> It really arouses my hindrance of ill will when
> "Buddhists" smuggle fabricated suttas into the sutta
> pitaka and then claim it's the word of the buddha.
> Have a backbone. Get some cajones. Put your own name
> on the work and just state it as your own
> understanding and contribution to the Buddhist
> religion.

I can certainly understand your aversion to this sort of practice; to
modern ears, it seems to be easily identifiable as a scam of some sort.
While I don't doubt that some of the 'misattribution' performed in
ancient times were simply an attempt to lend legitimacy to new ideas,
it's also important to understand that standards of attribution were
once different from our modern understanding.

In the time of the Buddha (and even for centuries later), it was not
uncommon for students of a particular teacher to attribute their
greatest works to their teacher, rather than themselves. A similar
notion can be found in ancient Greece among the students of the
mathematician Pythagoras. In the reasoning of the time, if you had just
created your greatest intellectual work, and believed sincerely that it
was true and meaningful, and furthermore believed that the only way you
could have attained such an understanding was through the benevolence
and wisdom of your teacher, then assigning to them the credit for your
own work was a high praise indeed. While there might be a certain
hubris associated with equating one's own work with that of the Buddha
or another great teacher, if the author of the work was anonymous there
was no ill-gotten gain for the unknown writer. While there remained the
possibility of abuse (using a 'great name' to shore up poor ideas), it
provided a way for a devotee to honor their teacher's memory.

Keep in mind also that new works don't appear in a vaccum. Just as we
read and criticize the 'innovations' of others now, there was an active
and vibrant monastic and scholastic community at the time of the
appearance of these works. The works that were felt to somehow
conttradict or demean the teachings that they were derived from are
doubtlessly lost now, having been rejected by the community of their day
as improper.

No doubt the judgement in days past (as today) was imperfect. But if we
believe that the Buddhists of past eras were at least as sincere in
their belief and practice as we are in ours, then we might regard their
words and beliefs as helpful in our own time. Most of us lack the time
and attention that the old writers were able to devote to the study of
the Tipitaka and its associated commentaries. So while some of the
methods (in terms of linguistic and textual analysis) available to us
today are much more sophisticated than those available to past learners,
in many cases their resources in terms of time, access to living
teachers, and access to other teachings is greater than ours.

In the end, deciphering wether or not a particular individual spoke
particular words in a certain language 2500 years ago is outside the
range of what we can hope to accomplish by any means- wether we look at
the Tipitaka, the commentaries, or the Mahayana texts. The best that we
can hope for is to take into account as much information as we have
available, and decide if what we are hearing leads us to live a life
that leads away from desire and suffering and towards contentment and
the end of suffering- without sacrificing our ethical obligations to
ourselves and others. If words were spoken by those other than the
Buddha, and attributed to him, then do we do harm to ourselves or others
by following them? While our instinctive desire is to be able to
categorize all statements as true or not true, based on their "real"
origin, and to debunk those claims that seem impossible to us, I wonder
if such an activity is useful in a practical (that is, in the sense of
putting the teachings into practice) sense. As an academic exercise, it
may or may not have merit, depending on how it is undertaken (assigning
works to the Buddha based on how you feel they gel with other teachings
is unlikely to get you published in the journal of the PTS!).

It becomes a question of why we study the Canon, or any other set of
teachings. If we seek to be better able to put into practice the real
teachings of the Buddha, than the spirit of the teaching is paramount.
However, what we perceive to be the 'true' spirit of the teaching is
influenced by what we accept as true- and in this, we need guides of
some sort. The opinions of learned Theras can be helpful, as can the
views of modern scholars on issues of language and origin. If we seek
primiarly to exercise our minds (or finish our degrees) by studying the
Pali language and texts as a purely academic subject, than the views of
scholars must take precedence over those of earlier monks, or we are
being academically dishonest in our undertaking unless we submit their
views to the same critique that we would a paper by a collegue. The two
activities are not entirely incompatible or unrelated, but they do seem
to me to represent two different methods of interpreting the same
information. One is most concerned with chronology and philology, and
is dominated by what is true in the sense of structured scholastic
investigation. The other is concerned with what is helpful in living a
good life, and seeks what is true in the sense of compatibility with
what we understand to be basic principles of Buddhist teaching, and with
their utility in ending suffering.


After that long mouthfull, I do recall a text in which the Buddha lays
out standards for recognizing what is or isn't consistent with his
teachings. He included, I believe, the opinions of more learned monks
and teachers in that analysis, as well as consistency with the other
teachings that have been learned before and are known to be true. It
may have already been invoked, but I don't recall seeing it. Does
anyone have a reference for it? I'm quite sure that it's up on Access
to Insight, for a start.

(appologies for a long an somewhat unedited ramble)

clay collier