page_title: Theravada
section_title: Modernisation and spread to the West
hierarchical_section_title: Theravada / History / Modernisation and spread to the West
caption_attribution_description: English: The Buddhists and Colonel Olcott in Colombo (1883)
context_page_description: Theravāda is the most commonly accepted name of Buddhism's oldest existing school. The school's adherents, termed Theravādins, have preserved their version of Gautama Buddha's teaching in the Pāli Canon. The Pāli Canon is the most complete Buddhist canon surviving in a classical Indian language, Pāli, which serves as the school's sacred language and lingua franca. For over a millennium, theravādins have endeavored to preserve the dhamma as recorded in their school's texts. In contrast to Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, Theravāda tends to be conservative in matters of doctrine and monastic discipline.
  Modern Theravāda derives from the Mahāvihāra sect, a Sri Lankan branch of the Vibhajjavādins, a sub-sect of the Indian Sthavira Nikaya, which began to establish itself on the island from the 3rd century BCE onwards. It was in Sri Lanka that the Pāli Canon was written down and the school's commentary literature developed.
  From Sri Lanka, the Theravāda Mahāvihāra tradition subsequently spread to the rest of Southeast Asia. It is the dominant religion in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand and is practiced by minorities in India, Bangladesh, China, Nepal, and Vietnam.
context_section_description: In the 19th century began a process of mutual influence of both Asian Buddhists and Hinduists, and a Western audience interested in ancient wisdom. Theravāda was also influenced by this process, which lead to Buddhist modernism; especially Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, founders of the Theosophical Society, had a profound role in this process in Sri Lanka. Simultaneously, vipassana-meditation was re-invented, and in Theravāda countries a lay vipassana practice developed. This took a high flight in East Asia from the 1950s onwards with the vipassana-movement, and from the 1970s also in the west, with western students who popularized vipassana-meditation in the west, giving way to the development and popularisation of mindfulness-practice.
caption: Henry Olcott and Buddhists (Colombo, 1883).
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