an agnostic attitude include that the evidence for the Buddha's teachings dates from (long) after his death. Some scholars of later Indian Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism say that little or nothing goes back to the Buddha. Ronald Davidson has little confidence that much, if any, of surviving Buddhist scripture is actually the word of the historical Buddha. Geoffrey Samuel says the Pali Canon largely derives from the work of Buddhaghosa and his colleagues in the 5th century CE. Gregory Schopen argues that it is not until the 5th to 6th centuries CE that we can know anything definite about the contents of the Canon. This position was criticized by A. Wynne. Authorship of the Abhidhamma Pitaka Western scholarship suggests that the Abhidhamma Pitaka was likely began to be composed around 300 BCE, but may have drawn on an earlier tradition of lists and rubrics known as 'matrika'. Traditional accounts include it among the texts recited at the First Buddhist Council and attribute differences in form and style to its composition by Sariputra. The earliest books of the Pali Canon Different positions have been taken on what the earliest books of the Canon are. The majority of Western scholars consider the earliest identifiable stratum to be mainly prose works, the Vinaya (excluding the Parivāra) and the first four nikāyas of the Sutta Pitaka, and perhaps also some short verse works such as the Suttanipata. However, some scholars, particularly in Japan, maintain that the Suttanipāta is the earliest of all Buddhist scriptures, followed by the Itivuttaka and Udāna. However, some of the developments in teachings may only reflect changes in teaching that the Buddha himself adopted, during the 45 years that the Buddha was teaching. Scholars generally agree that the early books include some later additions. Aspects of these late additions are or may be from a much earlier period. Other aspects of the Pali Canon, such as the information about society and South Asian history, are in doubt because the Pali Canon was extensively redacted in the 5th- or 6th-century CE, nearly a thousand years after the death of the Buddha. Further, this redacted Pali Canon of Sri Lanka itself mentions that the compilation had previously been redacted towards the end of 1st-century BCE. According to the Early Buddhism scholar Lars Fogelin, the Pali Canon of Sri Lanka is a modified Canon and "there is no good reason to assume that