Theravada Buddhism and the Abhidharma Tradition

Theravada ("Teaching of the Elders") is the only one of the early Buddhist schools (traditionally enumerated as eighteen or more, collectively termed the Nikaya or "mainstream" schools, and often loosely called "Hinayana" in later Mahayana polemical usage, a term modern scholarship generally avoids as pejorative) to survive as a continuous, living tradition into the present, based primarily on the Pali Canon and historically centered in Sri Lanka before spreading through mainland Southeast Asia to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. According to the Sri Lankan chronicle tradition recorded in the Mahavamsa and Dipavamsa (4th–6th centuries CE), Buddhism was formally introduced to Sri Lanka in the 3rd century BCE by the monk Mahinda, traditionally identified as the son (or, in some accounts, brother) of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who according to his own rock and pillar edicts actively sponsored Buddhist missionary activity across and beyond his empire following his conversion after the bloody conquest of Kalinga, an event Ashoka describes with explicit remorse in his Thirteenth Major Rock Edict.