It seemed like an opportunity to talk about it. Personally, I think our good moderator @ficus solved the original question expertly with archeology.
That sounds amazing. I have alot of respect for the creative arts of all kinds. Though I spend time these days being a (somewhat pedantic) translator, I’m actually a creative writer. So, I enjoy the mythology in these texts more than the dry philosophy, to be honest. When they start telling stories, I pull up a chair and listen.
When I compare Pali texts to their parallels (and sometimes it’s the reverse situation), I see the same patterns of expansion that I see with other texts. Granted, it’s usually two data points, not a half dozen. But I can quickly see which one has grown more than the other. The Diamond Sutra is just a convenient example.
When I look at repeated translations of Agamas in Chinese, it’s more complicated because they often aren’t from the same canon. So, for example, there’s four or five translations of the Parinirvana Sutra in Chinese, but only a couple match each other closely.
There are some translation issues, but by and large these were changes in the texts coming to China from Central Asia or India. This idea that (for example) Kumarajiva was a lazy translator who abbreviated and paraphrased is not a new one, and it’s been disproven by discoveries of early Sanskrit versions of the Diamond Sutra. The sutra really was simpler in 400 CE. Most scholars who worked with late Sanskrit texts assumed the same thing: The Chinese canon is full of bad translations. But they actually are pretty good translations, they just weren’t translating the same Sanskrit texts that Indic scholars were studying.
The Diamond Sutra is actually a good example of the growth of Buddhist texts over time for someone who doesn’t read Chinese. The Kumarajiva and Tibetan versions are available in English. These are the earliest and latest versions of the sutra. If you set them side by side, you’ll see how it evolved from about 400 CE to around 800 CE. The Tibetan version is very close to the last translation by Xuanzang.
Yes, this is probably the reason there’s an amazing correspondence between the Majjhima Nikaya and the Madhyama Agama. They come from closely related canonical lineages, meaning they split off from the same parent canon. Comparing only those two sets of parallels creates a false sense of similarity.
That said, though, it’s getting difficult to accept that there was a single, original canon. I’m basically in agreement with scholars like Salomon don’t think there was one. That’s because when we look at Pali, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Gandhari, they are really different. It seems more likely that Buddhists didn’t form canons until after regional evolutions had already changed the sutras quite a bit. The core teachings likely go back to the original disciples. Without older texts to look at, though, we’re guessing about these things.
I wanted to take time to give a more concrete example of why I think it’s a problem that we don’t have texts from earlier eras. It’s a bit academic, but it’s a good example of the problems I see in parallels.
So, one criteria for what’s an early Buddhist teaching might be whether it’s found universally in Agamas and Nikayas (and even Mahayana texts). So, we can quickly pull in a large core of teachings without worrying about the wording of the sutras. The four noble truths, eightfold path, five aggregates, six ayatanas, etc. Most of these basic teachings are found in all Buddhist texts in all languages, and there’s no variation beyond ambiguous readings here and there. They’re sometimes defined differently, but let’s set that aside.
There are universal teachings like this that vary from one source to the next. An example is the 10 powers of the Buddha. It’s found in all Buddhist canons from the Nikayas to late Mahayana texts. They don’t agree about all 10 powers, but they do agree about five of them.
I posted about this in an essay a few months back when I translated some of the parallels: The Tathagata’s Ten Powers (or Five).
It’s a puzzle that can’t really be solved easily without some evidence about what the EBTs actually looked like earlier. What appears to have happened is everyone adopted an expanded list of ten powers from an earlier list of five. I say that because almost all of the lists in the Agamas and Nikayas agree on the first two and last three powers (with a couple minor exceptions). Then they insert their own take on powers 3-7.
So, comparing the existing parallels doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what happened. All we can do is theorize.
There’s a sutra in the Samyukta Agama that could be a clue. It says arhats have the five powers from the 37 factors, and the Buddha has the 10 powers. What I wonder is: Did this sutra originally have two sets of five powers? It would seem a better fit for an oral tradition sutra; they liked parallelisms because they’re easier to memorize.
But today, this sutra has the ten powers like the other sutras. So, I can theorize about it. Originally it was five powers of the Buddha, not ten. One day, someone thought, “The Buddha is supreme and unique. Surely, he had more than five powers. What were his other powers?” Eventually, a sutra is being recited with ten powers instead of five. Word gets around from that region to other samghas, and they say, “Wait, our version of that sutra only has five powers. That must not be right; theirs has ten powers! Surely the Buddha did have more than five powers. We should adopt these ten powers.” Now, their sutras have ten powers, but they chose a different set of five more powers to add to the original list.
And so forth until at some point, the five powers version is erased from the Buddhist canon everywhere. And that’s the canon we have, after it had already changed.
It’s a nice story, but it’s just me daydreaming. It could be something else that happened. Maybe right after the Buddha’s parinirvana, the disciple who’s job it was to remember the 10 powers of the Buddha forgot five of them? Then everyone filled them in with different sets five powers to fix it. (A stretch, I know, but it’s another story we could tell ourselves.)
Without actual evidence, it’s a mystery. It’s a similar problem when it comes to parallels that are different but we can’t rule one out as later. Which one goes back to the Buddha’s time? It’s basically a guessing game.