In a previous post I discussed Andy Olendzki’s teachings about the overall reliability of the transmission of the Pali Canon via rote memorization, rather than writing. Andy also discussed a number of features in parts of the Pali Canon which point clearly to the Canon’s dating directly from the time of the Buddha, rather than being a compilation assembled some time between the Buddha’s passing on (around 485 BCE) and the writing down of the Pali Canon in Sri Lanka (around the first century BCE or thereabouts.)
To begin with, the Buddha actually refers to other suttas by name sometimes — suttas that are known in the Pali Canon. For example, he might refer to the “teaching on the worn-out snakeskin”. We can look up this sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya and find that, indeed, the sutta in question is germane to the Buddha’s topic. (For the record, the idea of the worn-out snakeskin is that a snakeskin is useful at one point during the snake’s life, but sooner or later it is time to grow a new one and the old one is sloughed off. The snake does not try to keep the old snakeskin; it is left where it was. Spiritual practice is like that — we progress, we grow, we move on, and we leave all that old junk behind us: the opinions, views, hangups, and so forth.)
This reminds me a great deal of the situation with popular modern Dharma teachers who use various stories repeatedly to get a point across. One such teacher is the wonderful Joseph Goldstein, one of the most respected and beloved teachers in my tradition (the westernized dialect of Theravada popularly — and inaccurately — known as Vipassana.) Joseph has a number of illustrative examples he likes to use. One in particular is the “Big Dipper” story. If you’ve heard Joseph give more than a few of his beautiful and elegant Dharma talks, you’ve probably heard the example. So many of the yogis in the Vipassana community know this story that Joseph is liable to laugh a bit apologetically when he launches into the “Big Dipper” story. (The last time I heard it, in fact, probably everybody in the room had heard it, this being a retreat of “old” yogis.) But it’s a great example of the nature of emptiness. All Joseph has to say is “Big Dipper” and I know what’s coming up and why he’s about to say it.
It’s also true that the “Big Dipper” story is in Joseph’s book “One Dharma”. Therefore I can confidently point to “One Dharma” as being, at least in this one aspect, a completely reliable record of Joseph Goldstein’s teaching style. I’ve heard Joseph tell the “Big Dipper” story in person. I’ve got a recording of a Dharma talk in which Joseph tells the “Big Dipper” story. I have a copy of “One Dharma” and I can read the “Big Dipper” story in there. In short, the presence of the “Big Dipper” story points clearly to authentic Joseph Goldstein. When I read the “Big Dipper” story in Joseph’s book, I can hear his voice telling it.
The Buddha’s references remind me of that. I can almost picture the older monks in the original sangha smiling a bit (or a lot) when the Buddha said something like: “You know, it’s rather like a worn-out snakeskin…” so the monks know what’s coming next. For some of the younger monks this would be the first time to hear the story. Perhaps a lot of those older monks, in years after the Buddha’s passing on, might remember the sound of the Buddha’s voice when they chanted the sutta on the worn-out snakeskin, just the way I hear Joseph’s voice when I hear the “Big Dipper” story.
At any rate, it’s a pointer to the sutta dating right back to the Buddha himself. Unless we are so jaded as to think that every single word of the Pali Canon is a later monkish invention, we must conclude that the Buddha used his illustrative examples frequently (as indeed he does in the Pali Canon) and can refer to them by name as a kind of shortcut, just like Joseph saying “Big Dipper” (or “Munindra-ji and the Peanut Vendor”, or “Sesame Spinach”, or “The Lampshade in the Window”, all of which are dearly-loved and very familiar Joseph stories.)
Here’s something else pointing to at least some of the Pali Canon dating from the Buddha’s own time: there are a number of suttas which specify that they are about events which happened after the Buddha’s passing on. There is a reason for that: they place the action clearly in a time frame. For example, there are a number of suttas having to do with Ananda (the Buddha’s cousin and attendant) who had to work through quite a lot of grief after his beloved relative and master’s passing on. They refer very specifically to Ananda’s actions and words in the time immediately following the Buddha’s passing on, so they’re easy enough to place historically. But the mere fact that they mention this as being unusual certainly points to other suttas which are delivered by the Buddha himself as stemming from the time of the Buddha’s lifetime. Almost certainly not all of the suttas in the Canon stem from the Buddha’s own time, but if there are those securely datable to the years immediately following the Buddha’s death — because they mention the Buddha’s death and the reactions of his community to his death — then there is no reason to suppose that other suttas shouldn’t be considered to come from the time of the Buddha.
Another has to do with language: it isn’t true that Pali, the language of the Pali Canon, is some sort of artificial literary language. It appears to be one of many dialects, or Prakrits, that were mutually intelligible around the area of the Ganges Valley and Northern India during the Buddha’s time. These languages are all Sanskrit-like; in fact, what distinguishes Sanskrit from many of these other languages is that Sanskrit was codified by the grammarian Panini (who lived around the same time as the Buddha) and therefore has come to be thought of as the ‘baseline’ language to which all of the other languages such as Maghadan, Kosalan, or Pali are compared. But in reality they were all more or less the same language, just localized variants with different spellings, but probably not even all that different even in pronunciation. Andy Olendzki at least points out that everybody seemed to be able to understand everybody else just fine. The Buddha certainly spoke such a language, even if he was more along the lines of Kosalan or Maghadan rather than Pali — but who really knows? The differences are very small: for example, in one Prakrit you might say “Bhikkhave” to mean “O Monks”, whereas in another it would be “Bhikkhavo”. The differences are equally small between Pali and Sanskrit. (Consider the Pali words ‘dhamma’, ‘kamma’, or ‘Gotama’ and compare those to their Sanskrit equivalents ‘dharma’, ‘karma’, and ‘Gautama’ and you can see that we’re looking here at fairly trivial variants.)
In other words, there’s no reason to think that there are no authentic words of the Buddha stored in the Pali Canon.
It’s rather mind-blowing when you think about it.