Тхеравада - новодел?

Ajaan Mun devoted many years of his life to tracking those customs down. Born in 1870, the son of rice farmers in the northeastern province of Ubon, he was ordained as a monk in the provincial capital in 1892. At the time of his ordination, there were two broad types of Buddhism available in Thailand. The first can be called Customary Buddhism — the mores and rites handed down over the centuries from teacher to teacher with little, if any, reference to the Pali canon. For the most part, these customs taught monks to live a sedentary life in the village monastery, serving the local villagers as doctors or fortune tellers. Monastic discipline tended to be loose. Occasionally, monks would go on a pilgrimage they called "dhutanga" which bore little resemblance to the classic dhutanga practices. Instead, it was more an undisciplined escape valve for the pressures of sedentary life. Moreover, monks and lay people practiced forms of meditation that deviated from the path of tranquillity and insight outlined in the Pali canon. Their practices, called vichaa aakhom, or incantation knowledge, involved initiations and invocations used for shamanistic purposes, such as protective charms and magical powers. They rarely mentioned nirvana except as an entity to be invoked for shamanic rites.

The second type of Buddhism available at the time was Reform Buddhism, based on the Pali canon and begun in the 1820's by Prince Mongkut, who later became King Rama IV (and still later was portrayed in the musical The King and I). Prince Mongkut was ordained as a monk for twenty-seven years before ascending the throne. After studying the canon during his early years as a monk, he grew discouraged by the level of practice he saw around him in Thai monasteries. So he reordained among the Mons — an ethnic group that straddled the Thai-Burmese border and occupied a few villages across the river from Bangkok — and studied Vinaya and the classic dhutanga practices under the guidance of a Mon teacher. Later, his brother, King Rama III, complained that it was disgraceful for member of the royal family to join an ethnic minority, and so built a monastery for the Prince-Monk on the Bangkok side of the river. There, Mongkut attracted a small but strong following of like-minded monks and lay supporters, and in this way the Dhammayut (lit., In Accordance with the Dhamma) movement was born.

If the texts just discussed are the tools by which Asian Theravāda educational traditions access Abhidhamma, and in this sense constitute the curriculum for Buddhist
philosophy in Theravāda countries, we should also note that Western engagement with philosophical dimensions of Theravāda have taken a different route. There are at least two contemporary Theravādas: the Theravāda of Asian countries, which of course varies regionally and locally, and the Theravāda of the Western imaginaire. The latter is a construct of Western scholars working with the textual materials of the Theravāda tradition as they have become available in critical editions (themselves a product of Western scholarship), and focusing not necessarily on the materials that are used in Asia but on those which they have identified as closest to the Buddha (this being reflected in the publishing history of the Pāli canon in Europe). The construction of this Western Theravāda Buddhism is therefore a handmaid (or should it be niece?) of the essentially nineteenth-century search for Buddhist origins and the “historical Buddha.” Peter Skilling suggests that

The centering of “Theravāda” in the Pāli canon, above all in the “four main Nikāyas,” is
a child of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It has grown up to become what
we might call a “new Theravāda,” largely anglophonic but increasingly international in
influence and outreach. This new trend should be respected and recognized as one of the
Buddhisms active today. But should it be read back into the past?
(Skilling 2009, 72)