"Buddha" before the Pali Canon?

[Steve Farmer]

I have a question touching on, or rather going a step beyond, the
Buddha redating issue.

A prominent Vedicist (who does not participate on this list) sent
out an email the other day with the following intriguing comment.
His point arose out of a previous discussion of the links between
Vedic and Buddhist traditions:

> Pali texts are
> certainly not the oldest of Buddhist texts, and Pali was not the
> language of the Buddha or of the early Buddhist community. This
> is a myth propagated in the 19th century by the Pali Text Society
> etc. There certainly are very old documents within the Pali canon
> -- e.g. the Suttanipata, and within it the Attakavagga (see
> Vetter's article on this).

I take it that he is referring here to Vetter's arguments (e.g.,
in his 1988 monograph, pp. 101 ff.) concerning pre-Buddhist
strata in the Attakavagga. But I have no information about his
reference to Pali not being the "language of the Buddha or of the
early Buddhist community." Can someone more knowledgeable about
than I am about recent Buddhist studies help me out with
bibliography in any European language?

In general, I should point out that I take arguments about the
historicity of "the Buddha" with deep skepticism, since ancient
biographies of figures like this (cf. "Confucius," "Aristotle,"
"Jesus," etc.) were invariably late constructs, reflecting
scattered data in rapidly growing textual canons (collected
syncretically to generate figures who eventually reached cosmic
dimensions), self-serving claims by warring schools, and other
equally dubious sources. Indeed, I think that strong
cross-cultural models can be built for how biographies like these
grew over time. The credence that these biographies (stripped
only of their miraculous elements) are still given even by modern
researchers rests on no stronger grounds than the fact that they
have been endlessly repeated.

Hence I view the redatings of early Buddhism by Bechert et
al.(which I fully support) to be redatings of the Pali canon and
not of "the Buddha" -- and am hence equally skeptical about
claims about "the language of the Buddha" (not only don't pot
speak, as the saying has it, but neither do biographical
constructs - or if they do they are surely multilingual). I've
been surprised to find that claims concerning the "historical
Buddha" are still widely accepted by Buddhist scholars, even
revisionists following in Bechert's path. (The argument is always
about *when* "the Buddha" died, not about whether or not he is a
syncretic construct, built around a variety of "awakened"
religious revisionits.) Vetter too (1988: xxi ff.), despite his
work on pre-Buddhist levels of Buddhist texts, accepts a lot of
conventional lore about the life of "the Buddha" that no one
could *possibly* support using well-controlled evidence.
Interestingly, these tendencies are also common in recent
revisionist works on early Confucian works, in which efforts to
destratify the texts are often coupled with remarkably
traditional accounts of Confucius's "life."

In any event, does anyone have any comments about the "language
of the Buddha," Buddhist texts antedating the Pali canon, etc?

Best wishes,
Steve Farmer