I think, in a sense, you are right.
I think I wrote in a different thread that people existed as ‘empirical realities’.
Of course Rishi S ‘exists’ in a certain way. To deny that would raise a lot of eyebrows!
But Buddhism teaches that he is devoid of a permanent essence that can either persist after death, or cease to exist after death.
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…
… Just like a rainbow!
Does that exist? Does it not exist? Both? Neither?
IMO, the answer ‘with atmospheric humidity as condition, water droplets come to be… with water droplets and sunlight as condition, refraction occurs… etc.’ is so much more coherent than outright confirming or denying the existence of rainbows.
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Just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t it also possible that these terms are rare precisely because this is an early sutta? what I mean is this, that the sutta does not have any repeated formulas because it pre-dates the formulization of the teachings.
kullūpamaṃ itself (“similar to a raft”) is attested only here ([MN22]
This could be an example of that. Would later disciples speak of the Buddha’s teaching as a raft to be let go of? One could argue that humans have a tendency to cling to the words of the master, rather than let go.
It’s interesting what Analayo says on the Vinaya section of this text
The introductory part of the Alagaddūpama-sutta, which narrates the monk Arittha’s obstinate adherence to his misunderstanding, recurs in the Vinayas of the Dharmaguptaka,
Kāśyapīya, Mahāsānghika, Mahīśāsaka, (Mūla-)Sarvāstivāda, Sarvāstivāda, and Theravāda traditions as an exemplary case for unwillingness to give up a wrong view.
So it seems this could be a very early text, since it’s shared by what seems to be all the schools.
Both the MA and MN version of the text contain the not-self teaching, even though there are differences between the phrasing of both. For example, MA includes a criticism of the annihilationist, while MN doesn’t.
Another argument can be made with the fact that none of the unique words you’ve pointed out occur in the later texts, like the abhidhamma (I don’t know that this is true, I’m just working with the figures you gave). If this is the case, that would be an argument in favor of the fact that this text pre-dates the formulization of the teachings, rather than the other way around.
Anyways, I think you should be a little more cautious in coming to conclusions about lateness or earliness. I don’t think any conclusions are warranted given the evidence that has been presented, at least to my eyes this seems to be the case. It’s possible that the text contains some earlier elements and some later, it’s also possible that it’s early or late. I think the evidence you’ve presented is far from convincing.
Hope you will read this as constructive criticism, rather than pure criticism,
with Metta.
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Thanks @brus963 I certainly think that the text is pre-sectarian, but i dont think that means its early in the sense I’m ising the term, ALL the EBT’s are early in that sense.
I think your point about the absense from later texts would be well made except that some of the terms do reoccur, and when they donit is mostly in texts known to be later like the Nett, Pati, etc.
Its also not the case that the sutta lacks standardised formalised texts, much of the aggregates talk is the usual boiler-plate.
Of course you could be right in twrms of there being earlier and later elements, one of the ideas i have been thinking about lately is the notion that the texts that show the most editorial intervention and revision, with the most added and thus appearing as the “latest” texts might sometimes paradoxically be the earliest texts, showimg the signs of additions precicely because they had been around the longest to make additions to!
I also have no real expertise, im just pating words into DPR, nevertheless I will stick to my guns and maintain my opinions until people.can present me with better evidence to the contrary, and I do not see any so far that makes me. Hange my assesment 
To be clear, I also think the Buddha did not teach no-self for a reason. If the goal is the unconditioned, all views belong in the realm of the conditioned. So unlike Thanissaro, I wouldn’t say not-self is purely a strategy, I think the reason it works is because it is true. But I also think Thanissaro is right in the sense that as a strategy, its meant to lead beyond the conditioned, which includes views on self (no self included).
Having said that, I’m not sure any text needs to be shown to be later in order to hold this position. Alexander Wynne has an article on this actually
http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Articles/The%20atman%20and%20its%20negation_Wynne_2010_33_JIABS.pdf
So I don’t see MN 22 as a problem for my view that the Buddha did not teach no self.
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Also, I think conditionality and anatta go hand in hand. Seeing for yourself the way feelings, craving, thoughts, intentions, etc, arise based on causes and conditions, you see the not-self nature of phenomena.
Although I do agree with you that SN has some weird features, like repetitions. Sometimes an entire discourse is word for word the same apart from one word. But I’m not sure that would mean anatta wasn’t taught at all. I do think there is an over-emphasizing of the anatta teaching, when like you pointed out its only one perception out of many, impermanence, dukkha, etc.
I have read Bhante Sujato’s arguments for SN along with Yin Shun, and I personally found it pretty convincing. I think DN contains a lot of seemingly legendary information that it’s hard for me to really see it as early, although it’s possible some of it is. Having thought about it for a while now, I think the earliest material is probably scattered throughout the Nikayas at this point, and i’m not sure finding them will be an easy task.
Anyways, just a few thoughts.
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Nice metaphor! If only we regarded ourselves and each other with the same wonder we do rainbows. I always feel like I’m in the presence of a miracle of some sort when they happen.
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Basically I take as my starting assumption something that Rhy Davids said, that is that the earliest teachings are probably those that are repeated, word for word, multiple times, in all 4 Nikayas.
Starting from this assumption and then actually looking at standard technical terms like jhana and sati and kamma patterns start to emerge.
For the SN is early amd DN is late theory to work, the anatta/aggregates formulation would have had to be popular early, faded almost to complete obscurity by the time of DN and then made a roaring comback by the ti.e of the Abhidhamma.
I think its more parsimonious to put it the other way round.
I also think the ledgendary features of DN are examples of what i alluded to before, the oldest narratives exhibit the most emboidery precicely because they are old and have had the most time for additions and alterations.
Underneath the legendary embroidery are still a lot of features that suggest antiquity, the presence of the 10 link conditionality and the absence of the 12, jhana/kamma over sati/anatta, SN qouting DN but not the reverse, etc.
As for the Gist theory and Yin Shun, thats something I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about recently too, but it probably deserves its own thread.
Thanks fornthe article links!
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[briefly off topic]
I think because rainbows feature a combination of colours that is not common in nature. Majority of nature is like 33% brown 33% green and 33% blue, this is why red stands out, especially in flowers or blood, because it’s somewhat rare in nature. A rainbow in comparison is borderline supernatural, and as is aurora borealis.
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Well, to be honest, since reading some of your posts I have begun to question the earliness of the SN. The biggest factor for me is the artificial repetition. And of course now that I think about it, people would have most likely remembered stories of the Buddha, some of which are in SN, others in MN and DN.
Ultimately though I have no idea 
Anyways, wish you the best in your research.
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Well, that’s high praise! I’m glad i have provided food for thought.
My conclusions are very tentative, and much more informed and qualified people (@sujato for example) obviously have very differnet conclusions, so take it all with a grain of salt.
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One last article I’d like to recommend, also by Alexander Wynne
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True! There’s also some sort of focusing effect that causes the area under a rainbow to look like it’s in a spotlight. But I often think this, too, about how ancient people must have found bright colors to be rare and delightful when they couldn’t fabricate them the way we do today. A peacock or a parrot or a keel-billed toucan would have been quite a sight to see.
There was also a doctrinal controversy involving a Buddhist movement called the Pudgalavadins who began claiming that the “person” is neither identical nor different from the aggregates. This “person” was functionally the same as atman, so they were essentially taking the position of a mystical, undefinable self that the sutras sort of allow as a inference. There are debates with them recorded in both the Theravada and Sarvastivada Abhidharmas, so it must have been a major doctrinal controversy at some early point in history.
I’ve known a Mahayanist or two that take the same position to argue that the Buddha was hinting at a mystical self, which was later called Buddha nature. There was a big split between Mahayanists on this issue, some holding to anatta teachings and others saying there is a mystical self that’s involved with becoming a Buddha. So, that’s another, much later, point in Buddhist history when the issue came up. It didn’t require non-Buddhists for these teachings to get amplified in the early canons, but they would have made good fodder for discussing it in sutras.
Overall, I personally think the Buddha was trying to get his disciples to just stop thinking about atman. So, he didn’t necessarily want them to go around repeating anatta to themselves forever but move on to other matters like overcoming defilement, etc. But atman was a popular concept in India religion, so he was more often telling people that it wasn’t a thing, hence anatta statements are found along with the tetralemma. It would be like having a new religion in the Christian world that said there was no god. The founder would have to explain why to people over and over, but they’d rather get passed that and deal with other things.
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Reading the article you shared, and wanted to observe:
The Second Sermon of the Buddha, preserved in the various Vinaya texts of different Buddhsit sects and as a separate discourse in the Pāli canon (the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta), contains two important anātman teachings. The first of these anātman teachings is found in only one other text: the Cūḷasaccaka Sutta of the Majjhima nikāya (no. 35). The second and variants of it are, however, much more widely distributed throughout the early Buddhist discourses, particularly those preserved in Pāli. As Collins has pointed out, ‘a very high proportion of the discussions of not-self in the Suttas consist in various versions of this argument’.2 This is therefore the more important anātman teaching of the Second Sermon (although it is to be noted that it lacks the term anātman/ anattā)
So firstly, I am not sure it is correct to say that the first anatta teaching occurs only at Sn22.59 and MN35, something very similar occurs at DN15, and arguably at MN2 and MN22 as well.
Secondly, its not at all clear that the second argument is in fact all that more well distributed. The phrase rūpaṃ niccaṃ vā aniccaṃ occurs nowhere in DN, in MN only at MN22, MN35 and MN109 and nowhere in AN or KN or AB or VM (once in VN). (MN146 and MN147 have the rarer variant rūpā niccā vā aniccā, which also occurs 6 times in SN, and nowhere else)
so rūpaṃ niccaṃ vā aniccaṃ or rūpā niccā vā aniccā (“is form permanent or impermanent”):
VN: 1
DN: 0
MN: 6
SN: 51
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0
VM: 0
42 of the 58 occurrences in the canon occur in SN22 or SN24
Metta
Have you read the whole article? also what do you use to find all these data?
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Still reading it along with about a million other things. Copying text from Sutta Central into Digital Pali Reader search is my basic method.
Metta.
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Having read the whole article now I would say that I at least agree with the following:
How can the evidence of the Vajirā Sutta be reconciled with the second
anātman teaching? Since the ‘no self’ idea is not expressed in the second
anātman teaching, and since this teaching is a common feature of the early
Buddhist literature, the ‘no self’ idea of the Vajirā Sutta would seem to be the
more unusual teaching, and so is most probably to be understood as a later development
I also think that this picture makes sense, and is suggestive of the process I see at work in the Tripitaka where a move from a “not self” reading of things to a “no self” reading of things occurs.
As a deviation from an older understanding of how a person realises (adhi-
gam) the immortal (amata) nirvana, conclusion of the Second Sermon marks a
significant development in Buddhist thought. The authors of the Vinaya account
would not have veered from an old account to create a new and fundamentally
different version of the five bhikkhus’ liberation without good reason. The use
of the reductionistic formula was intentional, and if so it must surely indicate a
new and different doctrinal perspective. The new doctrinal position, it seems,
involved a reluctance to speak of liberation as something attained by a person:
the authors of the pre-sectarian Vinaya biography rejected a strongly stated
‘personalistic’ description of the five bhikkhus’ liberation, and replaced it with
what looks like a reductionistic account
I consequently agree more or less with the conclusion:
The Second Sermon is therefore proof that an important
doctrinal change had taken place in early Buddhist circles. The old teaching that
no ātman/attā can be found in the five aggregates was at some point taken to
indicate that a person lacks a ‘self’ per se. In other words, a ‘not-self’ teaching
had developed into a ‘no self’ teaching. It would thus seem correct to believe
that the Vajirā Sutta represents a relatively late stratum in the Pāli Suttapiṭaka.
Its ‘no self’ doctrine cannot be taken back to the Buddha, but was of such
influence that it came to define the Buddhist mainstream for more than two
thousand years.
I would also just add that there is a plethora of textual evidence in the sutta material that the “no self” fictionalist philosophy is simply not consistent with any philosophically consistent reading of the undeclared points material, and I would go further and say that the undeclared points material is clearly more uniformly spread across the 4 principle nikayas than the aggregates/anatta material which as I have pointed out elsewhere is much more concentrated in SN, especially if the MN suttas whose agama counterparts are not in MA but rather in SA are removed.
Metta
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This is a great comment, well done. A truism that merges black hole physics, software design, and the Dhamma.
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Just a note here, the sequence is to see impermanence (arising and ceasing), and to see that the suffering is in that, and the perception that what is suffering cannot/should not be identified as ones own, as ones self, and therfore giving up obsession with what is impermanent (arising and ceasing), as we do this suffering fades away…
Theres just nothing there about fictional selves and aggregates, niether of which is neccesary to make the basic argument.
I was going to post this in the other thread but here is fine.