Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon

Richard Gombrich's Precept and Practice is a classic scholarly ethnographic and textual study of Sinhalese Buddhism in rural Sri Lanka, written by one of the most respected living scholars of Theravada Buddhism combining close command of Pali canonical texts with direct fieldwork among practicing lay Buddhists and monks. Its enduring influence in Buddhist studies comes from that dual method, letting Gombrich compare canonical doctrinal precept against what he observed as actual lived practice, sometimes finding real divergence between the two. As a study focused on a specific rural Sri Lankan context during the period of Gombrich's fieldwork, its findings about doctrine-practice divergence there are not automatically generalizable to Theravada Buddhism in other regions or eras without further comparative study, a limit Gombrich's own later work has addressed.