The paradoxes that seem inherent in Theravada Buddhism as a social and historical phenomenon have proved fertile ground for the imagination of social anthropologists. We should not be surprised that major attention has been drawn to the oppositions that arise between the austere, intellectual doctrine of salvation that from one point of view at least forms the core of the Way of the Elders, and the embedding of this doctrine in a social and historical context: the social context being the overwhelmingly peasant composition of the practitioners of the religion, the historical context, its development within the milieu of Hindu India. The facility of binary opposition and paradox has not, however, blinded the discipline to the reality of the complex field within which the practice of Theravada Buddhism manifests itself.