Doctrinal centre
The Pāli canon — the Tipiṭaka, three baskets — was preserved orally for several centuries before being committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Theravāda's distinctive doctrinal commitments include the analysis of mind into momentary dhammas (treated in the Abhidhamma), the centrality of the three marks of existence — impermanence, anatta and dukkha — and the figure of the arahant (the fully liberated one) as the ideal of awakening. The tradition is conservative in the literal sense: it has changed less, doctrinally, than any other major Buddhist school.
Practice tradition
Theravāda is not primarily devotional; it is contemplative. Monastic life is structured around the vinaya (precepts), study and meditation, with insight (vipassanā) and concentration (samatha) treated as two complementary cultivations. The Thai forest tradition — Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Mun and their lineages — preserves a particularly rigorous monastic and meditative form, and was instrumental in the late-twentieth-century Western inheritance.
The modern Western inheritance
The twentieth-century Burmese revival of vipassanā — Mahasi Sayadaw and the lay teacher U Ba Khin — and the Thai forest tradition both reached the English-speaking world through teachers trained in Asia. The Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts was founded by their students — Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield — and the generation of American teachers including Tara Brach trained in this stream. Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR is the secular clinical extension.
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