bodom_bad_boy wrote:I like to keep in mind these words from author Red Pine in his commentary to the Heart sutra:
"The question of authorship (of the Heart sutra) was an important one for early Buddhists concerned with authenticity. But over the centuries it has become less so. Nowadays Buddhists resolve this issue by considering the teaching contained in the texts on its own merit. Accordingly, the principle of the Four Reliances (catuh-pratisarana) has developed to deal with this issue: We are urged to rely on the teaching and not the author, the meaning and not the letter, the truth and not the convention, the knowledge and not the information. Thus, if a teaching accords with the Dharma, then the teacher must have been a Buddha or someone empowered by a Buddha to speak on his or her behalf. For our part, all we can safely claim is that the author of this sutra was someone with an understanding of the major Buddhist traditions of two thousand years ago, the ability to summarize there salient points in the briefest fashion possible, and the knowledge of where buddhas come from."
I believe this can be applied to all of the "controversial" Mahayana sutras.
And it's an important methodology to keep in mind, given the possibility that the Pali canon may contain its own fictitious suttas and those who made the canon may have excluded some legitimate discourses of the Buddha that may be present in other Buddhist canons. Now, this is only speculation, but some of the early Buddhist schools
claimed that's what the Sthaviravadin's did and we don't have a complete enough or independent record of the early schools, and of the Buddha's sayings, to either substantiate it or reject it.
What we can say is that the Sutta Pitaka (and the Agamas of the Mahayana canon) represent the most reliable account of the Buddha's original teaching. You can't extend that same reliability, though, based on the evidence, to the Pali Vinaya, Abhidhamma, commentaries, the
other Mahayana sutras, or the Tibetan canon.