No, it isn't. You've yet to identify where in the cannons this is, but even if we take your word for it, the scripture would be a product sometime well into the common era, centuries after the Buddha died. You believing them to be historical records is an act of faith.Malcolm wrote: Of course it is a historical record, don't be daft — your assertion that it is an interpolation is entirely arbitrary.
Prove it.Of course the points stands, because the same story is preserved in other canons.
What is the earliest identifiable specimen of Sarvāstivāda literature and which language is it in?It was set down in Sanskrit, from day one.
[/quote]No, I don't. Let's look at a map —— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan ... 0_BCE).png
That is a hypothetical map from Wikipedia relating to a time period long long before Buddhism.
The Brahman heartland was centered around what is now UP and extended east towards what is now Bihar. The communities in what is now Sindh later on were not part of that Brahman heartland.
You're not proving anything. This is an academic forum, so let's be a bit more scholarly.I never said either that Buddhists began using Sanskrit from the beginning, merely that a push to Sanskritize is evident from the beginning.
I agree that Buddhists eventually adopted Sanskirt as their lingua franca from the first few centuries of the CE onward, but your reasons for this are at best incomplete.The Sarvastivadins wrote their canon down in Sanskrit, and this more than anything accounts for the widespread adoption of the Sarvastivada Abhidharma by most schools who were not connected with the proto-Theravada.