Can original message of what historical buddha was teaching be traced ever?

Thats a great question and my answer is yes in bits and pieces but not as a whole .Why do i say that? because if one understands textual evidence then it is clearly made up of strata with different chronology.Now buddhism as we know as of now is very much in formalised form, call it as a finished product which the compilers worked on so as to reduce the anomalies and give it a uniform structure
Clearly identifying such strata in that structure is a key to understand the development of buddhism starting from buddha itself,in fact questions could be raised as to what determines or shows us that this entire development was set in motion by a historical buddha.
Well buddhism as we all know is a organisational based movement and clearly such movement does require a central figure, a core tenet, a person which did indeed set the ball rolling , without that there is no possibility to see how an organisation of a grand scale which encompassed half of civilisation could even sustain itself
Like any work, work of buddhism is a dynamic thing, a literature which was always updated with lively debates and very much so in spirit of four mahapadesas( four main authorities) which buddha himself is said to have outlined in mahaparinibbana sutta in digha nikaya.
yes corruptions did stream with time and some texts indeed got corrupted with some suttas might have been left out or some added later, therefore to understand buddhism in its original form needs a complete reworking and so as to understand its philology
Suttas( sutras) or in short sayings of buddha were recorded by oral compositioners termed as bhankas ie reciters.The idea was to compile these suttas or sayings in a format which could be mnemonically easily understood therefore you would come across several such repetitions in sutta.
Since these suttas were compiled in different regions of ancient india each with its dialect, they went through several translation layers and therefore inconsistency did creep in .The process of weeding out such inconsistencies so as to give it an uniform formal look was the task of sangiti or buddhist council which met periodically
Such formalisation of suttas gave rise to the language of canon in theravada which is known as pali ( which only meant rows).so pali is the formalisation of suttas,a language which is a hybrid form since its about normalisation and hence has admixtures of several indian prakrit or its variant
such formalisations didnt entirely got rid of original form of reading and pali texts do have some words which are very ancient, probably dating as far back to buddha's time
also the most ancient reading of pali or the redaction copy of it is traced to alu vihara edition which was generally around 25 to 70 bc .
That reading tells us about two specific texts in general in sutta pitaka, one being parayana vagga and another being atthaka vagga which had their own sets of commentary and those commentaries were considered canonical in itself
so it does establish that those two texts were held in deep esteem so as to to have its own commentary, also not to forget those two texts were referred by other suttas
if one does read those texts then it would be striking to know thats it format,metre length and its form is very different from the other suttas.Those suttas does come across as a personal experience in classic indian udana format ( udana meaning upbreath or exclamation from delight).
in my next post i would write about the inscriptions found in bharhut,sanci and asokan inscriptions in girnar which gives pointers to pre sectarian buddhist suttas

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