Reply To: Tipitaka Validity

#51456
pathfinder
Participant

“Not sure what counts as “strong evidence” to you, but the description of the first Buddhist Council is in the Tipitaka itself. Read, Pañcasatikakkhandhaka”

What I mean is evidence outside the tipitaka to corroborate its validity, eg external accounts, archeological evidence that the first Buddhist council did occur.

Perhaps I can give the following simile to illustrate my point.

Let’s say in the Russian-Ukraine war, in the Russian media they would promote the narrative that the Ukrainians started the war, they attacked first. As a Russian, if I only have access to Russian media, I would believe this to be true. It is also possible that the media can try to make everything internally consistent. Given access to limited information, the Russians themseleves may find it hard to prove against this.

However, if I were to watch it from the outside, we have other means of corroborating and discovering the truth, eg looking at satellite images, looking at accounts from both russian and ukraine side, accessing military documents.

Another simple illustration: there are accounts of Jesus’ resurrection in the Bible, would you take that to be true? How will you investigate it? You will try to see if there are non-christian sightings of Jesus after his crucification etc.

Likewise, we now only have one source, the tipitaka, and from the tipitaka we try to figure out whether it is true based on its consistency and based on whether it corroborates with what we know today. However, we do not have aracheologic, third party evidence to say that what they wrote were indeed, factual and words of the Buddha. For example, a strong evidence would be texts or inscriptions of non-buddhist saying “this indeed happened, this conversation indeed took place, the tipitaka does include factual accounts”. Now we have a non-biased source to improve its validity. In history, to prove the validity of an event, it is good to have multiple, non-biased sources.

  1. Analyzing the self-consistency
  2. Examining the consistency with observed facts
  3. Using one’s direct experience

This is what we have been doing so far, and I agree that it is helpful. But if we know of these unbiased, third party evidence outside the tipitaka, it would be immensely helpful in  building credibility as well. Otherwise we can only use logic and deduction from looking at the tipitaka for its validity. Of course, such evidence could well be impossible to find.

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