Finally, that the path to overcoming suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path, which consists of right beliefs, intention, speech, action, job, effect, awareness, and mental state. Finally, there are ten fetters which bar people from enlightenment: self belief, doubt, clinging to rituals, lust for sensuous pleasures, ill will, craving for material existence, craving for nonmaterial existence, conceit, mental restlessness, and ignorance. These concepts represent the very basic doctrinal concepts of Buddhism, the framework around which all other discussions of Buddhism are built.
	It is also important to have a basic understanding of the Buddhist social structure. The Buddhasasana consists of four components: the Bhikkus, the Bhikkunis, the Upasakas, and the Upasikas. Essentially, there are monks and there are lay people. The monks live by the rules of the monastic order—two volumes of the Suttavibhanga, two volumes of the Khandaka, and the Parivara. The lay people merely have to live by the five precepts. Any layperson is welcome to renounce the world and become a monk, but first they must act as Samaneras or Samaneris—monks in training, who are responsible for ten precepts. There are occasional controversies about what monks can and can not do—most notably in terms of their relationship to politics. But, at its most basic, this is what the Theravada Buddhist community looks like. The monks have an entirely different experience from the lay people.
	An example of a purely external, benign force is British colonialism in Sri Lanka. The British colonialists kicked the Dutch out of Sri Lanka, and established themselves as sole colonialists of the island. Under the British, Sri Lanka saw a collapse of the caste system, and a replacement with a previously unknown race consciousness. This race consciousness set the scene for massive Sri Lankan strife, which will be explored later. The British were the final colonial powers in Sri Lanka, and with regard to Buddhism, they were the most lenient.
The British were responsible for the 1815 Kandyan Convention. This convention was a sound overall representation of British colonial intention with Sri Lanka, especially in regard to the Buddhist tradition. Though they did force the Sri Lankan King and his family to leave Sri Lanka, they had no interest in destroying the rich Buddhist tradition (as previous colonial powers had) in Sri Lanka. The fifth clause of the Kandyan convention said “[t]he religion of the Buddha is declared inviolable and its rights to be maintained and protected.” In this instance, an external force was actually fairly benign for the Sri Lankan Buddhist community. This was, however, a rare exception—especially in Sri Lanka. Far more often, external forces were hostile.
Hostile external forces were truly a plague of Sri Lanka, especially with regard to colonialism. In 1505, the Portuguese arrived in Sri Lanka, looking to exploit it for trading purposes. As Catholics, they had a fundamental problem with the “heathen” religion of the native Buddhists. A king by the name of Dharmapala, a Catholic, eventually came into power and began to cooperate with the Portuguese. 