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How is it possible to prove that the traditional accounts of the first sermons of the Buddha are reliable historical sources? Not long after the Nirvāņa of the Buddha the leaders of the samgha tried to find criteria for assessing the authenticity of texts. We must admire their methods and their scrupulousness but it is not possible to deny that they were unable to lay down infallible principles of authenticity. It is difficult to see how more than two thousand years later modern scholars would be more successful in this regard.
4. The difficulties encountered in interpreting the canonical texts show themselves clearly in the continuing discussion on the ātman in early Buddhism. In 1973 Kamaleswar Bhattacharya published a book in which he tried to demonstrate that Buddhism recognised the upanişadic ātman. Since 1973 Bhattacharya has published several articles in which he adduces further arguments and documents. His most recent article concludes with the following words: “The Buddha's Absolute appears to be the same as that of the Upanişads". A similar point of view has been defended by J. Pérez-Rémon, but his views have been refuted by Tilmann Vetter and Steven Collins. Collins made a detailed study of the anātman doctrine and arrived at quite opposite conclusions.
One of the most penetrating studies of the ātman problem is to be found in Claus Oetke's book in which he carefully analyses the anātman doctrine in the Pāli canon, the second book of the Milindapañha (ed. V. Trenckner pp. 25-28) and the ninth book of the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. On pp. 119-121 he discusses the famous Alagaddūpama Sutta (Majjhima nikāya, sutta 22) which is often adduced by those who believed that the Buddhists did not deny the existence of an ātman. Oetke refers to discussions of this sutta by La Vallée Poussin, Bhattacharya and Pérez-Rémon. It is instructive to compare their remarks with recent studies of the same sutta by K.R. Norman and Richard Gombrich.
Strangely enough, the ātman problem seems to excite the minds of
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