Alex123 wrote:Paññobhāsa Bhikkhu:
Please consider that nobody on this planet can logically, demonstratively prove the following four points:
That a great Indian sage called Gotama Buddha ever really existed;
Even if he did exist, that he was a fully enlightened being;
Even if he did exist and was a fully enlightened being, that he always spoke the truth (or that any fully enlightened being necessarily always speaks the truth); and
Even if Gotama Buddha really, historically existed, and was a fully enlightened being, and always spoke the truth, that the Pali Buddhist texts accurately, reliably represent what he said.
http://thebahiyablog.blogspot.ca/2012/0 ... icism.html
Thanissaro Bhikkhu:
And although every conceivable scrap of literary or archeological evidence seems to have been examined, no air-tight historical proof or disproof of these claims has surfaced. What has surfaced is a mass of minor facts and probabilities — showing that the Pali canon is probably the closest detailed record we have of the Buddha's teachings — but nothing more certain than that. Archeological evidence shows that Pali was probably not the Buddha's native language, but is this proof that he didn't use Pali when talking to native speakers of that language? The canon contains grammatical irregularities, but are these signs of an early stage in the language, before it was standardized, or a later stage of degeneration? And in which stage of the language's development did the Buddha's life fall?
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... icity.html
I find these statements, which I have read previously, to be strangely encouraging. Here we have two serious, practicing monks who have transcended the idea that we can know these things, or even that we necessarily need to, with 100% certainty. Part of this is "faith," and the other part is not purporting to know things that are not truly known by you.
Their healthy admission of some sort of skepticism is part of what attracted me to the Buddha's teachings in the first place. Faith is a critical component, it is like pushing the primer button on your lawnmower engine. Without it, you can't start mowing the lawn but it won't run the engine by itself either. Practice is where we get to really know what we can know, and really see what we can see. To attest to anything else as unequivocally true is to lie.
They aren't saying that the teachings don't "work," that the realization of Nibbana is false, impossible, or anything like that, they're simply saying that it is impossible for someone alive today to know with 100% certainty that the texts have not been corrupted in some manner.
Well, I suppose impossible unless you can speak with Devas who were living at the same time as the Buddha... I haven't learned how to do this either though.