Is there a “head” of Theravada Buddhism, in the same vein as the Dalai Lama or the Pope?

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DeDanan

Is there a “head” of Theravada Buddhism, in the same vein as the Dalai Lama or the Pope?

There is no single monk or other person who serves as the "head" of Theravada Buddhism. Each Theravada country has it's own Sangharaja, usually translated as Supreme Patriarch, who serves as the chief monk for his respective country.

The World Fellowship of Buddhists, founded in Sri Lanka in 1950 and headquartered in Bangkok since 1963, links representatives from 27 countries in Asia, Europe and North America in the Mahayana, Theravada and Vajrayana traditions.

WFB

In his final sermon Lord Buddhas stated to his aide Ananda very clearly who his successor was to be - The Dhamma. He very deliberately did not appoint a human successor. Theravada has maintained this policy very strictly down the millennia and thus each abbott only has jurisdiction over his own wat/vihara and each sangha is autonomous, within the remit of the Sangharaja which is a more recent development.

Incidentally the role of the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church and Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism is not analagous. His Holiness The Dalai Lama is the spiritual head of one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism (the Gelugpa). The spiritual head of the school in which I took refuge is the 18 year old Karmapa (whom my own teacher discovered) and the other two have their own spiritual heads.

In the couple of centuries before the Chinese invasion the Gelugpa had become the temporal power in Tibet thus the Dalai Lamas were the temporal leaders (i.e. rather like a president) but their temporal (political) and spiritual roles are very separate.

Today virtually all Tibetan Buddhists of all the schools recognise the Dalai Lama as the temporal head of Tibet and all recognise his spiritual authority - i.e. we all acknowledge his enlightened wisdom whether or not he is our spiritual head.