There’s a range of views here. It all depends on the authenticity of the Pali canon. If they are authentic then they include an explanation of how we come to have them and why they were accurate.
The scriptures themselves include an account of how they were preserved. They say that they were written down during the first great council shortly after Buddha died. In a society without writing, memorization was very important. The Hindu Vedas were memorized word for word by the Brahmins priest caste. That’s agreed by everyone.
If the sutras are authentic, they say that the monks started to memorize his teachings while he was still alive. They started to do that when the leader of the Jains died. There was disagreement amongst his disciples about what his teachings were. This happened while Buddha was old but still alive. Buddha’s disciples noticed that and didn’t want the same thing to happen to Buddha’s teachings when he died, and so started to memorize them while he was still alive and also to check their understanding with Buddha himself.
This can be done, as we know from the Vedas. But the Brahmin priest caste in ancient India was trained from a young age to memorize their scriptures in a culture without writing in Northern India. (Many places had writing by 500 BC but Northern India didn’t until a century or two after the death of Buddha).
The main question then is, did the Buddhist monks, without a Brahmin caste, manage to achieve that same level of accuracy. It’s certainly possible. Some of them of course were Brahmins before they became monks. It says in the sutras, internal evidence again, that some of them were especially good at memorizing the teachings. And it’s humanly possible: some Buddhists to this day have memorized the entire Pali canon, word for word. It’s difficult, takes a lot of study, but can be done.
If you want a bit more detail (what I said above is a very quick summary), see Recovering the Buddha’s Message by Richard Gombrich
(Please note,I don’t have a thorough understanding of the sutras themselves. They are very extensive, a whole encylcopedia in size, and you’d probably be a Buddhist scholar, devoted your life to their study, to read them all. It’s not like Christianity, say, where a keen Christian may have read the entire Bible - a keen Buddhist is very unlikely to have read the entire canon, unless they are a scholar. I’m relying here on what Buddhist scholars say who present the case for the theory of authenticity).
So, what’s the evidence that it actually happened like that? Well quite good. The canon describe a particular geography (several small kingdoms) + a particular level of technology. This is only valid for a short period of the Indian history. Within a few decades after Buddha died, the sutras would no longer describe the political geography accurately. And the technology changed quite rapidly also.
There are many other lines of evidence supporting the “theory of authenticity”, but for me that’s one of the most impressive. For a detailed account of this evidence for their authenticity, plus many other lines of evidence, see The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts by Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali
I think that’s pretty good evidence. Even if they wanted to insert new material, they wouldn’t have enough understanding of history and archaeology to do it consistently with the world in the sutras. There are some later ones but the scholars can tell easily which they are.
Scholars who think this way include Wynne, Payutto, Sujatto, and you can also count Gombrich of course, as I just mentioned. He thinks that due to the large corpus of texts, there must have been communities of monks and nuns that specialised in memorising particular sections of the canon from an early stage, as is known to have happened at a later date in Ceylon.ory.
These scholars all make it clear that it’s not like a transcript. The sutras are clearly organized to be easy to remember, and understand, as compositions rather than transcriptions.
Also, the early teachings in his life must be by memory from after the event as it was late in his life that they started memorizing them. His birth stories and youth would be memorized decades after they happened. And they saw things differently from us and wouldn’t be approaching it with ideas of science and modern history. But I think that what we have in the canon is what the great council recorded after he died, pretty much word for word, and probably has the teachings of the Buddha and the actual words of the Buddha,and with the central teachings in it also reviewed by checking it with the Buddha himself while alive. Then their memories checked by reciting together in unison after he died, which would show up discrepancies if anyone got just a single word wrong.
If this is true we know a lot about Buddha. His early life, the four sights etc, seems a bit implausible, that it happened exactly like that. Could you reach adulthood and never encounter even sickness? Or old age? And in India at the time, to reach adulthood and never see a dead person? It’s a story that speaks to us, strikes a chord but might not be exactly as it happened. But by the time it was recorded, this was a history that few people alive would remember since Buddha himself lived to a great old age for his time.
In some ways memorizing helps with accuracy. When there’s writing, you can get copying errors, it all depends on the accuracy of a single scribe. Less so when memorized in a culture without writing with a great deal of importance to faithful word for word accurate memory, and based on reciting the texts in unison to check the accuracy of their memory.
So, I happen to think that we know a lot about Buddha, not just that he existed, but many details of the teachings and quite probably actual words of his teachings and actual events of his life story.
Scholars cover the full spectrum of views from those who think the earliest sutras in the Pali Canon are preserved word for word, through agnosticism, to those who think that most of the canon was written after Buddha died. I happen to think that the ones who support the theory of authenticity are right.
The later Mahayana sutras are clearly composed at a much later date, starting about 500 years after Buddha died. I think all scholars agree there.
That includes many famous sutras e.g. the heart sutra. There’s an idea in Tibetan Buddhism of hidden teachings that can be hidden in the landscape or in the mind and recovered centuries later, and so they could be termas in that sense if you think that’s possible - or preserved just from one teacher to the next but never written down, or they involve new ideas and discoveries. After all Buddha taught us to see for ourselves and in some traditions of Buddhism new teachings can arise appropriate for the times at any later date, that are thought to have the same inspiration of enlightenment. Including e..g Zen Buddhism with its stories and koans and there are similar things in Tibetan Buddhism. So - the mahayana sutras are a bit like that, inspiration of enlightenment, but not preserved word for word from the time of the Buddha and don’t desvribe this consistent political and scientific world of the time of the Buddha.
Sources:
- The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts (supplement to Volume 5 of the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies) by Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali
- The Pali Canon - What a Buddhist must know by Prayudh Payutto
- Recovering the Buddha’s Message by Richard Gombrich
- The Oral Transmission of Early Buddhist Literature - Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (Volume 27. No. 1 2004) by Alex Wynne
For the full range of views on the topic, the wikipedia article on Pāli Canon is good.
Note that wikipedia is very patchy on this topic, indeed on Buddhism generally. It has some excellent articles on Buddhism, and others that are very poor indeed.
The Pāli Canon article I just linked to is good. But many of the wikipedia articles on core concepts in Buddhism only mention the theory according to which Buddha didn’t even teach the four noble truths, and present that as a scholarly consensus. It’s one view of many. You’d never guess that from reading those articles. They are edited by a group of editors who are convinced of the theory of inauthenticity and think everything else written on the topic is unreliable. What on wikipedia is called a :Tag team - at least that’s how it seems to me.
I’ve tried to get them to fix this, along with other inaccuracies, but failed and indeed am now topic banned from wikipedia for six months from mentioning the four noble truths on its talk pages - I’m sure the ban would also include a ban on me mentioning the theory of authenticity according to which Buddha taught the four noble truths. It’s something of a relief actually to be out of that crazy hall of mirrors :). For the issues with their four noble truths article, why I think it is seriously inaccurate, see my : Buddhist sources on the Four Noble Truths
If the theory of authenticity is right, then the Pali canon teachings are amongst the most accurately preserved of any of the ancient religious teachings apart from the Vedas of course. And may be preserved as accurately as the Vedas, and some ancient philosophical texts like the texts of Plato and Aristotle.
Note, should say, the Vedas are not sacred texts for Buddhists. Buddha didn’t say they are wrong either, for a short summary: Guide To Buddhism A To Z. Buddhist teachers don’t use them at all, will only mention them to say that they are not sacred texts for Buddhists.
Perhaps the connection between the Vedas and Buddhism is a bit like that between Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps you could go as far as to say that Aristotle wouldn’t have developed his ideas if it wasn’t for Plato. But his works don’t quote from Plato and he follows a different line in his philosophy, and it would be very wrong indeed to use the Platonic forms or many of the other main ideas from Plato to expound ideas from Aristotle’s work.
For more on why the teachings preserved in the Pali canon may be authentic see
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