History of Theravada Buddhism: Very Old and Very New

So today we're going to tackle a topic that I find really interesting which is a Buddhist history in particular we're going to look at the history of taravada Buddhism in a nutshell of course only only the barest introduction even though there's a lot to talk about coming right up [Music] so I'm Doug Smith I'm study director at the secular Buddhist Association that's secular buddhism.org if you're new to the channel and interested in living a wiser and a Kinder and a less stress-filled life consider subscribing to the channel and one of the ways the way sort of the the biggest way on this channel that we look at that is is through early Buddhism through early the the text that we find the some of the writings and ideas we find in early Buddhism and similar kinds of ideas and other philosophies around the world and one of the ways that those early texts have have survived and been passed down to us is through these schools some of these schools these Buddhist schools around the world um that stretch back 2500 years to the Buddha's Lifetime and one of those schools is known as the teravatan school it's a school we find in basically in Southeast Asia and we're going to discuss a sort of a nutshell history of teravada Buddhism now what we're gonna what I'm going to structure this is the ways the teravada Buddhism is both very old is sort of old and is very new because there's ways in which it's very old and very new uh in ways that we don't necessarily understand appreciate I think and particularly the way it's very new we'll get we'll get to the new stuff at the end but we'll start with the old so the traditional story is that the Buddhism that became taravata Buddhism was was transmitted to Sri Lanka where it sort of had its has its its Homeland if you like in somewhere around 250 BCE um and it was done so by the the Son and Daughter of King Ashoka now King Ashoka was the first and probably arguably the greatest Buddhist King who lived around a little bit earlier than that time he can sort of be thought of as the Buddhist Constantine I mean that's obviously oversimplifying a lot of things but for purposes of this video if you know who Constantine was he was when we have the growth of early Christianity Christianity was a very very small uh religion or belief system in the near East and in Rome as well at that time and then Constantine became ruler became the emperor and he converted to Christianity and by doing so he he sort of gave Christianity a kind of a kick in the pants going forward you know it it as a result it became something that all of a sudden was much more popular than it had been it was something that was looked upon favorably by people within Society and similarly I think that's probably what happened around King Ashoka there's you know evidence is of course scanty at that time in India but basically he became a Buddhist King he instituted a number of laws and regulations that seemed to have been based upon the Buddhist texts or at least the Buddhist learning that he had one of the things he did was to send out uh missionaries around the region and perhaps around the world and two of those as I say went to Sri Lanka and instituted a Buddhism in the island and what we have from there is the foundation of this kind of approach now of course it was it was it existed before had been brought to the island so in a certain sense its roots go back into ancient into ancient India of course uh into the the foundation of Buddhism and one of the great um Scholars of early Buddhism Richard gombrich who is also one of the people who has studied a terravada Buddhism most closely had this to say he says I share with teravada Buddhists and most Scholars The View that their form of Buddhism is extremely conservative doctrinally taravada seems to have undergone very little change or development since its origin in Ancient India that is to say that arguably theravada Buddhism is the most that conserves the most of what was what was left by the Buddha that it's the closest of all of the present-day schools of Buddhist teaching to what would have been taught by the the historical Buddha insofar as we can actually know what he taught and these doctrines were transmitted to us in the language of Pali so Pali is a language that all of basically all of theravada Buddhism is grounded upon it's a dialect of Sanskrit teravatans Will May believe some of them that that's the language the Buddha spoken but that's not true he likely spoke in a related language which is called which we refer to today as magadi prakrit which would have been something like Pali it would have been a similar kind of sanskritic language but Pali is kind of an artificial language that was that came up over the years based on these texts that were that were preserved now it's important to keep in mind though that when we talk about theravada Buddhism what we're talking about is a certain kind of a lineage of ordination rather than a set of beliefs or practices and this is a very very important difference because I think a lot of people in the west tend to think of the different schools of Buddhism sort of like in comparison to the to the different branches of Christianity you know Catholicism and protestantism in different schools of protestantism and each one has its own catechism or its own set of beliefs and you have to subscribe to those set of beliefs in order to be a member of that church uh that's not the way it is in in India and Indian religions and in particular with taravada teravada basically terravata Buddhism if you're if you are a terravata Buddhist monk what that is to say is that your ordination lineage can be traced back through the person who ordained you to the person who ordained him all the way back at least conceivably to the historical Buddha although we never can be absolutely sure about that but that's at least the idea and there's no there isn't quite the same idea that you have to have a rigid scent of beliefs to be a terabond in fact there really isn't such a thing you have to be able to practice according to their rules that's one thing um and so Buddhist these kind of Buddhist schools generally are organized around rules around What's called the patimoka or the the monastic rules because in order for you to be able to share your monastic Hut with the other person you have to be sharing the same kind of rules if you're doing things completely differently then it's not going to work in contrast to this the Mahayana approach to Buddhism which is another school a later School some well in certain ways is later Mahayana tends to be an approach to Buddhism based around a certain set of practices which is not the case with terravata so much so but what are some of the Hallmarks of terravada Buddhism one of the one of the Hallmarks is the centrality of the monastic order in other words the the monks and nuns or really there are very few nuns anymore but Monks at least are very important they're critical to what teravada Buddhism is because it retains the flavor of them of monasticism that was there in the early Sangha and around the time or just after the time that the Buddha lived and so it preserves that strong in general a strong distinction between monastics and laypeople and the monastics keep certain vows keep certain rules that lay people don't in particular by being monastic they have to rely they have to live on based on the alms that lay people provide for them they're not allowed they're not allowed to grow and make their own food as monastics in Europe for instance are about that is to say Christian mastics since they're not allowed to make their own food they depend for the laity to feed them to clothe them let's say to give them shelter the laity will provide money for their shelter to provide for their their medical needs and these are these are ways that they that the Buddha set the system up so that the monastic 6 had to be in constant contact with laypeople so the monastics would teach the dhamma or the Dharma and the lay people would provide this kind of support that was the mutual kind of uh back and forth that they had and that was what the Buddha set up so that the monastics did not become isolated in in monasteries so obviously they have to remain celibate they're not supposed to eat any food afternoon uh supposed to eat a relatively small amounts of food they're not supposed to handle money and they're not supposed to go to normal entertainment they're not supposed to go to shows they're not supposed to wear jewelry and so on there's a there's a large number of these kinds of rules and these are very very important for theravada Buddhism now that's obviously not to say that these aren't violated in in many many cases human human nature being what it is societies being what they are of course the rules are an ideal and they're at least thought of as such but if you go to actual monastic orders you go to actual sanghas nowadays in in parts of Southeast Asia they may not necessarily be keeping all of these rules even though they're supposed to and this they're you know they're studying the practice is based around material that we find in the poly Canon which I discuss a lot on this uh channel so if you've watched the channel you will have seen some of the videos I've done about or a lot of the videos I've done about the material from the poly Canon that's the kind of stuff that they that grounds their practice and that grounds uh their approach or they may be relying on close commentaries about that material contemporary commentators on that material but it always goes right back pretty quickly to the material itself you read the actual texts if you're a monastic or at least you can and many of them do or some of them do or again ideally some of them do I'm talking more of a history of ideas here rather than a sociology because sociologically of course there are lots and lots of distinctions and the doctrines are the ones we'll be familiar with uh Four Noble Truths the Eightfold Path dependent origination if these are new to you then check out some videos on the Channel with those titles and you'll find out more about them but that's basically the sort of the background that you will you will get in teravada Buddhism and the aim is to become an aura hunt and awakened being that is someone who has escaped uh dukkha the pain of life that which is the third Noble Truth um who was attained in Nirvana who has escaped uh the What's called the wheel of of samsara of birth and death because within Terror within teravada Buddhism is the belief that we are reborn and ordinarily unless we become awakened in which case uh these the cycle of birth and rebirth ends another way to look at this is that their aim is to eradicate completely agreed hatred and delusion and all of these ways I've just discussed of the of the goal of the path go back to the Buddha in so far as we know and go back to the historical Buddha this there in other words they are following the teravans are following that path as opposed to Mahayana which have really a quite different kind of approach and throughout history there has been I would say a back and forth between what we might call Urban or more urban kinds of of monastics and more rural sort of forest monastics and the the basic uh balance between them seems to be that the urban monastics tend to be more text-based and so know the texts better but on the other hand tend to be more easily corrupted by their Urban environment whereas the rural monastics tend to be less Orthodox as far as their textual understanding goes because they may be less close to the texts but another on the other hand they do more meditation so that is the tendency of the balance and there tends to be a kind of a back and forth between these kinds of parts of theravada Buddhism over the the centuries and Millennia so these are the ways um the theravada Buddhism is very old in other words that it goes way back to 250 BC and potentially even back to 400 BC and earlier during the Buddha's lifetime this material goes back very very far into history [Music] now there's another way in which theravada Buddhism isn't quite so old and that is that one of the ways that we distinguish teravada Buddhism from other schools either schools that exist nowadays or schools that used to exist and no longer do of Buddhism is through it's What's called the abidamma and through its commentarial Tradition now the abhidham is early early if you like early early commentaries soon after the Buddha's lifetime they try to compile the Buddha's uh beliefs and practices into a more easily digestible form so you didn't have to read thousands of pages of dialogues but rather if you had a question you could go right to the abidaman app and answer for it pretty quickly and each of the different schools of Buddhism created their own abhidhamma their own kind of uh cheat sheet if you will to the to the sutas and so and they differ in certain ways they're relatively minor in general but they're you know between the schools um there will be large disagreements over what may look from the outside as relatively small points uh points that might have only been of interest to you know Scholars and you know Geeks basically but but anyway that's one of the ways that they differ another way is through their commentarial tradition in other words the the group of com commentaries that were written about the suktas written about uh everything basically in order to allow other people to understand how they approached particular passages in suit does or whatever and perhaps the greatest theravada commentator is a man named budagosa who lived in the fifth century of the Common Era and he wrote a large book called The vasuti Maga which is basically a compilation as so far as we know a compilation of earlier commentaries uh probably written by any number of different people whose names we don't know that he sort of compiled together in a single place again so that people could refer to it more easily so for example if you want to study theravada Buddhism or learn more about it how what they believe about let's say meta about about loving-kindness practice well one of the one of the places you can go is to the vasuti Maga by budigosa and find out what he says about it because what Buddha Gosa says about meta about loving kindness practice is actually quite different from what's in the suit does the suit does the practice uh is a very simple one of just sort of broadcasting loving kindness out to the world in particular directions a sort of a mental state of of loving-kindness but a ghost on the other hand is a very complex practice involving taking various people from your life and thinking about them in various ways and so he's introduced certain Novelties to the practice that weren't there before and this is one way that theravada practice becomes its own thing and terrible and a different practice from what we might find in certain schools of Mahayana or other schools that were around at that time to get more into that one of the ways that we may Define theravatas teravada Buddhism or understand it is by contrast with other schools in other words we may say you know teravada Buddhism on its own I don't really understand but I can understand how it differs from this this other guy or this other school the the the most the the most standard way we differentiate teravada belief in practices by comparing with Mahayana belief in practice so we'll say oh there's this Mahayana practice of of bodhisattva vows and so on and they're the teravadas who don't do that but when we say that we have to remember that there were many many schools of what's called what we might call a shravakayana or non-mahayanist schools that existed for many centuries after the Buddha's lifetime that were non-terravatan that don't really exist anymore as such they kind of to my knowledge basically died out with uh with the arise of the Mahayana over certain centuries so schools such as the service dividend school or the southrantica school which don't exist anymore as such but are thought of by mahayanas as non-mahayana schools as what they will call hinayana which means a lesser vehicle Mahayana meaning greater vehicle so they sort of denigrate them and they will denigrate the theravada as well the mahayanas will as being lesser than their vehicle and so they're these kinds of back and forth fights but another but what I want to get across here is that when we look back into history we we should not think that there was this always the split between one teravanan school and the Mahayana what there were many many schools taravanan being one of them and these School the other schools were non-terravada eventually sort of died out and replaced by Mahayana beliefs so for example we have an early text called the abhidham which is actually a pre-mahayana text I got this wrong in my early video when I was talking about it because I think of it as Mahayana because it's not teravadan but it is not my Mahayana either it's something like buddigosa's uh vesuti Maga in other words it's this huge compilation of all of Buddhist philosophy in one place but not written from a terravanan perspective and I this may be geeking out too much to you but I I'm always fascinated by looking at the back into history and seeing how things how ideas come and change and how schools come and go and and how our contemporary view of the past is not necessarily the way the past seems actually to have been and on that matter there's ways in which theravada Buddhism is extremely new uh in fact the the term teravada it appears for the first time in a an epic a Sri Lankan epic called The Deep of amsa which occurred some was written or composed sometime around the third or fourth Century of the Common Era but in the Deep of amsa it doesn't mean a school the way we think of it nowadays a school of philosophy or School of Buddhism what it meant was um the the group of texts of the group of of learning the amount of learning that was brought to their Island from the mainland from India that is it was taken to refer to the terravatamines basically the doctrine of the elders it was taken to refer to the doctrine that was brought by these these Elder monastics to their Island it wasn't taken to be a school of of religion or Buddhism and it really didn't have that meaning as a school of Buddhism that we find in Southeast Asia across many nations uh all of them using the Pali language as their sort of root language it didn't come to mean that until a British monk named Ananda mateya around the year 1907 uh coined the term he used it in the context I believe of a a universal kind of a meeting of of different religions as a kind of a replacement for terms such as hinayana which was the the Mahayana term for his kind of practice and Hina again meaning lesser vehicle when no one wants to be called into lesser vehicle so there's been all for the last couple of centuries in the west as we've collated this material a sort of a search for another name for this other stuff that wasn't Mahayana and Nanda mateya came up with the term teravada for that but again he Ananda Mateo was not using the term teravada to refer to earlier not non-mahayana schools because those were those were sanskritic schools they were not poly schools he used it to refer to the kind of pollywoodism that he practiced and there was practice in Southeast Asia where his teachers were so if you have any questions please feel free to put them down below I've there's no way I can get everything here that's such a huge topic obviously thousands of years of History hope to have scratched the surface at least and wedded your interest a little bit to go farther thanks so much for being here love to see you all you guys here every every time I make these videos and we'll catch you on the next one so be well

Channel: Doug's Dharma

Views: 108,609

Keywords: buddhism, buddhist, buddha, secular buddhism, secularbuddhism.org, secular buddhist association, doug's secular dharma, secular dharma, philosophy, secularism, secularbuddhism, theravada, theravada buddhism, theravada buddhism history, theravada buddhism teachings, theravada buddhi, theravada buddhism for beginners, richard gombrich

Id: S0B1xqTjt50

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018