The early Buddhist sources tell us that Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha to be, practised extreme forms of asceticism in his search for enlightenment but abandoned this course of action and found the middle way between extremes of mortification and indulgence. The Buddha is said to have rejected severe asceticism as profitless, in that it did not lead to enlightenment. This story is so familiar that it hardly needs to be restated. But in spite of this apparent abandoning of asceticism, the Buddha did allow harsher practices, the dhūtāṅgas, and the middle way of the monastic tradition is nevertheless very ascetic by modern, Western standards. This chapter will continue our theme and we shall discover that again, while the goal of the tradition is different, along with the methods to attain it, the process of the ascetic self internalising the tradition remains the same as in the Hindu traditions we have examined. This chapter will focus on only the Theravāda tradition articulated in Pāli sources, where we find an ascetic self constructed in a tradition-specific way and following a path leading to a tradition-specified goal.