Did Bukhari include false Hadith in his collection on purpose ? and the question of 600,000 Hadith claim.

Among the many claims to prop the secondary sources in Islam one that stands out has to be the 600,000 Hadith claim associated with Bukhari's compilation. It goes hand in hand with another claim that he was inspired by God. In reality, Hadith literature is nothing but reports ascribed to the Prophet Pbuh, his family and the companions by ordinary people, a vast majority of these reports are false or even outright fabrications. To imply that in some way there is a Divine flavor to this literature is absurd. To go one step further and try to deduce theological positions from these man-made reports is, in fact, a theological impossibility. If God had intended this literature to be preserved, the first Divine order would have been to preserve these reports verbatim, as is the case with the Quran.

The logical fallacy of the claim that Hadith in some way are Divine in nature can be refuted rather easily. It is irrelevant whether these claims are a result of deception or ignorance, the main issue has to be to determine their authenticity. The repeated attempts by the traditionalist to draw attention away from the serious flaws in these compilations is understandable. Hence in their zeal to give Bukhari's collection boost in whatever way they can as long as it cannot be independently verifiable is also understandable. The claim of "dreams" works perfectly towards that end. But it is this very zeal that made them shoot themselves in the foot. I will explain. As long as they are in "so and so said so" domain, the false Hadith peddlers feel at home. The subjective nature of talking up the narrators gives them enough margin to just about hold their ground. However, the moment you quantify the issue sufficiently so that it can be easily verified they split like nobody's business.

The game has been going on for over a thousand years and the central difficulty of resolving has been the absence of methodology, this is specifically true of Bukhari's compilation, by the time the compilation was given more or less final touches a staggering 100 or so Rulers/kings had a chance to interfere with the process. The interference was either directly or was done by "scholars", with the sole purpose of pleasing the king. Coming back to the game, since Bukhari did not layout his methodology, it is now very convenient for the Hadith peddlers to twist and turn as they please. To use a sports analogy, whenever you call them out in twisting the rules they have a ready answer to dodge the issue, for instance, when it clearly looks like they are playing soccer and suddenly start handling the ball and you shout foul, they quickly turn around and claim, we are not playing soccer, we are playing basketball.

The same doggy defense has been attempted in the 600,000 Hadith claim, there have been attempts by some supporters to distance themselves from Bukhari's claim of ghusl and two rakat Istikhara. It is obvious that like many, they also did the math and it did not add up. (Several hundred years will be needed as opposed to the 16 odd it took him) So they tried yet again to claim they were playing basketball and modified the claim to restrict the ghusl and two rakats to the actual Hadith he had already verified to be true before including them in his compilation.

The amateurish attempt exposes their poor logic yet again. In the new format, 99% of Hadith will be excluded from the supposedly divine flavor of the process, which clearly was the plan, to begin with. The resulting question begging runs into scores. The obvious one, how many false positives did he get and why is there no record or even mention of it and the other more serious issue, how many Ahadith did he miss out on which were potentially true, out of the 99% which he rejected without the aid of Istikhara. Incidentally, the Talmud writers have an identical claim in place, right down to their ghusl equivalent.

Conclusion, if you go along with 600,000 Hadith claim and imagine that it was actually made by Bukhari then it is as good as Bukhari stamping himself a liar, if on the other hand, you remove this claim from his works then it loses the divine guiding hand stamp which was the objective of the claim to start with, irrespective of whoever made it.

The above blatant attempt to yet again equate Bukhari with the Prophet Pbuh is another example that they will not stop at anything because their relevancy is tied to making these absurdities stick. If that means to systematically keep declaring the whistleblowers Kaffir, so be it.

After studying Bukhari in depth, any rational mind very quickly concludes that there was a method to the scholarly equivalent of "Madness" in omitting to include a methodology used in the compilation of his work. It is very easy to see that Bukhari's real unstated methodology was to create Fitna through ambiguity and includes blatantly contradictory reports in his compilation.

I hope more people would see through this crude sophistry.

So the question is, did he include the false reports under pressure or is this a result of latter-day edits? In either case, the resulting "final' work fulfilled the suspected objective, to create Fitna, irrespective of whoever was behind it.