[Buddha-l] Back to the core values? -- and origins

[L.S. Cousins]

Isidoros writes:

>"If", Jack. If! The problem here is that we have no documented
>immediate record of what the, a, Buddha said to any monks.
>Instead we have hearsay of hearsay of ... hearsay ... many centuries
>long.
>
>Now, I ask you, would Richard Hayes write down accurately
>today what a guy in a New Mexico carrots juice bar confided in
>him, of what a man in a tortillas counter told him, of what ...
>a gal from Alabama in a bar told ... of what Carl Rover said to a
>fellow George Bush Republican about the Chief's celebration on
>the enemies' defeat over a warship in the Atlantic ocean? (And by
>"accurately" I mean as compared to a Carl Rover account of
>the event -- which is another story).

I think this misunderstands the nature of Indian oral literature.

We know that the Rg Veda was preserved orally for a millennium by 
very careful techniques of memorization and recitation. The proof of 
this is that it contains linguistic forms and information that we can 
verify from other sources, e.g. other Indo-European languages. This 
means that in some cases the brahmins accurately preserved linguistic 
information for many centuries that their tradition no longer 
understood.

So there is no doubt that the Sangha could have accurately preserved 
information. It is difficult to prove with absolute certainty that 
they did.  However, absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Lance Cousins