Theravada

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Theravada is the oldest existing school of Buddhism, and its followers have preserved their version of the Buddha's teaching for over two millennia. They keep that teaching in the Pali Canon, the most complete Buddhist canon surviving in a classical Indian language. As of 2010, it accounted for 36 percent of the world's Buddhists, behind the 53 percent who belong to Mahayana. The name means "Doctrine of the Elders," a claim that reaches back to senior monks said to have gathered at the first council. But the path from that ancient claim to a modern world religion runs through gold plates buried in Southeast Asia, a tablet book carved in stone, and meditation manuals written half in Pali and half in languages no longer spoken. What did these monks choose to keep, and what did they refuse to accept? How did a tradition rooted in India and Sri Lanka come to define the official faith of nations? And why does so much of its life happen far from the canonical page?

• 2. Doctrine Of The Elders

  ›

  The Pali word theravada combines thera, meaning "elder" or "senior monk," with vada, meaning "doctrine," "teaching," or "school." According to Kate Crosby, at the Mahavihara in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka in the fifth century CE, the term thera-vada referred to the teachings of those senior monks who gathered at the first council. This usage credited the Mahavihara's own codifications and commentaries of the Tipitaka to the Buddha's immediate arahant disciples. In the twelfth century, the Mahavihara monastic tradition came to dominate the Buddhism of Sri Lanka and from there Southeast Asia. Yet only in the modern period did the term come to mean the community religion of the whole region. It became the official designation at the World Fellowship of Buddhists in 1950. Colonial-era scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries first called this tradition Southern Buddhism. It also became labeled as one of the Hinayana "inferior vehicle" schools, a pejorative term drawn from Mahayana sutras to describe opposing schools. Representatives of the tradition reacted against that label from the end of the nineteenth century, searching for an acceptable common name and finally settling on Theravada. That settled name marked a tradition defined as much by what it rejected as by what it preserved.

• 3. What The School Refuses

  ›

  Theravada rejects the authenticity of the Mahayana sutras, which appeared from around the first century BCE onward. Because of this, it generally does not recognize the existence of many Buddhas and bodhisattvas believed by the Mahayana school, such as Amitabha and Vairocana, since they are not found in its scriptures. This conservatism extends across theoretical study, called pariyatti, and monastic discipline, called Vinaya. On the philosophy of time, the tradition follows philosophical presentism, the view that only present-moment phenomena exist, against the Sarvastivadin view that phenomena exist in past, present, and future alike. Theravada holds that insight into the Four Noble Truths happens instantaneously rather than gradually, and that the defilements are abandoned all at once. It traditionally rejects the idea of an intermediate state between rebirths, though scholars such as Bhikkhu Sujato have noted canonical passages like the Kutuhalasala Sutta that support such a state. It also rejects the docetic view, found in Mahayana, that the Buddha's physical body was an incorporeal manifestation and that his birth and death were an illusion. In Theravada, the Buddha resided in the human realm and could not stop something already arisen from ceasing. He could not keep a being from growing old, sick, or dying. These positions are presented in the Kathavatthu, also called Points of Controversy, a work that mapped exactly where this school drew its lines.

• 4. The Pali Canon

  ›

  The Pali Tipitaka was committed to writing in the first century BCE, making Theravada one of the first Buddhist schools to write down its canon. The recension that survives today is that of the Sri Lankan Mahavihara sect. Its oldest manuscripts from Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia date to the 15th century and are incomplete, while complete manuscripts of the four Nikayas appear only from the 17th century onward. Yet fragments survive in inscriptions from Southeast Asia dated to the 3rd or 4th century. According to Alexander Wynne, these agree almost exactly with extant Pali manuscripts, meaning the canon was transmitted with high accuracy for well over 1,500 years. The Tipitaka has three parts: the Vinaya Pitaka, the Sutta Pitaka, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka. The Abhidhamma is believed to be a later addition, dating from around the 3rd century BCE onward, and was not recognized outside the Theravada school. The Theravada Vinaya contains 227 monastic rules for bhikkhus, while the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya used in East Asian Buddhism has 253. The Abhidhamma presents a method that builds a single consistent philosophical system. Because it analyzes the internal lived experience of beings and the structure of consciousness, scholars such as Nyanaponika and Bhikkhu Bodhi have compared it to a phenomenological psychology. The tradition holds that the Buddha himself taught the Abhidhamma, a claim some modern Theravadins now question. Beyond such formal analysis lay a body of texts that ordinary followers were far more likely to encounter.

• 5. The Living Library

  ›

  Buddhaghosa, who worked in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, stands as the most important Theravada author outside the Tipitaka itself. He wrote Pali commentaries based on older Sri Lankan commentaries of the Mahavihara tradition, and he composed the Visuddhimagga, a compendium of Theravada doctrine. His contemporaries Dhammapala and Buddhadatta also wrote commentaries and other works in Pali. Theravada monks produced historical chronicles such as the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa, along with hagiographies, poetry, and Pali grammars. According to Kate Crosby, there is a far greater volume of Theravada literature in vernacular languages than in Pali. The Jataka tales, stories of the Buddha's past lives, are popular among all classes and appear in formats ranging from cartoons to high literature. The Vessantara Jataka is one of the most popular. Most people access Buddhist teachings not through Pali scripture but through vernacular literature, oral teachings, sermons, art, performance, films, and internet media. These vernacular forms carried the tradition into daily devotion long before they reached printed manuals.

• 6. From India To Empire

  ›

  The school descends from the Vibhajjavada, a division within the Sthavira nikaya, which arose after the first schism in the Indian Buddhist community. Theravada sources trace the tradition to the Third Buddhist council, when the elder Moggaliputta-Tissa is said to have compiled the Kathavatthu. Aided by the patronage of Mauryan kings like Ashoka, the school spread through India and reached Sri Lanka through missionary monks like Mahinda. In Sri Lanka it became based at the Great Vihara in Anuradhapura, the ancient capital. Over time two other sects split from the Mahavihara, the Abhayagiri and the Jetavana, and they often came into conflict over royal patronage. The reign of Parakramabahu I, from 1153 to 1186, brought an extensive reform that created a single unified sangha dominated by the Mahavihara sect. Epigraphical evidence shows Theravada became dominant in the Southeast Asian kingdoms of Sri Ksetra and Dvaravati from about the 5th century CE. The oldest surviving Buddhist texts in Pali are gold plates found at Sri Ksetra, dated to around the 5th to 6th century. Starting around the 11th century, Sinhalese monks and Southeast Asian elites led a widespread conversion of mainland Southeast Asia. The Burmese king Anawrahta, who reigned from 1044 to 1077, and the Thai king Ram Khamhaeng, active in the late 13th century, were instrumental in making Theravada the predominant religion of Burma and Thailand. During the 15th and 16th centuries it became the state religion in Cambodia and Laos, where Hindu and Mahayana temples like Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom were transformed into Theravadin monasteries. Today Theravada is the official religion of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Cambodia, and the dominant Buddhist variant in Laos and Thailand. Those kings who called themselves Dhamma Kings set a pattern of state involvement that would intensify under modern rulers.

• 7. The Modern Reinvention

  ›

  In the 19th and 20th centuries, Theravada Buddhists came into direct contact with western ideologies, religions, and modern science, producing responses called "Buddhist modernism." In the British colonies of Ceylon and Burma, Buddhist institutions lost their traditional role as prime providers of education. Figures of the Sri Lankan Buddhist revival included Anagarika Dhammapala, Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera, Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thera, and Henry Steel Olcott, one of the first American converts to Buddhism. Two new monastic orders, the Amarapura Nikaya and the Ramanna Nikaya, formed in the 19th century. In Burma, King Mindon Min, who lived from 1808 to 1878, patronized the Fifth Buddhist council in 1871 and the Tripitaka tablets at Kuthodaw Pagoda, still the world's largest book. After independence, Myanmar held the Sixth Buddhist council from Vesak 1954 to Vesak 1956, producing a new redaction of the Pali Canon published in 40 volumes. In Thailand, the only Theravada nation to keep its independence through the colonial era, King Mongkut, who reigned from 1851 to 1868, and his successor Chulalongkorn centralized the sangha into a hierarchical bureaucracy. Mongkut created the Dhammayuttika Nikaya, which kept a stricter discipline, including not using money, not storing food, and not taking milk in the evening. The Vipassana movement revived meditation in Burma, with Ledi Sayadaw, who lived from 1846 to 1923, as a key figure. The 20th century also brought forest traditions, including the Thai Forest Tradition founded by Ajahn Mun, who lived from 1870 to 1949. The tradition spread westward, founding viharas such as the London Buddhist Vihara in 1926 and the Washington Buddhist Vihara in 1965. That outward spread carried with it the practice that modernists prized most, even as it remained, in the words of one observer, a minor part of most monks' lives.

• 8. The Path Of Practice

  ›

  The Noble Eightfold Path is one of the most widely used frameworks in Theravada, summarized as the three disciplines of sila, or moral conduct, samadhi, or concentration, and panna, or wisdom. Theravada orthodoxy takes the seven stages of purification outlined in the Visuddhimagga as the basic outline of the path. Buddhaghosa systematized classic Theravada meditation, dividing it into samatha, the calming practices, and vipassana, the insight practices, and listing 40 forms known as kammatthanas, or "workplaces." According to Buswell, vipassana appears to have fallen out of practice by the 10th century, amid the belief that liberation was no longer attainable until the coming of Maitreya. It was revived in Burma in the 18th century by Medawi, who lived from 1728 to 1816, and later by Ledi Sayadaw and Mahasi Sayadaw. An older esoteric tradition called boran kammatthana, or yogavacara, was the dominant form of meditation in the 18th century and may reach back to the 16th. According to Crosby, it involved internalizing aspects of the path at points in the body between the nostril and the navel. Modernist reforms and the wars in Indochina drove it into decline, and it now survives in only a few Cambodian and Thai temples. Release from suffering comes in four stages of awakening: stream-enterers, once-returners, non-returners, and arahants, who are free from all defilements. Theravada holds that an arahant is never a layperson. As Bhikkhu Bodhi notes, the few recorded lay disciples who reached Nibbana either attained it on the brink of death or entered the monastic order soon after. Yet the layperson's role was never empty. In Thailand today, about half of the primary schools are located in monasteries, a quiet measure of how far this oldest school still reaches into ordinary life.