Pseudobabble wrote: ↑Sun Jul 08, 2018 8:19 am
As long as the practices work, does it even matter? The whole thing could be a complete fiction, but if the practices delivered the end of suffering, it wouldn't matter at all.
Another "who cares" version may be, as soon as wise people taught some useful stuff, does it matter it was actually one wiseman, two wisemen, or one hundred - does it matter their names, casts, skin color, height? This opinion weights more broadly than just "the author of Pali Canon", since there are questions like "were Jhanas taught before Buddha" ; "who did invent Nibbana concept" ; "what is the origin of PaticcaSamupadda theory" and so on.
However as a side note, i embrace two different views : 1. we do not have enough material to know and, it is not science to claim something we cannot check nor measure, so the question should be left as not answerable ; 2. it is more interesting to read at studies than try to guess which texts are older, which are more modern, which theories came first, which last, based on various assumptions. The interesting part in these studies is not so much the raw deductions like "well the rhinoceros sutta is really old" or "arupa jhana were not called jhana in the canon" ; while it is valuable, the interesting part of these studies is rather how they come to such conclusions, why.