Justin Whitaker's post "In Search of Original Buddhism," although interesting, describes a "search" that I think is beside the point, somehow. But let's look at this search for a minute, anyway.
How much do we really know about the Buddha and what he taught? Just from a historical perspective, not much. The Buddha's biography is, I believe, mostly taken from the Buddhacharita, an epic poem written nearly seven centuries after the Lord Buddha's parinirvana. No doubt the story "improved" considerably over those seven centuries.
We look to the Pali Canon for the oldest recorded words of the Buddha. But, again, historians tells us the Pali texts bear signs of editing. Comparisons to early texts from Gandhara show many discrepancies that appear to be later additions to the Pali work. And no, I don't know what they are. I'm looking into it.
The Buddha didn't speak Pali or Sanskrit but another Indo-Aryan language called Magadhi. So the Pali already is a translation from the original. And, frankly, there's no contemporary documentation or archeological evidence that the person Siddhartha Gautama, called the Buddha, even existed. Maybe he's a literary figure?
And I ask, how much does that matter? If tomorrow somebody found solid evidence that the historical Buddha was a contrivance, and the dharma was cobbled together by some committee, would the 25 subsequent centuries of practice/enlightenment go poof? I don't think so.
My sense of things is that looking for "original Buddhism" in ancient texts is a fool's errand. Words do not contain reality; they only point to it. "Original Buddhism" lives in sincere practice, not in books.
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