The most remarkable feature of Theravada Buddhism, from the perspective of this study, is that its early scriptures already provided both the notion of a community of virtuosi and a specific model of interaction between virtuosi and laymen. As we shall see, the early doctrinal preoccupation with the relation between virtuosi and laity is itself rooted in a very distinctive mode of coexistence, or “economy,” of otherworldly and worldly orientations within the canonical corpus, combining an extreme world-negating definition of salvation on the one hand with a sustained concern with the social order as the inevitable and even necessary context of this search for salvation on the other.

Theravada Buddhism is known for its conservative concern with the proper preservation and understanding of its canonical texts, and the Pali scriptures did indeed remain a constant source of reference and ideological inspiration throughout the traditional period. Canonical Buddhism, however, is not the only ideological influence to have been at work. Neither did the interpretation of Buddhist doctrines remain static from the time of their early efflorescence in northeast India, through their spread to what became their bastion in Sri Lanka and later diffusion throughout Southeast Asia. Understanding the dynamics of the virtuoso–layman relation on the ideological level will thus also require us to consider a number of later ideological developments that, even if innovative and deviating from canonical premises, became part and parcel of Theravada “orthodoxy.”