It is a known fact that the historical critical method emerged first in Europe as historical-biblical criticism. In the 18th century, it had focused on questions like Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch, before evolving into the methods of literary and redaction criticism we see today. I was attempting to state fact, not lob insult.
Questions are great, but the framework in which those questions are asked isn’t completely irrelevant. Part of the assumption of the historical critical method is that we can mine texts to find truths beyond their face value. This works out OK for Christianity, but gets a bit harder for Buddhism due to basically less written material (compare thousands of versions of Christian texts to only a small handful of versions of Buddhist texts). I had referenced Ehrman as my personal hero who has used Christian textual criticism to do great things, showing us that the Gospel is not an accurate record of the teaching of Jesus. This is only possible in Christianity due to the rather extreme nature of Christian doctrinal development in relation to the trinity. Buddhism as of yet, has not produced an Ehrman who can totally upend what is already regarded by sensible people as basic presectarian Buddhism.
Nonetheless, comparing the nikayas across versions in Buddhism has also managed to yield some insights into textual composition and development, sometimes confirming the position if the commentary itself that text was added or changed. But even the people who are very good at this sort of thing and do it professionally haven’t shown the same type of radical doctrinal development as Ehrman. Doctrinal development in the nikayas is present but typically much milder. And also very obvious to people who read these texts professionally. I am only talking about development within the EBTs themselves though.
There is a kind of natural limitation to how far the text critical methodology can be stretched in the absence of more witness texts with different readings. I.e. textual criticism as “criticism” gets hard when all your witness texts say pretty much the same thing. There are methodological frameworks in which textual criticism works, such as using evidence external to the text itself, as well as internal evidence. External evidence might be something like a witness text with a different reading. In this case, it might be a version of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta without the khandhas (i.e. the thing we don’t have). Internal evidence would be a hint from the text itself that development has occurred. There are a set of Latin maxims which describe this, like that the shorter reading is to be preferred.
Counting the number of occurrences of a theme in a given text, by itself, is not a particularly sound basis to make further inferences. This is because Buddhist texts have multiple genres, and the absence of a particular topic could equally be explained by genre features, or just the scope of the topic of the discourse.
So what we have here is, in fact…
The use of a methodology which was developed for Christian texts
…
Extended to a situation which does not have the kind of internal or external evidence on which this methodology primarily relies.
When people try to advance ideas without evidence in medicine, or who blithely overstep the methodological constraints of research based science, it can legitimately be called conspiracy. Especially when the credibility of a legitimate body is called into question without evidence.
When people try to do the same thing in Buddhism, in this case, calling the legitimacy of the core portions of the Buddhist textual account of the Buddha’s teachings across multiple canons into question, it is in the wider interests of the community to point it out as conspiracy.
While it may not be what you were after, I understand that answering the questions asked is also a legitimate use of the forum.
Nobody mentioned Theravada. I was talking about the basic doctrinal categories of presectarian Buddhism.
Insulting people by defilements is a specifically prohibited category of insult in Buddhism, termed a dubbhasita in the vinaya. Silabbataparamasa refers to perversions of morality which only arise in the absence of genuine insight into the nature of the khandhas. How could you possibly know whether another person is a puthujjana or not, when even the Buddha’s own disciples had to repeatedly ask the Buddha about this?
