Here is what the woman of incorrigible disbelief, Blanche Fromage, wrote me and my response

 BTW, the Dharani Sutra is from around the 8th Century CE, over 1000 YEARS after the Buddha died. The Buddha never taught it. Anything that's called "sutra" was written much later by the Buddha's critics - if you're going with that, you're siding with the Buddha's critics against the Buddha.

In the case of abortion, classical Buddhist texts, from the Pali canon through the Mahayana sutras, offer no specific guidance. Even if there was a specific, classical Buddhist text addressing the moral status of the fetus and the act of abortion, it would not be consistent with “Buddhism” to accept this teaching uncritically. Buddhism encodes with its teachings a reflexive, dynamic, self-critical element, beginning with the Kalama Sutra, which encourages Buddhists not to simply follow scriptures, but to continually adapt the Dharma to new audiences.

Consequently, a Buddhist approach to abortion has more to do with approaching the issue with a characteristic set of concerns, and in dialogue with a vast body of texts and teachers. It therefore comes as little surprise that most Western and Japanese Buddhists come away believing in the permissibility of abortion, while many other Buddhists believe abortion to be murder. In this essay I would like to sketch some of the reasons why most Western Buddhists accept abortion as an unfortunate but necessary part of women's reproductive health care. Source - Blanche Formage

My response:

 You can't convince me that the Sutras were not the teachings of the Buddha. Don't forget than Nalanda, the great Buddhist library in India, was destroyed by the muslims. It had a treasure trove of texts, sutras and commentaries from 400 AD.

Since you are so enamored with those Buddologists, Richard Gombrich is perhaps the greatest scholar of Buddhists tests alive today, far more accomplished even then the late Thomas William Rhys David (Please compare the sheer volume of their works). Here is what Gombrich had to say.

"Modern editors of the Pali Canon, however, have generally contented themselves with trying to establish a textus receptus or ‘received text’. Let me explain. Most of our physical evidence for the Pali Canon is astonishingly recent, far more recent than our physical evidence for the western classical and biblical texts.

While talking of this, I want to take the opportunity to correct a mistake in something I published earlier this year. In Professor K. R. Norman’s splendid revision of Geiger’s Pali Grammar, published by the Pali Text Society (Geiger, 1994), I wrote an introduction called ‘What is Pali?’ (Gombrich, 1994a). In that I wrote (p. xxv) that a Kathmandu manuscript of c.800 A.D. is ‘the oldest substantial piece of written Pali to survive’ if we except the inscriptions from Devnimori and Ratnagiri, which differ somewhat in phonetics from standard Pali. This is wrong. One can quibble about what ‘substantial’ means; but it must surely include a set of twenty gold leaves found in the Khin Ba Gôn trove near Śrī Ksetra, Burma, by Duroiselle in 1926-7. The leaves are inscribed with eight excerpts from the Pali Canon. Professor Harry Falk has now dated them, on paleographic grounds, to the second half of the fifth century A.D., which makes them by far the earliest physical evidence for the Pali canonical texts (Stargardt, 1995). -- Richard F. Gombrich

Therefore, according to this reliable information, the Sanskrit text of the Lotus Sutra is older than the Pali texts that the Hinayana Buddhists arrogantly claim to be the only authoritative texts of what the Buddha actually taught.

Let's also not forget that Buddhism was essentially wiped off the map in India between the Muslims and the Rajputs, thousands of Sutras, vinayas, and commentaries destroyed. The ancient Buddhist monks had an incredible memory, like those today who memorize the entire Q'uran word for word. However, the monks were given the responsibility to each memorize a different Buddhist Sutra. Prakrit evolved around 300 BCE and Sanskrit was much older, the various forms, probably several millennia BCE. Please also note that papyrus, a material somewhat loosely like paper was used and few original fragments of Sutras from before 1000 have been recovered (war against the Buddhists, the burning of Buddhist monasteries and libraries, the nature of papyrus and the type of ink used).

Wikipedia teaches along with Gombrich:

"The Great Dharani Sutra (Korean: 무구정광대다라니경) is a copy of the Uṣṇīṣa Vijaya Dhāraṇī Sūtra, a scripture of Mahayana Buddhism, which is considered to be the OLDEST printed text (on woodblock) in the world." (684). - Wikipedia. That doesn't mean this Sutra wasn't originally in sanskrit or prakrit, during or not long after the Buddha was alive or having even older sanskrit texts, should the Buddha have lived even earlier: ("The exact date of the Buddha's birth is disputed, with Nepalese authorities favoring 623 B.C., and other traditions favoring more recent dates, around 400 B.C. and others even earlier.") - National Geographic

So do you really think I will be dissuaded by an icchantika? Really? Do you think that an icchantika could shake my belief? You, to me, are a useful idiot who serves the very great mission of destroying the Soka Gakkai which has bastardized Buddhism to the point that it created one as you.