WordPress working with buddypress. Need help with buddypress

We have wordpress theme. NewsSense 1.0 by NewWpThemes.com. We love the layout, but also want to have our visitors to be able to have a social media community to have profiles and chat. It looks like when you install buddypress it’s not like a separate plugin that links to our current theme. We were told to download the buddypress template pack so it can work with our them. We tried this but instructions aren’t great! I went to edit one of the files and there’s a ton of code in it, but then they said it should read look like this:
*********************************************
[HEADER]

<div id=”container”>
<div id=”content”>
[PAGE CONTENT]
</div>

<div id=”sidebar”>
[SIDEBAR CONTENT]
</div>
</div>

[FOOTER]
*********************************************

does this mean we delete everything in the index.php and it should only read that?

Were just trying to have a great front news layout and then some where on the front where members can sign up and comment and post things and blogs…

Thanks for all the help in advanced!! Were new to wordpress