How Do We Know?

The question of how we know what we claim to know about the Buddha and his teachings may be interesting only to people like me who have a fixation on all things historical. We should recall, however, that one of the things the Buddha allegedly said was not to take what he said as authoritative just because he said it. We’re supposed to try it out and see if it works for ourselves. On one hand, this could militate toward complete indifference to the authenticity of the texts, since we’re not supposed to take any of it on faith, anyway. I take it that the reason some people claim that the bible is the revealed word of god is that they want to be very sure of the authority of their sacred text. This is not an issue in the same way for Buddhism.

On the other hand, the Buddha’s injunction to examine everything seems to invite an interest in the scholarship behind what we claim to know about his teachings. Also, as we will see in the next chapter, what texts one accepts as canonical is a major division in schools of Buddhism. One authority put it this way:

No one can prove that the Tipitaka contains any of the words actually uttered by the historical Buddha. Practicing Buddhists have never found this problematic. Unlike the scriptures of many of the world’s great religions, the Tipitaka is not regarded as gospel, as an unassailable statement of divine truth, revealed by a prophet, to be accepted purely on faith. Instead, its teachings are meant to be assessed firsthand, to be put into practice in one’s life so that one can find out for oneself if they do, in…