How to Practice Theravada Buddhism

Start with the foundation. All Buddhist schools, but particularly Theravāda, identify four foundational, interacting qualities, which you should cultivate to enable you to develop a practice. These are dāna, meaning giving or generosity, sīla, meaning virtue or ethics, samādhi, meaning meditation, and paññā, meaning wisdom or deep understanding. For best results, you should assign equal importance to each.

• People often never really get their practices started, because they try to bypass generosity and virtue, which resemble the vehicle's fuel or the house's walls. Without them, a practice never develops and topples very easily. Meditation stays too shallow and wisdom too superficial to be of any life-changing value. Each virtue reinforces the next in a circular pattern, clearing the way to achieving deeper tranquility and more revealing insight.

Develop your generosity. This is never as simple as donating money from a distance. Instead, it's a moment-to-moment practice of liberality toward yourself and others. It manifests in activities such as volunteer work; donating food, clothing, medicines, and other support to practitioners of higher virtue and wisdom; and offering your care, patience, and kindness to those in need—including yourself.

• Your intentions underwrite all of these practices, so develop them skillfully and compassionately. Formulate your intentions to extend the same compassion to yourself that you offer to others. Doing so bears witness to a heart mature in virtue.

Keep the precepts. Lay people often choose to observe five or eight precepts, five being more common for everyday Buddhists. Although there is no harm in breaking your precepts by accident or unawareness, the longer you can keep them the deeper and more stable your practice becomes.

• The first five precepts are to refrain from killing, stealing; harmful sexual activity; improper speech; and substance abuse. Jewish and Christian readers should be experiencing a modicum of déjà vu at this juncture.
• The precepts' functional role is fascinating because keeping them builds a sense of confidence in life—essentially your lifestyle evolves in such a way that the wise praise your qualities and you avoid becoming a target of disapprobation. But their deeper role is providing a sense of having no regrets, which removes a hinderance to incredibly powerful meditation.

Practice meditation. Meditation is all about learning the true nature of your body, feelings, mind, and mental objects, as well as how to skillfully and wisely develop them to diminish suffering. The authors of the canon and other early Buddhist texts state throughout that a practitioner should pursue deep states of stillness (or jhana) via samatha, as a way to the insight (or 'seeing clearly') attained via vipassanā. Stillness practices weaken the aspects of the mind that hinder insight. Meditating with a turbulent mind can be like looking through foggy or blacked-out lenses.

• The Dhammapada sums this up very neatly: there is no jhana without insight, no insight without jhana. Having both, one is close to Nibbana.

Practice wisdom. This ultimately means applying your understanding in each moment, and allowing your wisdom to grow, as every situation is different. This particular skill results from the other three aspects, so whereas it can be developed on a simple level by reading early texts, listening to good lectures, and attending personal retreats, this mode blossoms slowly, but is perhaps the most beautiful flower of the four.

• Wisdom is often engaged and boosted by generosity, since it is easy to follow one's innate preferences, but to be patient, kind, and wise in challenging situations is an expression of a generous mind.

Study the early texts. The early texts' presentations tend to be the simplest and most straightforward; however, over the last 100-odd years, there's been a great deal of research into texts that may be recognised and those determined to be inauthentic. The complication is that these recent distinctions are not always known by those starting or keeping a practice, so teachers can often innocently present later ideas and concepts traditionally thought of as being authentically the Buddha's own. Fortunately it's becoming much easier in the 21st century for everyday practitioners to find out for themselves.

• What distinguishes most Theravāda traditions is their emphasis the historical Buddha's teachings, rather than on subsequent interpretations and new goals. This is largely due to geographical distance between the schools. Therefore some of the characteristics of Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna schools are not present at all. Theravāda does have its own later ideas however, such as those found in the Abhidhamma and commentaries such as the Visuddhimagga, which were complied many centuries after the historical Buddha's death.

Study modern texts. Practitioners from all three Buddhist schools have produced many fantastic meditation and life manuals, which present excellent tricks and skills for developing your practice. The early texts function as a central point of reference for what the Buddha actually taught, but the later texts can give personal experiences of other practitioners in their interpretation of the early texts, which can be very inspiring.

• There is usually no problem in reading non-Theravāda texts as scholars have noted strong similarities, particularly between Theravāda and Zen. But the practitioner should know the later doctrinal ideas so as to be able to recognise what is and what isn't of the Theravāda school and avoid complicating their practice.

Balance your practice. The early Buddhist texts seem to promulgate no one-sided practices—such as awakening through study only, through meditation only, through virtue, or confidence only. Instead, they're all themes that can be more or less dominant as part of the whole. So it's the essence of the practice to reflect and study, to practice samatha and vipassanā meditation, and to develop generosity and virtue.

• Exceptions to this case are actually very rare and are a result of conditions such as kamma, or (more often) the texts themselves have been proven to be late or corrupted.