Exactly. I responded with a similar comment not too long ago in another discussion:
I suspect that the contention raised by the Buddha was more to do about Brahmanism and their questionnable practices, rites and rituals than anything else. Of course, I can’t know that for sure because I wasn’t there. But neither was anyone else pondering over these things today. Sure the EBTs give us some guidelines along with text critical studies. But what, among other examples I could allude to, did the Buddha say that wasn’t recorded? What about many things I can say as an English speaking North American that mean something quite different in Europe or Australia… just because of say, my intention, intonation, body language, etc.? These details cannot be recorded accurately – either through oral transmission or written – to convey what a person originally meant. To compound these many problems, there are so many things that we think we know for sure on Monday…to be contradicted by more or unknown data coming in by Friday. So we are in a constant mode of defining and reconfiguring our so-called knowledge today. Does anyone really consider how complicated this gets when trying to repiece the past?
This is not a criticism of Buddhism per se. It equally applies to any religion, philosophy or perspective that has its origins in the millenia of time. (The same can be said of what Christ originally said and really meant, compared to the thousands of interpretations and their interpreters out there who continue debating the particulars to this very day. Those making present day interpretations weren’t there either).
So to the point of what the Buddha really meant about many things, I’ll pass my turn. In the end, belief seems to be the name of the game. We often have a tendency to think and believe either one way …or another. Some stick to their guns until the day they die. In many cases, these people are later found to have erred, either through miscalculation, misinterpretaion or misinformation. Finally it seems inevitable that, whether right or wrong, our belief in something or someone is what really calls the shots … and far less what our so-called unbiased analysis is really about.
It boils down to a very concrete and time bound problem: reinterpreting the past. Unless one’s teacher lived in recent times and has formally and clearly written down what he meant to convey/teach, interpretation will always be filled with uncertainty. Though I find suttacentral to be about the best online Buddhist forum today, the interminable arguments and incredibly diverse interpretations, perspectives and positions over many topics – sometimes even over what one single word was meant by the Buddha when he (supposedly) said it – is a most evident case in point.
Some scholars, like Salomon Richards, have explained the many problems related to finding the ‘original’ teachings of the Buddha:
Salomon Richard writes in Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandara: An Introduction with Selected Translations:
From these and other similar discoveries, it has gradually become clear to scholars that the history of Buddhism is far more complex than previously realized. Early scholars of Buddhism in the West, especially in the English-speaking world, had assumed that the Pali canon represented the true original scriptures of Buddhism while other manifestations of Buddhism and versions of Buddhist texts were secondary derivations, elaborations, or corruptions. This view prevailed mainly because the Pali canon of the Theravāda tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia happened to be the only one that survived complete and intact in an Indian language, and because it came to the attention of Anglophone scholars at a relatively early date as a result of the colonization of Sri Lanka by England. This led to the illusion that the Pali canon was the only true Buddhist canon, and the misconception was reinforced by the self-presentation of the bearers of that tradition, who were the early European scholars’ main points of contact with the Buddhist world.
But it is now clear that the seeming primacy and authority of the Pali Tipitaka is only an accident of history. The discovery of abundant remnants of a previously unknown Sanskrit canon in Central Asia enabled scholars to realize that there had once existed other, perhaps many other, canons in various local languages both within Buddhist India and beyond it, in regions to which Buddhism had spread but where it had died out in antiquity. The more recent discovery of Buddhist texts in Gandhari emphatically confirms the view that there once existed many Buddhisms, each with its own distinctive literature and canon. Moreover, detailed studies of the Sanskrit and Gandhari manuscripts, particularly with a view to comparing them with their parallels in Pali, Chinese, and other languages, has further undermined the myth of Pali primacy. Comparisons of several versions of a given sutra in the various languages concerned – for example, the Pali, Sanskrit, and Gandhari texts of the Rhinoceros sutra – typically show complex relationships in which no one version can be identified as the sole source or archetype for the others.
For this reason, most if not all Buddhist textual scholars nowadays consider each version of a given text, and by extension each body of Buddhist literature, to have a priori an equal claim to accuracy and originality. This result may seem disappointing and frustrating to those who wish to discover the true and original “words of the Buddha,” be they historically oriented scholars or practicing Buddhists. But in light of recent trends in textual scholarship, reinforced by the discovery of the Buddhist literature of Gandhara, most scholars have abandoned the quest for a single “original” version of the canon as a wild-goose chase.
For even if there ever were, in theory, a single original form of the canon, or at least of a group of individual texts as the Buddha himself uttered them two and a half millennia ago, there is no hope of finding it intact. By the time the texts were set down in writing, apparently in the first century BCE, Buddhism had already spread far and wide around India and adjoining countries, as a result of which slightly, and sometimes not so slightly, different versions had already arisen and diverged in complex and tangled ways that make it impossible to reconstruct a single original archetype.
Moreover, it is doubtful whether, even in the time of the Buddha himself, the texts existed in a single uniform shape. For example, the Buddha may have preached some sūtras several or many times in his travels and probably varied them slightly each time, for example shortening or lengthening his exposition according to the situation or the disposition of his audience. Thus different disciples could have heard, memorized, and transmitted different versions of a given sūtra, so that the textual diversity that has set in by the time of the earliest surviving written texts may have existed from the very earliest days of Buddhism. Therefore any search for the true, original words of the Buddha is doubly a quest for a will-o’-the-wisp.
For modern scholars, then, the focus has gradually shifted from a fruitless search for a single true original Buddhism to a broader understanding of the nature and interrelationships of the many Buddhisms that developed over the centuries and millennia. But where does this leave Buddhist practitioners who want to be sure that they are studying and following the true Dharma, just as the Buddha taught it? This is, of course, a matter of personal inclination and belief, but the multiple versions of texts and canons do not have to be considered a problem. In most cases, the differences between a given sūtra in, for example, Pali, Sanskrit, Gāndhārī, and Chinese are more a matter of phrasing and arrangement than of substance. If such texts are read for the spirit rather than for the letter — an attitude that is explicitly encouraged in certain sūtras — the inconsistency need not be a problem for Buddhists, just as it has ceased to be a problem for most scholars.