Lagi..lagi dan lagi, saya sampaikan Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra ada 2 versi, versi panjang (ada masalah vegetarian) dan versi pendek (tidak ada vegetarian). Mana yang benar? Jika masih diperdebatkan mana yang benar maka sutra ini tidak bisa dijadikan rujukkan untuk membahas mengenai vegetarian.
Ada kutipan menarik dari DT Suzuki dalam Introduction Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra :
The Date of the Laṅkā
As is the case with other Buddhist texts it is quite impossible with our present knowledge of Indian history to decide the age of the Laṅkā. The one thing that is certain is that it was compiled before 443 a. d. when the first Chinese translation is reported to have been attempted. But this does not mean that the whole text as we have it now was then already in existence, for we know that the later translations done in 513 and 700-704 contain the Dhāraṇī and the Sagāthakam section which are missing in the 443 one (Sung). Further, the Meat-eating chapter also suffered certain modifications, especially in the 513 (Wei) one.
Even with the text that was in existence before 443 a. d. we do not know how it developed, for it was not surely written from the beginning as one complete piece of work as we write a book in these modern days. Some parts of it must be older than others, since there is no doubt that it has many layers of added passages.
To a certain extent, the contents may give a clue to the age of the text, but because of the difficulty of separating one part from another from the point of view of textual criticism, arguments from the contents as to the date are of very doubtful character. As long as we have practically no knowledge of historical circumstances in which the Buddhist texts were produced one after another in India or somewhere else, all the statements are more or less of the character of an ingenious surmise. All that we can say is this that the Laṅkā is not a discourse directly given by the founder of Buddhism, that it is a later composition than the Nikāyas or Āgamas which also developed some time after the Buddha, that when Mahayana thoughts began to crystallise in the Northern as well as in the Southern part of India probably about the Christian era or even earlier, the compiler or compilers began to collect passages as he or they came across in their study of the Mahayana, which finally resulted in the Buddhist text now known under the title of Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra.