[foonlesse]

This is where the challenge is most explicitly covered in this article (emphases added).
[A] 2006 talk by Salomon...first unveiled...the importance of the translator's findings.... Salomon...explained [that] scholars had traditionally expected that if they traced the various branches of the tree of Buddhist textual history back far enough, they would arrive at the single ancestral root.... As scholars scrutinized the Gandhari texts, however, they saw that history didn’t work that way at all.... It was a mistake to assume that the foundation of Buddhist textual tradition was singular, that if you followed the genealogical branches back far enough into the past they would eventually converge. Traced back in time, the genealogical branches diverged and intertwined in such complex relationships that the model of a tree broke down completely. The picture looked more like a tangled bush, he reported.... [T]hese newly found manuscripts, he declared, strike the coup de grâce to a traditional conception of Buddhism’s past that has been disintegrating for decades. It is now clear that none of the existing Buddhist collections of early Indian scriptures—not the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, nor even the Gandhari—“can be privileged as the most authentic or original words of the Buddha” (http://www.tricycle.com/feature/whose-buddhism-truest).