Dear Robert,

You wrote:
Thus it seems reasonably important if one wants to follow the Buddha
that the texts one relies on are right. If one values a fake text
and follows that you could still feel you were getting much out of
it, while all the time heading along the wrong path.
****
One dictum is that if a text teaches or does not contradict the doctrines of
impermanence, suffering and not-self in conjunction with the eightfold path,
then it is a valid Buddhist text. Another valuable criteria, to borrow from
our Christian friends, is the "by their fruits ye shall know them". I see
with my limited understanding no difference between the fruits attained by
followers of Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana or whatever. Since you are in
Japan, I would suggest your best course of action might be to burn all the
texts (repectfully) and devote yourself to Zen practice.

> Someone has suggested that part of the Tipitaka was added by later

monks. Now these monks must have plotted together and convinced
literally hundreds of other monks to go along with them and make the
outright slander and lie that the Dhammasangani was part of the
Tipitaka so that it could be included in the Buddhist councils.
If the Dhammasangani (the First book of the Abhidhamma) is not a
genuine Buddhist text then it should be held in contempt by devout
Buddhists. So far no one has produced evidence of this plot or the names of
the leaders.
****
The whole of the above seems rather naive, ill-informed and a tad emotional.
You seem to see things in very lurid black and white terms with little
understanding of human nature.
First you should familiarize yourself with the well-documented processes of
orality -- there are many studies dealing with this. Interpolation of
additional material, corruptions or other kinds of changes are rarely
intentional or, if so, then seldom due to malicious intent -- it is just a
natural process. The same situation applies to any manuscript tradition --
try doing some mss editing and you will soon learn this -- every time a text
is copied by hand some errors creep in and these accumulate. Again, when a
line was dropped from a text by one scribe, he or another might write it in
the margin with a little mark in the body text to indicate where it
belonged. Unfortunately, commentorial annotations in the form of marginalia
were sometimes confused with corrections and become incorporated into the
text by scribes.

The simple reason reason why it seems probable that the Dhammasangani was a
later composition is because it *only* survives in Pali. If it were as old
as the earliest pan-Buddhist councils, it would have been preserved in some
form by most or all the other schools. I have explained the details of this
in my msg to Rett. But, of course, the Dhammasangani is a genuine Buddhist
text based on authentic Buddhist doctrines -- nobody is suggesting that it
is not -- but it's a genuine Buddhist sectarian compilation, as are all the
other Abhidharma texts of the other schools. Again, if you choose to
*believe* whatever you like about the Dhammasangani, that is your right, but
pls rememember that it is only a belief not knowledge -- unless you can
inent a time-machine for us :)

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge