Theravāda ("The Teaching of the Elders," the enlightened male and female monastic disciples of the historical Buddha) is the name of Buddhism's oldest extant school.
The school's adherents, or Theravada Buddhists, have preserved Siddhartha Gautama's teaching in the Pāli canon, the only complete Buddhist set of writings surviving in a classical Indian language.
Pali -- or Magadhan, an Indo-Aryan/Iranian Magadhi Prakrit -- is a simpler form of Sanskrit (at that time an exclusive liturgical language of Vedic/Hindu Brahmin priests, who used it like Roman Catholic priests once used Latin). It was the ancient lingua franca spoken by the Buddha.
Pali was used in the northwestern frontier, which the Buddhist Emperor Asoka conquered and brought together as the "India" we recognize today centuries after the Buddha (in and around Great Bharat, the ancient remnants of the Indus Valley Civilization around:
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| The Buddha surrounded by familial Scythians |
- Mohenjo-daro,
- Harappa,
- Gandhara,
- Afghanistan (home of the Scythians/Shakyians, the Buddha's family clan, not Nepal, according to historian Dr. Ranajit Pal),
- Kashmir,
- Magadha,
- Bihar, and
- the Gangetic plain.
In contrast to Chinese-dominated Mahāyāna and Tibetan-dominated Vajrayāna, Southeast Asian Theravāda tends to be conservative (i.e., getting "back to basics" and as such being closer to what the historical Buddha actually taught) in matters of doctrine and monastic discipline. More
- Scythians (Sakas) in Mahabharata (India)
- The real "Kapilavastu," the Buddha's three hometowns -- three seasonal capitals with a palace in each: Bamiyan, Kabul, and Mes Aynak (all in today's Afghanistan not Nepal)
- Shakyians/Scythians were as rich as history says
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