the root of a worldwide map

The thing most pages about Dhamma Khetta get wrong, or just skip, is how ordinary the beginning was. There was no grand campus. There was a businessman named Ratilal Mehta who had sat a couple of courses with Goenka in Rajasthan, liked what happened to him, and invited Goenka to teach inside the switch factory Mehta had just built in Hyderabad. People sat their first ten days surrounded by industrial buildings.

Only after a few of those courses did Mehta donate 2 acres of land next to the factory, and a real center went up. The first course on that ground was held in September 1976. That is the moment the tradition marks as its first center. The timeline below is how it grew from there.

The numbers, today

These come from the center's own site, verified on 2026-06-26. Treat the live links as the source of truth and this as a snapshot, since facilities and schedules change.

Why the name is a farming word

Almost every center in this tradition is named Dhamma-something: Dhamma Giri (“hill of Dhamma”), Dhamma Cakka (“wheel of Dhamma”), and so on. Dhamma Khetta uses khetta, the Pali word for a field, the kind a farmer plants. So the name reads as “field of Dhamma”.

The image is deliberate. In the early texts a field is where you sow and what you sow eventually comes up, for better or worse. Naming the very first center a field, rather than a hill or a palace or a temple, frames the whole thing as ground you work, not a monument you visit. If you want the linguistics of these names, our note on what Vipassana means walks through the same Pali vocabulary.

The facts, in one place

Live schedule and applications: schedule.vridhamma.org/courses/khetta. Center site: khetta.dhamma.org. Global directory: dhamma.org directory.

Does it matter that it was first?

Practically, no. A ten-day course at Dhamma Khetta follows the same daily clock and the same Code of Discipline as a course anywhere else, and the technique is transmitted the same way by authorized assistant teachers no matter which center you sit at. I can say that because I have sat six courses across three centers in California and the structure never moved an inch. Being the first center does not make it a better course.

What it carries is history. If you have ever sat anywhere in this tradition, the room you sat in is, in a real sense, a copy of a copy of something that started on those 2 acres in Hyderabad in 1976. For some people that lineage is just trivia. For others it is the reason to go sit there specifically. Either reaction is fine. If you want the structural detail of what those ten days actually contain, that lives in our breakdown of the 10-day course structure.

I am not a teacher, and I have not sat at Dhamma Khetta myself, so I will not pretend to describe what practicing there feels like or tell you how to practice. For anything operational, the only honest pointers are the official Code of Discipline and an authorized assistant teacher at the course you attend.