Dear Ven. Pandita & all

<< To quote Sayadaw U Silananda, "The structure of Buddhist doctrine ....is
consistent and self-contained, .... The Doctrine is just like a set of
dominoes. The whole pile would crumble if you try to remove a single item.

>>

To me, this begs the question: But what is Buddhist doctrine?

My motivation in learning Paali is to put my ear as close as possible to the
mouth of the Buddha. But however expert in Paali I may become it doesn't
seem likely I could acheive this aim by a wholly uncritical reading of the
Tipi.tika.

As seems generally accepted by scholars, not all palm leaves have the same
critical weight, not all parts of the canon were created equal, not all
suttas, or parts of suttas are equally as old, or have the same degree of
authenticity.

(I wonder what might be the state of Paali studies now if the great machine
of the Western universities that have been busy digging up papyri and
raiding monastic libraries to produce critical editions of the Latin corpus
had put their efforts into Paali.)

> there are practices called Samatha explained in Visuddamagga to achieve
> insight into such matters.

I was interested to hear Prof. Gombrich saying in a talk to the London
Buddhist Society's Summer School that he thought that the Visuddhimagga was
quite remarkable in that in all it's long exposition of the Dhamma he could
not think of one single contradiction. The suttas, however, were full of
contradictions. (I hope I've quoted him reasonably accurately, certainly the
gist is correct.)

This statement seems inconsistent with Sayadaw U Silananda's above quote,
depending on how you interpret "doctrine".

I find Maurice Walshe's attitude to this question of authenticity
interesting, in the introduction to his translation of the Diigha he says in
the section on "Authenticity": "Personally I believe that all, or almost all
*doctrinal* statements put directly into the mouth of the Buddha can be
accepted as authentic, and this seems to me the most important point"

So if I strayed far enough from satipa.t.thana to ask, my first question
mightn't be: Does Mt Meru exist or not in some shape or form, but what is
the critical weight for this part of the Tipi.taka, how likely is it to an
embellishment by a scribe with an overactive imagination sweating over his
palm leave.

Excuse my ramblings, nich