Theravada Buddhism

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Theravada — Pali for the “Teaching of the Elders” — is the branch of Buddhism that preserves the Pali Canon as its scripture and remains the dominant form of the religion in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. It is the only school of the early, pre-Mahayana phase of Buddhism to survive intact into the present, and it understands itself as the keeper of what the Buddha actually taught, transmitted with the least alteration.

Its scripture is the Tipitaka, the “three baskets”: the monastic rule, the discourses attributed to the Buddha, and the Abhidhamma, a later systematic analysis of mind and phenomena. These texts are in Pali, a Middle Indo-Aryan language close to what the Buddha may have spoken, and the tradition treats that linguistic closeness as part of its claim to authority. The canon was carried orally for some centuries and, by tradition, first written down in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE. Scholarship distinguishes the Theravada school — an ordination lineage and commentarial tradition consolidated in Sri Lanka, whose great systematizer was the fifth-century commentator Buddhaghosa — from the older body of teaching it transmits; the two are not simply identical, and the school’s self-presentation as unbroken original Buddhism is itself a historical construction worth distinguishing from the texts it preserves.

The goal Theravada sets before its adherents is the arhat: one who has worked through the path the Buddha laid out, extinguished craving, and will not be reborn. This is the point on which later Mahayana movements defined themselves against the elder schools, holding up instead the bodhisattva who defers final liberation to help all beings, and calling the older ideal narrow. Theravada held its ground, maintaining that the arhat’s release is the release the Buddha described and that the path to it runs through one’s own disciplined effort rather than the grace of celestial buddhas.

In practice the tradition rests on a division of labor between a monastic order, the Sangha, which preserves the texts and pursues meditation and study, and a lay population that supports the monks and accumulates merit toward better rebirths. Among its meditative disciplines is the cultivation of insight, vipassana — close, sustained attention to the arising and passing of bodily and mental events — which in the twentieth century detached from its monastic setting and seeded much of the secular mindfulness movement in the West. That export carried the technique while leaving most of the doctrine behind, so that a practice framed in Burma and Thailand as a path out of rebirth has been recast, in much of its Western circulation, as a method for managing stress. The older frame remains intact where the tradition is lived, in the monasteries and the giving that sustains them.

→ In the library: The Dhammapada (Müller, 1881) · Buddhist Suttas (Rhys Davids, 1881) · Buddhism in Translations (Warren, 1896)

→ Related: Buddhist Madhyamaka