I think that the differences in the recensions can be brought into context by examining the doctrines and interpretations of the school that this āgama came from, the Sarvāstivāda. In the Nikāya recension, a number of qualities are given to paṭiccasamuppāda, namely, and forgive me for not being able to word-for-word it:
[quote]Uppādā vā tathāgatānaṃ anuppādā vā tathāgatānaṃ, ṭhitāva sā dhātu dhammaṭṭhitatā dhammaniyāmatā idappaccayatā.
Whether there is an arising of Tathagatas or no arising of Tathagatas, that element still persists, the stableness of the Dhamma, the fixed course of the Dhamma, specific conditionality.[/quote]
The meaning of this is not exceptionally esoteric or complicated, I don’t think. It merely says that the teaching of the Buddha, in as much as it is true and in as much as it relates to the subject matter of the sutta in question, is true regardless of whether or not a Buddha teaches it, i.e., dependant origination is not “created” or “made up” by the Buddha, or, the Dharma pre-exists the Buddha’s teaching of it.
I agree that the difference is highly subtle, but highly subtle differences in interpretation, wording, phrasing, etc, of the Buddhavacana can have extremely profound doctrinal implications when orthodoxies are built and/or arise out of the Buddhavacana’s interaction with practitioners and/or interpreters.
I think this is evidenced in the highly divergent Abhidharmāḥ generated by the Sarvāstivāda and Theravāda historically, particularly as related to the classifications of dharmāḥ presented in their respective divergent dhamma-theories. The Sarvāstivāda (or the “everything exists school” or the “all-existent school”, for those unfamiliar with them) held a doctrine of the quasi-eternal persistence of all dharmāḥ in the past, present, and future, as well as conceiving of existent reality as predicated on existent “prime dharmāḥ”. They were polemicized against by Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu as holding heretical metaphysics, in some interpretations of those writers’ works.
This āgama’s characterization of the natures of certain dharmāḥ (namely ignorance, capability, knowing, naming [and] forming, the six senses’ touching, touching, receiving, lusting, taking, becoming, developing, aging, sickening, dying, worrying, grieving, [becoming-]angry, suffering) is consistent with Sarvāstivāda orthodoxy, because the dharma themselves are described as “thus, thus-so, thusness”, lending to them the quasi-eternal “persistence” spoken of in the Nikāya-parallel when it speaks of “this element” in its text. In the Sarvāstivāda āgama-recension, this quasi-eternal persistence is ascribed to the particular dharmāḥ specified therein. In the Nikāya-parallel it is the “principal” or, to phrase it more loosely, the “process” of paṭiccasamuppāda that is a “persistent” element. Now this āgama does not go so far as later Sarvāstivāda orthodoxy would go in its treating of dharmāḥ as quasi-eternally persistent, but it does take a step in that direction that is not present in the Nikāya-parallel, wherein no dharmāḥ at all are characterized as persistent.
I think that this recension might be an example of the latent seeds of “potential-readings” from which later Sarvāstivāda elaborations of doctrine, based in their traditions of interpreting their Buddhavacana-recensions, would manifest concerning dhamma-theory, and ultimately metaphysics and ontology.
Just an interesting thing I think I may have observed in the sutta-parallels.