Buddha, before the Religion

Which passages of the Pali Canon stand closest to the Buddha's own speech? Scholars have argued the question for a century, mostly from intuition, style, and a handful of famously archaic chapters.

This book asks the question with instruments. Five independent signals are computed across the canon — semantic similarity, formulaic density, metrical archaism, morphological profile, and a Bayesian phylogenetic model of textual descent — and then compared to see where they agree. The chapters long suspected of being oldest, the Aṭṭhakavagga and the Pārāyanavagga, are tested rather than assumed.

The result is a ranking, presented with its uncertainties intact, and new translations of the passages that score highest — the canon's most likely oldest words, given here to be read as literature and not only as evidence.

Full appendices document the corpus, the models, the sensitivity analyses, and everything the method cannot show.