Dear Robert,

> why would a well-established doctrine such as Mt Meru be the result of
> an imaginative scribe?

I hoped I'd made it clear that I was making a general point about the
critical weight of parts of the canon & the question of how are we to
determine that.

But I'll quote what I said in reply to Ven. Pandita. who commented on this,
in case you missed it:
<<
(Ven P:)

> If you look for the string "*meru*" on CSCD, you would find that it
> occurs 10 times in the canon, notably once each in Suttanipaata and
> Mijjhimanikaaya. It means that you just cannot reject it out of hand, or
> blame a poor scribe, whether you like it or not.

(Me)
I'm sorry that I ended on a slightly flippant note, I was trying not to
sound too pompous but probably just succeeded in sounding stupid. I will
have to read up on Mt Meru, but, of course, one could take an example where
there surely must be thousands of references like "deva" which it would be
very tempting to the western mind to gloss over.

>>

As you bring this up again though, I'm bound to say that ten mentions aren't
a lot considering the size of the canon & could easily originate from one
part of a sutta which was reproduced in several other places.

But my point was a general one about viewing these things from a textually
critical perspective in the hope that I'd elicit some replies from those
more knowledgeable than myself. (Which I'm glad to say it did.)

What is a doctrine? Is Mt Meru a doctrine but the tradition that the Buddha
took a number of steps in each direction directly after birth & issued his
first declaration not? My question was about how these things are decided
for us by history, tradition & the happenstance of which texts survive, or
by us in our interpretation of that material, & that point is cetainly not
flippant, nich




To put it more bluntly, the doctine of Jesus being the son of God is well
established, as is the doctrine