Theravada · Pāli: theravāda

Theravada means the Doctrine of the Elders. It is, in Access to Insight’s words, “the school of Buddhism that draws its scriptural inspiration from the Tipitaka, or Pali canon, which scholars generally agree contains the earliest surviving record of the Buddha’s teachings”. That Pali Canon has three baskets: the Vinaya Pitaka, the rules and customs of the monastic Sangha; the Sutta Pitaka, the sermons of the Buddha and his close disciples; and the Abhidhamma Pitaka, a detailed psycho-philosophical analysis of the teaching. Its language, Pali, is based on a dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan probably spoken in central India in the Buddha’s time.

For many centuries Theravada has been “the predominant religion of continental Southeast Asia (Thailand, Myanmar/Burma, Cambodia, and Laos) and Sri Lanka”, with followers numbering well over 100 million, and in recent decades it has begun to take root in the West. It is, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, “the only surviving tradition of Buddhism that is not Mahāyāna”; the other early schools died out.

The clearest difference from the Mahayana is the goal each recommends. Most Theravada practitioners “aspire to become Saints”, that is arahants or “worthy ones”, for whom the life in which they attain it is the last, while “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”. A note on names: Mahayana texts call the older traditions Hinayana, the “lesser vehicle”, which the same source calls “a pejorative term”, so Theravada is the name to use. We set the two traditions side by side in Theravada vs Mahayana.